Reconciliation – not atonement: President Rivlin honors German volunteers

ARSP facilitates Germans volunteering for one year in countries which suffered under Nazism. Volunteers in Israel work with Holocaust survivors.

By GREER FAY CASHMAN
2013 Israeli film Hanna's Journey dealt with the issue of German volunteers in Israel (photo credit: YOUTUBE SCREENSHOT)
2013 Israeli film Hanna's Journey dealt with the issue of German volunteers in Israel
(photo credit: YOUTUBE SCREENSHOT)
Though Germany’s Action Reconciliation Service for Peace has been operating in Israel since 1961, and in 2010 was awarded the President’s Prize for Volunteerism, Sunday marked the first time the organization’s members were invited to the President’s Residence on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Founded in 1958 by Lothar Kreyssig, a judge in Weimar Germany who was removed from the bench in the Nazi era for protesting discrimination against the disabled and the treatment of prisoners in concentration camps, ARSP facilitates Germans volunteering for one year in countries which suffered under Nazism. Volunteers in Israel work with Holocaust survivors, and in many cases becoming part of their extended families.
The loaded theme of young German people volunteering in Israel and working with Holocaust survivors was also the focus of a 2013 Israeli film called 'Hanna's Journey.'
The ARSP volunteers met Sunday with President Reuven Rivlin, German ambassador Susan Wasum-Rainer, and MKs Elazar Stern and Dov Hanin co-chairs of the Knesset lobby for Holocaust survivors.
Joining them were Bergen-Belsen survivor Tamar Landau who today resides in a sheltered living facility in Jerusalem where many of the other inhabitants are also Holocaust survivors. Landau said of the volunteers, most of who are in their late teens, “They are superb young people who do wonderful work. But they have nothing for which to atone. They are already the third and fourth generation of the murderers who committed war crimes.”
Asked by The Jerusalem Post what motivated him to volunteer here given that he was not yet born during the Holocaust years, Philip Lierman from Wisebaden said: “It’s not a matter of guilt. We want to bring about change so that we can make sure that this does not happen again in the future.”
Anika Finkan and Daniella  Stermer, who volunteer at Yad Vashem and in the occupational therapy division of the Association of Israelis of Central European Origin, said that since Germany had caused immeasurable suffering, it was the country’s responsibility to take appropriate action.
When ARSP was founded in 1958, they noted, most Germans wanted to put the past behind them. That painful past cannot be undone, said the volunteers, “but whoever closes their eyes to the past is blind to the present. We are witnesses of the last witnesses.”
Stermer spoke  of a meeting with a Holocaust survivor who had shown her a photograph of a childhood friend. “What happened to her?” asked Stermer. “Deported her to Auschwitz,” came the reply. Stermer made some derogatory comment about the Germans of that time, to which the survivor responded: “We were Germans too”.
Guy Band, CEO of ARSP in Israel, pointed out the organization began operating in Israel four years prior to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Jerusalem and Bonn.
“We want remembrance to serve again and again as a basis for the future. We remember the dead as we pay homage to the survivors,” said Wassum-Rainer.
She regretted that “Antisemitism, racism and hatred of others are still relevant in 2019,” adding “For Germany, responsibility for the Shoah will never cease.”
As a young man, Rivlin demonstrated against the establishment of diplomatic ties between Israel and Germany. He was among the protesting demonstrators who congregated outside the President’s Residence in August 1965 when Rolf Pauls, West Germany’s first ambassador to Israel, presented his credentials.
Since then, Rivlin as President has accepted the credentials of German diplomats and has hosted German statesmen and politicians.
But this does not prevent him from speaking out against the servants of the Third Reich.
“There can never be forgiveness for the crimes of the Nazis against the Jewish people.,” Rivlin declared. “There can never be forgiveness for the terror and suffering of Jewish children during the dark years of the Second World War. But there can be reconciliation between the German people and the Jewish people today,
“Reconciliation must be based on truth. As the Holocaust fades from living memory, we must all work together to keep the memory alive. This is especially true today, when there are political leaders in the world who wish to distort their people’s role in the Holocaust, when extremists on the European right are trying to revive racist ideologies and when extremists on the European left are calling for the destruction of the State of Israel,” he continued.”