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Article: A pilgrimage to Germany.
- Article from:
- Judaism
- Article date:
- September 22, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 American Jewish Congress. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In August 1994 I visited Germany for the first time. Like most Jews I had avoided that nation: Germany symbolized the evil of the Shoah, of the horrors launched by the Nazi state over a half-century ago. To travel there would evoke anger and painful memories, and I would not be able to dissociate the events of the period of National Socialism from the places and people, and even the language, that I might encounter. But I, American-born of parents who immigrated from Poland in the early 1920s, had confronted such memories on several "Jewish heritage" tours to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in recent years. I had come to realize that sometimes memory is a form ...