Daily Press from Newport News, Virginia • Page 32

LIFESTYLES D4 Saturday, Feb. 22, 1997 Germans, Jews carry burden of Holocaust students read "Night," Elie Wiesel's revered memoir of the Holocaust. But instead of wanting them only to cringe at the gory details, she wants them to think about the qualities that spawned Nazism in Get-many yesterday and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia today. She wants them to think about it when they mutter a racial epithet under their breath in the school cafeteria, "Honesty, civility, dignity, respect how could we not be teaching that in school?" said Fishman. "My God, look at the world we're living in." i After school, Fishman totes her 12-year-old daughter, Lia, to bat mitzvah lessons at Temple Beth El, Over pasta one night in Berlin, Alix Rehlinger the German and Jackie Fishman the Jew explained why they refuse to shed the past that weighs so heavily on their shoulders.

Rehlinger's father fought for the Nazis in Holland. Now she's a social worker who helps resettle Palestinian and Bosnian refugees in Germany. She sees the prejudice aimed today at outsiders and remembers her dad and the past, "Maybe it's learning to live with it. And making sure it never happens again," she said. Fishman 's mother survived Auschwitz.

Now Fishman is a teacher trying to instill proper values in her students. She hears a student insult another person's or religion and remembers her mom and the past. I "I can feel the burden," she said. That's why Rehlinger and Fish-: man met on a freezing weekend in Berlin. Two children of the Holocaust learning to carry their bur-! den together.

by one question arising from her father's participation in the murder of 6 million Jews and 5 million others during World War II "What part of the evil is in me?" Alix Rehlinger, 38, remembers her father, a former Nazi soldier, issuing a warning before she moved for a year in the 1980s to Philadelphia "Don't come back with a Jew." During two days in the city where Hitler formalized his plan for the elimination of Europe's Jews, 400 Germans and 50 Jews listened to speeches, shared white wine and tried to begin weaving a bond shredded a generation ago. They even participated in an exercise meant to loosen pent-up emotions. People were paired off and told to push against one another to see what it feels like to be the aggressor and the victim. Fishman winced at the sight of Jews and Germans trying to communicate by sliding around a meeting room in their socks. "The Auschwitz disco," she muttered to no one in particular.

The conference one of the first of its kind in Germany wasn't meant to foster a false sense of forgiveness. "I don't forgive my father," said Kuhl. "Why should others?" It was designed instead to inspire dialogue between people who have never spoken, and to perhaps set an example in a world where communication is often wanting. Boston radiologist Samson Munn, who lost four grandparents in the Holocaust, likened it to "watering the soil." If Germans and Jews can talk in Berlin, he asked, why can't blacks and whites talk in America? Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker Wallfisch, a native of Wroclaw, Poland, who was forced to play the cello in the Auschwitz Women's Orchestra, called the gathering "an attempt to jump over our own shadows." Rehlinger, the mother of a 6-year-old boy, said she came to make sure her nation's legacy isn't forgotten. "I want the facts to stay alive," she said.

"I want my children to know." Fishman was touched by the sentiments, stunned by the confessions of German angst and moved to self-examination by all of it. At one point, she told a group of 100 that all this talk about prejudice Pi Berlin conference a learning lesson for N.C. teacher By Ken Garfield Knight-Ridder Newspapers BERLIN This is why the child of a Holocaust survivor had come to Germany to face with a clear mind and dry eyes the children of Nazi perpetrators. Charlotte, N.C, teacher Jackie Fishman was determined to learn all she could at a conference that brought together people whose loved ones were either victim or participant in the Final Solution. There were far too many issues to surrender to emotion.

So instead of crying, she spent two long, intense days questioning. "What do you want?" Fishman asked Dirk Kuhl as 14 Germans and Jews from Europe and the United States sat in a circle. answered Kuhl, a retired grade-school teacher whose father was head of the Gestapo in the Braunschweig region, where thousands of forced laborers died in Nazi plants. "What do you tell your kids in school?" said Fishman, 50. "Break the silence," answered Kuhl, 56.

Then Fishman told Kuhl what inspired her to make this trip; what inspires her to put the Holocaust at the center of her journey as a Jew, teacher and daughter determined to take the baton from her mother, an Auschwitz survivor. "My urgency," explained Fishman, "is to make American kids see the importance of understanding where the lines are in their lives, the lines beyond which they will not go. "In Germany, it seemed they didn't know where the line was." Answered Kuhl: "They knew where the line was and it did not matter." Fishman traveled to Berlin last month for a conference bringing together children of Jews who were murdered and children and grandchildren of Germans who were part of the Nazi machine. She hoped hearing the story from the German perspective would allow her to better pass on the meaning of the Holocaust to her students at Northwest School of the Arts in Charlotte. There were lessons to be learned, as she knew there would be.

