There is a report in Today’s papers (http://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/polizeibericht/article1297860/Kollwitzplatz-mit-Hakenkreuzen-beschmiert.html) about swastikas that were painted on tabletennis boards and stones around Kollowitzplatz on Saturday. This park is less than 50 meters from my daughter’s Kita, sometimes we go there to play, I play tabletennis with friends over there, and on Saturdays we like to go shoppin on the trendy market there. It is not in the former East anymore (well, technically yes), it is not Pankow, and it isn’t in a neighborhood riden by unemployment. It is right here, btween the asparagus and the swing, between the ice cream parlor and the flower stand. The cancer Germany never bothered to remove is spreading.

Here is what I have written about another incident, four months ago:

I was taking Maya to the Kita the other morning. We were riding the bicycle, both upset after our daily fight–Maya hates wearing the helmet. Anyway, we were driving up Schoenhauseralee and past the Jewish cemetery when I noticed three people spraying water over the external wall of the cemetery. I told myself that it was a weird hour for people to clean the wall, but since we fought and were a little bit late, I decided to come back after dropping the jewel.

When I came back, I looked on the wall. They were spraying over graffiti written along the wall. Also sprayed were the edges of a swastika, turning it into an “x”. I then noticed that a police car was parking on the bike lane near the entrance. I approached the two officers and asked what was going on. They shrugged their shoulders and replyed that nothing was going on. “Then what are you doing here?” I asked. “Just a routine check up”, they responded, “nothing happened”. I then asked them to come with me and showed them the wall, “I guess something did happen”, one of the officers murmured.

I looked for the person in charge. He was speaking Hebrew and was very nice to me, but refused to talk. He said, though, that it is not an incident, that such things happen once or twice a month, and then they just call the cleaning company and spray it off and the city is paying for it. Then he stopped and said that I must speak to his boss.

We called his boss, identifying himself as Ronny. Ronny was very clear about one thing: “I can’t stand journalists, they making up things”, he told me after we talked for couple of minutes. I thought it was in very bad taste to generalize like that. “I can’t stand security people”, I responded, “they make me feel insecure”.

Ronny was trying to get me off his back. He said that it happened a couple of days before, but the cleaning company could come only today. I said to him that it was impossible as I am driving by the cemetery at least 4 times a day. He said that there is no swastika. At that point I called a photographer and we took pictures.

I went home and called two Berlin daily newspapers ad asked if they have something on their police blotter that mentions the Jewish cemetery. One of them said that there’s nothing and promised to call me back after she checks. She did and then call me back saying that the police was amused: “why should they deal with every “x” written on the wall of a Jewish institution?” I told her that it was not an “x”.

The response of the other paper was really amazing. “there is no report on that, but even it were we wouldn’t pick it up and write about it”, one journalist told me. Why, I asked. It was really amusing. “because if you publish it, there are going to be a number of idiots who would like to do the same just in order to get noticed”.

 I called the Jewish council in Berlin and asked what was going on, where is the police report and why people keep telling me lies. They told me that this is how they like it. The police and the city are providing them with the cleaning, there is no publicity over it, and no idiot copycats.

I have a lot to say about the fact that my daughter and I ran into an anti-Semite incident five minutes from our house, here in Berlin (not in “the former East, where all this unemployed idiots are joining the NPD”, as my local friends like to explain these incidents–well, we live in the former East and there are a lot of unemployed people around here). This time I won’t add nothing to what I have written.

Just something to think about for the next time you read about the statistics of anti-Semite incidents in Germany.

And that sometimes silence is a foolish gold.