WALTER LAQUEUR
The Fate of a Generation
One evening last August I was admi tted to Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem.
The hospital was full and I was lucky to find a bed in a dark corner, shar–
ing a room with five other patients. None was very ill or sleepy and at a
late hour, after the nurses had taken the temperature, blood pressure, and
glucose level for a last time, they began to tell stories from their lives. One
had been in the underground in Iraq in the 1940s; another came from the
neighborhood of Lublin, Poland, had been a boy at the time of the German
invasion, and had spent the next few years in a so-called "family camp" in
a very distant part of the Soviet Union. There was someone of vaguely
French background who had spent the war years in the Foreign Legion,
but it had been an existence not quite as exciting as in the Hollywood
movies of the period. I also made my contribution, and the hours passed
rather quickly with these stories, something like a latter-day
Arabian Nights.
There also was a younger Israeli Arab man, perhaps a village school teacher,
with exquisite manners, always willing to help his neighbors, who eventu–
ally said with some envy, "What interesting lives you all have had!" We
tried to persuade him, without evident success, that he may not have
missed that much-and that, in any case, a price has to be paid for an event–
fullife.
According to very rough estimates, some 120,000 young people of
Jewish origin succeeded in escaping Nazi Germany (and Austria, and other
German-speaking parts of Europe) between 1933 and 1941. "Young" in
this context refers to people born between roughly 1916 and 1926-old
enough to remember something of the time before Hider, but without a
finished education, let alone professional training. Of them approximately
one-quarter went to the United States, a quarter to Israel, another quarter
to Western Europe (above all England), and yet another quarter to Latin
America, Shanghai and various other places.
I estimate that at least two thousand memoirs have been written by
members of this age group: books, articles, and unpublished manuscripts of
various length (unpublished whether because their authors could not find
a publisher, or because they were meant to be read by a small circle of rel–
atives and friends). Come to think of it, what with the arrival of oral
history, the overall number could be much higher. These memoirs include
books by people well known in their respective fields, and others who are
