Haaretz published today my story about the alleged Nazi Samuel Kunz (the story is in Hebrew, but in this link you can see an exclusive picture of him and an old picture showing that he wasn’t so miserable at the death camp). I spent a day in the pastoral village he lives in with his wife and son, trying to see what a man who, according to the prosecution, was involved in the murder of over 430,000 Jews (10 were killed by him personally), looks like.
I waited and waited outside his house. I talked to the next door neighbor who moved there just a month and was shocked to hear that his neighbor (and landlord) is a fucking monster. Samuel Kunz’s son (what a Jewish name, isn’t it?) appeared in the window and motioned me to leave, I motioned him to come down and talk to me, and he motioned his middle finger toward me.
The neighbor from the other side refused to talk, claiming that they are great neighbors. The pharmacist, like everyone else, didn’t know what I was talking about, was shocked when I told her and then moved to the next client. The owner of the garden shop told me that Kunz was a great customer („I wish everyone was like him“) and asked me if I don’t have better things to do with my life then bother an almost 90-year-old man.
Oberbachem is one of these places where everyone else knows what you ate yesterday for dinner. Every one knew about the incident where someone sprayed the word „murderer“ on the wall of the Kunz house. Everyone knew but still couldn’t connect the dots between the nice neighbor and the inhumanity of Belzec where kunz was a guard. Oberbachem is also a perfect place to retire to after working in a federal office after the war, invest in real estate, work on a beautiful garden and continue your life project: highlight three years of your life and press the delete button. In other words, Oberbachem is as far as you can get from Belzec.
If Kunz was a little bit more lucky, he should have been dead by now. Erich Steidtmann had this kind of luck, so did Adolf Storms. But he wasn’t, and so in one afternoon last week as he was returning home from his daily walk with his wife, he was approached by me. Can we please talk, I asked kindly. There is nothing to talk about, the wife answered assertively and pulled Kunz’s hand. They passed me and all this yo-yo feelings I get when I see German from a certain age, started rushing to my head. „Wissen Sie, Ich bin Judisch“, I said firmly. Kunz stopped, turned around and looked at me for a long minute. And then his wife pushed him inside the gate, the house, the door, where Smauel Kunz will have to deal, from now until the happy and lucky day when he’ll die, with the reality that his life project fell apart.
Shabbat Shalom.
