RogerEvansOnline.com

Frau Friedländer speaks here of the ignorance of the Holocaust that she found among young Germans. A German friend of mine, only a decade or so younger than I am, was spending some months working for the German classical-record company that I also was consulting for. We went, sometime in the ’90s, to a magnificent performance in Carnegie Hall of the Britten War Requiem, conducted by Robert Shaw. We met there a Jewish friend of mine and her party, and we decided all to go together to a then-fashionable joint for dinner. I had always avoided any reference to the WWII with my friend after my embarrassment when we saw Schindler’s List together. But the War Requiem was an inevitable recollection of the war between his country and mine.

All was very gemütlich at our table, and I went to the restroom while we waited for our orders to be served. To my horror, as I returned to the table, I heard my Jewish friend say to my German friend, “And what do you think of the Holocaust, Stefan?”

When he stunned the others by saying, “It has nothing to do with me,” I sat down in the midst of some shocked people and said, “The thing is, Stefan, that in this country we are educated to consider it a tragedy that implicates us all” — leaving unsaid that Germans might feel that even more than Americans.