""When will you forgive us?"?"
We met by chance in the coffee corner of the lecture center where he came with his friends, which I also visited.
He was a tall, pleasant-looking German student who had come here as part of a student exchange program.
And he asked this direct question after a fascinating conversation, which he insisted on conducting in almost fluent Hebrew, a conversation that, as if in a predetermined script, progressed toward that infinite final destination: the Holocaust.
He asked not as a defiance, not as someone claiming that the time for complete forgiveness had inevitably come. Only as someone seeking to understand and process in depth the victim's perception, after I had told him about my private family history, and especially because I had declared that I hoped I would never set foot on German soil.
And I didn't really know what to say to him.
After all, so many of the German people, like him, have been beaten and are being beaten for sin and unreservedly recognize the injustice for which he was responsible.
Hasn't the time come, then, to free ourselves from this burden of pain, to give up on the declarative gestures of distance that still exist in Israeli society, such as refraining from visiting Germany, certainly not to live there, or preferring non-German-made vehicles on the one hand, as well as the expectation of continuing to bear the blame of the "new Germans" who weren't "there" on the other, and simply to collectively forgive without reservation?
And in general, doesn't the healthy and even deep relationship with the German people for decades indicate that in practice we have already completely forgiven?
After thinking a little, I replied: It may be that the time has come to forgive, it is possible.
But the trains still don't let us.
In other words, the Holocaust is indeed over. And over time, the soul is also able to find strength, conquer the anger towards a people that has become a nation of scoundrels, and trust them again.
And after all, when you now say the word "train" to an Israeli of my generation, a third generation to the Holocaust, the thought still involuntarily comes to mind, perhaps even his first, that it will not be a commute or a toy train, but cattle cars on the way to death.
So for the better we are still there, living the Holocaust. Or rather, dying it. When something like that lives and dies in you, you are unable and should not move on completely.
Perhaps precisely when the Holocaust is not so deeply imprinted on an entire generation, on a day when there will be a terrible memory but without any remnants of a realistic and present existence, when a train will return to being just a train, it will also be possible to truly and definitively forgive.
When that day comes, maybe I'll also visit Germany, maybe even with my sons and grandchildren, and we can enjoy your efficient train system and the German scenery flying through the windows.
But in the meantime, our trains have not yet returned to the station of origin.
•
This encounter took place over fifteen years ago when I was still a young bachelor.
I remembered him on the last Shabbat when I was traveling with my sons on the Jerusalem light rail toward the Old City, when at the Damascus Gate a pair of tourists suddenly got on and were talking to each other in German.
""Hearing German on a train doesn't do me any good," I said with a smile to Aviad, my 10-year-old son, who was sitting next to me.
""Why, Dad?" he asked.
I preferred not to answer.
Who knows, maybe his train has already returned to the station.
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