Begin stroked the chin of his gaunt face and to lend added sincerity to the words he was about to say leaned across the table from the front edge of his chair and gazed into Lautenberg’s eyes with great earnestness.
It is true Frank he said. I reprimanded Helmut Schmidt in public.
What had he done? What had he said?
He had gone to Saudi Arabia and he had said in a public statement that Germany had obligations to various peoples among them the Palestinians but he made no mention of the Jews.
I was beside myself with astonishment. Could it be I said to myself that he of all people had failed to make mention of Germany’s obligation to the Jews – and in Saudi Arabia of all places? So yes I told him what I thought of him in public.
And how did he respond?
He demanded an apology but I refused. I publicly told him that he had shown arrogance and callous disregard of the Jews exterminated by his people in World War II. And I counseled him to take an example from his predecessor Chancellor Willy Brandt. I told him to do what Brandt did: to go to Warsaw. I told him to go to the site where the Jewish ghetto once stood.
Go down on your knees Mr. Schmidt I told him. Go down on you knees and beg forgiveness of the Jewish people for what your countrymen perpetrated under the Nazi regime against my people at a time when you Mr. Schmidt remained steadfast to the personal oath you had given to Adolf Hitler as a soldier in the Wehrmacht.
He was a soldier in the German army? asked Ruby.
Oh yes. He even reached officer rank. He served both on the Russian front and the western front until he was captured by the British in 1944.
What do you know! marveled Bernstein.
Yemach sh’mo! spat the Warsaw Ghetto survivor. Let him rot.
And now he’s chancellor of Germany concluded the prime minister shaking his head from side to side at the irony of it all.
But there was an even greater irony to come. In 1984 the former president of France Valery Giscard d’Estaing let it be known that Helmut Schmidt’s father was the illegitimate son of a Jew. (JPFS)