But nothing could have prepared her for the torment that still stains the German land- scape. Kuhl said he hates crowds because they stir images of Hitler wooine the masses at fiery rallies "This unconsciously means to me giving up your brain. Dangerous." He chose never to have children, fearing a child might inherit some part of his father's worst traits. Kuhl has blocked out memories of a final visit with his father before his 1948 execution by the British for war crimes. All he remembers is the box of pens his father gave him.

Renate Roeder, 55, the daughter of an SS commander, is consumed Jackie Fishman, right, a Charlotte, N.C, teacher, and her mother, Susan Cernyak-Spatz, a Holocaust survivor or Auschwitz, traveled to Berlin, Germany, in January for a conference bringing together children of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and children and grandchildren of Germans who were part of the Nazi regime. krt and English. She started immersing herself in Holocaust literature. Dry history, personal accounts, it didn't matter. "I read and I read and I read, until I got sick of reading," she said.

It all crystallized in April 1993, when Cernyak-Spatz took her three children Jackie, Wendy and Todd to Vienna and Auschwitz in Poland. They admired the handsome Austrian neighborhood of shops and apartments from which she was snatched. They stared into the blackened crematoriums where bodies were burned. Under cold, gray skies, they tearfully recited in Hebrew the Mourners' Kaddish outside the gates of the camp. On a 2 a.m.

train from Krakow, Poland, to Vienna, Fishman leaned over to her mom and announced that her oldest child, Sam, would be bar mitzvahed after all. "Jackie," said Cernyak-Spatz, "sort of took a turn." Said Fishman: "That journey made it very clear to me. There's sort of this mantle that comes to me from my mom." She put it this way to a fellow" Jew in Berlin: "There wasn't any more running away from it. Judaism is bigger than me. The history is bigger than me." Today, then, Fishman makes her reminded her of the times she sin- gled out a student for undeserved punishment just because she had that power, "I feel unnerved," she admitted.

Despite the disturbing feelings unleashed in the handsome town hall of high ceilings and tall columns, Fishman wouldn't allow herself to surrender to emotion. She had come not only to better understand the Holocaust, but to continue the work of her mother, a 74-year-old Auschwitz survivor who will one day need someone to carry on her message. She wasn't interested in wallowing in the Holocaust. "It's not that I don't have empathy for people," said Fishman. "But the lessons are beyond ourselves.

It can't be about one person's psy- She even has returned to Germany to talk with young Germans, though when she goes there she refuses to speak with anyone her own age. "I don't trust them," she said. Her dedication to the past, though, wasn't enough to win over the oldest of her three children. Fishman was strong-willed like her mother, but more curious about the world today than the Holocaust of a generation ago. She even shunned Judaism for a time to dabble in the Unitarian-Uniyersalist church.

"I was a thoroughly American kid," said Fishman, who was born in Illinois, raised in Missouri and tasted life in California from 1969 to 1972. She lived in the Haight-Ash-bury section of San Francisco when the neighborhood was synonymous with counterculture. "It was the '60s. Sex, drugs, rock n' roll were never better." Said Cernyak-Spatz: "We had our differences. She was into the '60s.

I found the '60s tacky." Said Fishman: "I took a long time to have a career and get serious about any grown-up life." Fishman began settling down when she moved to Charlotte in 1984. Married With children, she was fast becoming dedicated to teaching high school humanities Ail 4ft 5.., chological problems. "I don't want to hug anybody," she said, thinking back to a session where people sat cross-legged in a basement conference room and shared their feelings. "And I'm a pretty effusive person." There was a time when Fishman cared little about the No. 34042 burned into her mother's left forearm.

Susan Cernyak-Spatz, who has shared her testimony in hundreds of Carolinas schools and sanctuaries, was born in Vienna, grew up in Berlin and survived two years in Auschwitz through strength and guile. She credits luck and grit, not God. "You always tried to make your face look good," she once told a class in Lancaster, S.C "If you were looking real sick, they would choose you for that day's gas chamber batch." She married an American GI after liberation they met in a Red Cross club in Brussels, Belgium. She settled in Charlotte in 1972, where for years she taught an interesting combination of courses at University of North Carolina-Charlotte German and French, along with a class on the Holocaust. Thousands of Carolinas students have been moved by her presence.

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