Reunion Fred Uhlman Quotes

How would he in all his glory ever be able to understand my shyness, my suspicious pride and my fear of being hurt?

Now the crucial question no longer seemed to be what life was, but what one was to do with this valueless, yet somehow uniquely valuable life?

When I had almost reached him he turned and smiled at me. Then, with a strangely gauche and still hesitant movement, he shook my trembling hand. "Hello, Hans", he said, and suddenly I realised to my joy and relief and amazement that he was as shy and as much in need of a friend as I.

He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again. More than a quarter of a century has passed since then, more than nine thousand days, desultory and tedious, hollow with the sense of effort or work without hope- days and years, many of them as dead as dry leaves on a dead tree. I can remember the day and the hour when I first set eyes on this boy who was to be the source of my greatest happiness and of my greatest despair.

Until his arrival I had been without a friend. There wasn't one boy in my class who I believed could live up to my romantic ideal of friendship, not one whom I really admired, for whom I would have been willing to die and who could have understood my demand for complete trust, loyalty and self-sacrifice.

I studied his proud, finely carved face, and indeed no lover could have watched Helen of Troy more intently or could have been more convinced of his own inferiority.

All I knew, then, was that he was going to be my friend. Everything attracted me to him.

Standing quite still I looked at him. Needless to say Konradin hadn't giggled. He hadn't clapped either. But he looked at me.

His pleasure at seeing me was so genuine, so unmistakable, that even I, with my inbred suspicions, lost all fear.

Many of our discussions took place as we walked up and down the streets, sat on benches or stood in doorways taking shelter from the rain.

To claim Palestine after two thousand years made no more sense to him than the Italians claiming Germany because it was once occupied by the Romans.

Then his proud bearing, his manners, his elegance, his good looks — and who could be altogether insensitive to them? — powerfully suggested to me that here at last I had found someone who came up to my ideal of a friend.

I can't remember much of what Konradin said to me that day or what I said to him. All I know is that we walked up and down for an hour, like two young lovers, still nervous, still afraid of each other; but somehow I knew that this was only a beginning and that from now on my life would no longer be empty and dull but full of hope and richness for us both.

Everything about him aroused my curiosity: the care with which he selected his pencils, the way he sat — erect, as if at any moment he might have to get up and give an order to an invisible army — and how he stroked his blond hair. I only relaxed when he, like everyone else, got bored and fidgeted whilst waiting for the bell for the interval between lessons.

So, in my heart of hearts I look on myself as a failure. Not that this really matters. Sub specie aeternitatis we all, without exception, are failures.

I don’t know where I read that “death undermines our confidence in life by showing that in the end everything is equally futile before the final darkness.

Can’t you see them burning?” I shouted in despair. “Can’t you hear their screams? And you have the cheek to defend it because you aren’t brave enough to live without your God. What use to you or me is a powerless, pitiless God? A God sitting in the clouds and condoning malaria and cholera, famine and war?

También teníamos intereses menos trascendentes, que parecían mucho más importantes que la certidumbre de que la Tierra se extinguiría, para lo cual faltaban millones de años, y de que nosotros mismos moriríamos, para lo cual parecía faltar aún más tiempo.

Aún recuerdo una violenta discusión entre mi padre y un sionista que había venido a recaudar dinero para Israel. Mi padre aborrecía el sionismo. Esa sola idea le parecía demencial. A su juicio, era tan absurdo reclamar Palestina después de dos mil años como lo habría sido que los italianos reclamaran Alemania porque en otra época la habían ocupado los romanos. Eso sólo podría desembocar en una matanza interminable y los judíos deberían combatir a todo el mundo árabe.

Who was I to dare to talk to him? In which of Europe's ghettos had my ancestor been huddled when Frederick von Hohenstaufen gave Anno von Hohenfels his bejewelled hand?

I can't remember exactly when I decided that Konradin had to be my friend, but that one day he would be my friend I didn't doubt.

The problem was how to attract him to me. What could I offer the one who had gently but firmly turned down the aristocrats and the Caviar? How could I conquer him, entrenched behind barriers of tradition, his natural pride and acquired arrogance?

I had no fear, only one will and one desire. I was going to do it for him.

I once overheard him saying to my mother that, in spite of the lack of contemporary evidence, he believed a historical Jesus had existed, a Jewish teacher of morals, of great wisdom and gentleness, a prophet like Jeremiah or Ezekiel, but that he could not for his life understand how anyone could regard this Jesus as "Son of God". He found blasphemous and repellent the conception of an omnipotent God who could passively watch His Son suffer that bitter and lingering death on the cross, a Divine "Father" with less than a human father's urge to come to his child's assistance.

It shook me as nothing had shaken me before. I had heard about earthquakes that engulfed thousands, about streams of burning lava that buried villages, about oceans that swallowed up islands. I had read of one million people drowned by the Yellow River, of two million drowned by the Yangtse. I knew that a million soldiers died at Verdun. But these were mere abstractions — numbers, statistics, information. One couldn't suffer for a million. But these three children I knew, I had seen with my own eyes — this was altogether different.

It seemed to me that there were just two possibilities. Either no God existed, or there did exist a deity who was monstrous if powerful and futile if powerless.

I know my Germany. This is a temporary illness, something like measles, which will pass as soon as the economic situation improves. Do you really believe the compatriots of Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Beethoven will fall for this rubbish?

I couldn't understand it. It was impossible that he, so careful to avoid giving pain, so thoughtful, always ready to make allowances for my impetuosity, my aggressiveness when he disagreed with me Weltanschauung — should have forgotten to invite me. And so, too proud to ask him, I became more and more worried and suspicious, and obsessed by the desire to penetrate the stronghold of the Hohenfels.

Wouldn't it be better to avoid the thrust of the dagger which, I knew, with the atavistic insight of a Jewish child, would in a few minutes be plunged into my heart?

For half an hour I kept up the pretence, but I knew perfectly well that he knew what was going on in me, or he would not have kept off the subject of the greatest importance to us both; the evening of the day before.

I was alone before you came and would be still more alone if you threw me over, but I can't bear the idea of your being too ashamed of me to introduce me to your parents.

And if you want the whole truth, I've had to fight for every hour I've spent with you; and the worst of all, I didn't dare talk to you last night because I didn't want to hurt you.

Perhaps if you were a Jewess it might be different. He'd suspect you of wanting to hook me. And he wouldn't like that at all. Of course, if you were immensely rich he might, he just might consider a marriage possible — but even so he'd hate to hurt my mother's feelings. You see, he's still very much in love with her.

Still, I mustn't grumble: I have more friends than enemies and there are moments when I am almost glad to be alive — when I watch the sun set and the moon rise, or see snow on mountain tops.

I made sure about their past before shaking hands with them. You have to be careful before you can accept a German.

So I went through the whole list except the names beginning with H, and when I had finished I found that twenty-six boys out of the forty-six in my class had died for das 1000-jährige Reich.

Did I really want or need to know? What difference would it make if he were dead or alive, since dead or alive I should never see him again? But could I be certain? Was it completely and utterly out of the question for the door to open and for him to walk in? And wasn't I even now listening for his footstep?