The little girl had dark, curly pigtails, and a yellow Star of David on her red dress. She was six or seven years old. We passed each other every morning. She went along Fulda's Kunzeller Street to the Jewish school. I went down Edelzeller Street to the town school. Where the two streets crossed, we met. But I didn't even know her name.
I once tried to call one of my dolls Ruth. My mother said Jutta would be better, as Ruth was a Jewish name. Then, with a strange, sad hesitation in her voice, she explained to me the significance of the yellow star on the girl's red dress. And that was when I began thinking of her as Ruth.
Fulda, the town of St Boniface, who brought Christianity to Germany in 750, had an old Jewish tradition. The average Jewish population in pre-Nazi Germany was 0.9 per cent, but in Fulda was more than four per cent. There were more than 100 children in every grade at the Jewish school before 1939. As business people and artisans the Jews were well respected.
Then came the Nazi terror. Our Jewish fellow citizens gradually disappeared. To begin with, the old Jewish families laughed at the danger. Only when the synagogue burnt down in 1938 did they recognize how serious things were. 950 of the 1,500 Jews in Fulda had already emigrated. Then a number left hurriedly, and at the same time the Gestapo began deporting others. This went on until 5 September 1942, when the last remaining 'victims' were collected from the 'Jew houses', driven to the station and from there taken in goods wagons to Theresienstadt via Kassel - to death.
Why had my little friend whom I called Ruth stopped going to school? Was she ill? What did I know except that Ruth was different from me? We were both too shy to speak to each other. And yet I would have so liked to play with her.
Last year, after 50 years, Fulda's Mayor, Dr Wolfgang Hamberger, launched 'Action Shalom' to bring together the town's Jewish and non-Jewish residents. 200,000 marks was raised for the rabbinical school, Kol Torah, in Jerusalem, whose head was the son of a former Fulda rabbi. The town council voted unanimously to renovate the old Jewish school building and hand it back to the Jewish community, which now numbered 36. To its inauguration were invited all Fulda's former Jewish residents who could be traced.
50 to 60 guests were expected. But acceptances came from Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, France, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, the USA, Zimbabwe and of course Israel. Many were old and brought children and grandchildren to help. In the end Dr Hamberger welcomed 306 guests at Frankfurt Airport, the largest number of Jewish ex-citizens to be invited to a German town since the war. A conducted tour, a banquet, a memorial service at the Jewish cemetery and the handing over of the Jewish cultural centre gave many chances for personal encounters.
'Never again!' the old rabbi, Dr Blumenthal said, as he attached the old mesusa near the school entrance. 'Never again to the unspeakable things that happened here. Allow me to thank you for the gift - the opportunity, if God will allow it, of building a bridge to the future.'
'Whoever covers up past memories furthers a lie,' responded Dr Hamberger. We bear guilt, feel shame and ask for forgiveness. After Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Theresiensdadt and Yad Vashem and all that was done to the Jewish people in the name of Germans, it will be impossible for a long time for Jews and Germans to meet normally. But we must dare to make the effort to go towards one another.'
On my right at the coffee occasion was a lady from London. She had emigrated, she said, to what was then Rhodesia. School and university there, married, three children, moved to London. Widowed but still working in a computer company. One daughter already married. Charming pictures of grandchildren. I looked at the face, the eyes, the dark curls, and asked more questions: where had she lived, how old had she been when she left...
We'd been talking in English but suddenly both switched to German. I told her about 'Ruth'. 'That's me,' she said. 'And Ruth is my name.'
Time seemed to stand still. She looked at me carefully. 'I think I remember. You usually wore a blue dress, and had blond pigtails.'
Next day she came to lunch with us, met my husband and youngest son, and told us about her son, Tommy. We drove down the streets we had taken to school and stopped at the crossing. But somehow she seemed at a distance.
I knew well the people who lived in her family home. They invited Ruth in, and we went from room to room. Lively, as if with happy memories, she told us how everything had looked.
Then in a doorway she suddenly stopped. 'This was our playroom. Here by the tiled stove my little sister once burnt herself terribly.' Silence. Tears in her eyes. 'Burnt,' she whispered sadly. 'Why did you have to do it - burn six million Jews? Why did I come back?'
For a long time nobody said a word. But then suddenly I was able to put into words all that had weighed on me for days - no, for years. All the sorrow, anger, shame, the terrible guilt over the cruelties done by my fellow countrymen against the people who for me were all called Ruth. 'From the bottom of my heart I'm sorry. Please forgive.' She looked at me sternly and was silent.
The next day we said goodbye, and there were moving scenes. An old man waved his crutch as he got into the bus and shouted, 'We've made new friends. We're coming back!'
Ruth was busy with her baggage. Then she looked at me. 'Of course nothing happened to me or my family under the Nazis,' she said gravely. 'But I hated you all. I can't tell you how much. I found it incomprehensible what you did to the Jews. But today - no yesterday, yesterday afternoon - this hatred disappeared. For the first time. I think after all it was good that I came to Fulda.'
'Come again,' I said.
'I'd like to. And I'll bring Tommy too.'
We waved till the buses disappeared. I walked across the empty cathedral square and wondered for the first time whether the age of miracles was really limited to Biblical times. It seemed to me I had just experienced one.
By Kristin Weber-Fahr
Reprinted by arrangement with the German magazine Frau im Leben/Zenit
English
