Notebook Where's Papa? Is Christianity intrinsically anti-Semitic? Sometimes it seems so
Baumann, Paul
Paul Baumann WHERE'S PAPA? A shiva candle on the stove A shiva candle, with its emphatic blue Jewish star, burned in our kitchen for seven days and nights last month. My father-in-law, Max Horst...
...Segall was deported from Germany to Poland by the Nazis in 1938...
...Max was not a sentimental or demonstratively affectionate man...
...This was unexpected...
...God knows, he and his wife (who survives him, but struggles with Parkinson's) had been through nearly every imaginable horror during the war...
...I surmise they survived thanks to luck, shrewdness, bribery, and help from those who hid them...
...He was skeptical...
...Just tell me," he said, "who killed Christ...
...One measure of how well he understood the Germans was his decision to make the trip from Warsaw to Berlin over the long Easter weekend...
...I wrote the following lines for his obituary in our local paper: "Mr...
...One of the reasons he survived, he told me, was that he could, when questioned, pass as a "German...
...I thought they would be more relaxed on Easter....They would be in a festive mood," he told me proudly, describing how he and his wife walked unquestioned for miles down the nearly deserted boulevards of Berlin that Easter morning in 1944...
...Her parents, Holocaust survivors from Berlin, were courteous enough about the religious practices of others, but not believers themselves...
...my wife is not observant, or in any outward way religious at all...
...In private, Max could be scornful of religious customs, especially if they smacked of superstition or priestcraft (rabbis were included in this category...
...Institutional Christianity was another matter...
...I wondered what he would think of the shiva candle...
...Segall said, 'that the last place the Nazis would look for two Jews was in Germany.'" Max talked about the war only occasionally, and he was always parsimonious with details...
...I made the argument that Christianity was not intrinsically anti-Semitic...
...I confess I rather liked it, but I have a cultic weakness for smells and bells and small pious gestures...
...He decided to return to Berlin in 1944 because he thought the Russians (then advancing across Poland) were "crazy" (one of his favorite designations), but he knew "how to handle the Germans...
...But, then, Max was scornful of many things, from his perennially disappointing Chicago Blackhawks to the perennially disappointing Democratic party...
...I figured,' Mr...
...I don't pretend to have a very good answer to Max's challenge—my answers always seemed too abstract and idealized...
...We talked about Christianity and the Holocaust a few times...
...I thought about the conundrum of Christian-Jewish history many times as the shiva candle's light cast its shadows across our kitchen at night, and I've thought about it every time I've had the nerve to answer my children's predictable questions with the astounding assertion: "Papa is with God now...
...God talk, it is often said, is at best a way to speak about what we cannot finally comprehend...
...He could outwit the Nazis, he said, because he knew how Germans did things...
...I responded by contextualizing like mad...
...He had a complicated regard for Germany and for Germans...
...As long as Christianity teaches that the Jews killed Christ," he concluded, "Jews have a problem...
...He listened, patiently, but remained unpersuaded...
...My father-in-law, Max Horst Segall, died in Florida in the last week in May, and when my wife returned from the funeral she placed the candle on the stovetop (every home's holy of holies) and lit it...
...Early in 1944, they returned to Germany under false identities...
...Max's Easter reprieve is a sobering irony, to say the least...
...He was later joined in Poland by his wife and together they managed to avoid detection and capture during the Holocaust...
...He did not hesitate to credit individual Christians for helping him and his wife...
Vol. 123 • July 1996 • No. 13
