The Tellers and the Zacks were good friends, well known,  respected citizens with thriving businesses in the center of Gemünd, a small market town, in the Eifel region, Germany.

The Tellers made and sold hats. To go out in public hatless was unthinkable.

The Zacks sold a variety of household goods serving the locals and the surrounding farming community.

The Tellers and the Zacks were Jews.

In the early 1930’s it was normal for Jews and Aryans to have friendly social and commercial interactions. 

Until it wasn’t.

We were both only children, Gisela Teller and I.

She was about 12 years older and remembers coming to our house to give to me her sled.

I was perhaps 4 years old and pointing from our backdoor across the courtyard I said, imperiously, “put it in the shed.”

One of my best memories with my father is sitting in his lap, on that sled speeding down the cold, sparkling, white Eifel hillside.

Why did Gisela give me her sled? 

The Teller family was leaving for Palestine.

What caused their radical uprooting?

Gisela attended school in Euskirchen, traveling by train with a group of students from our small town, Gemünd. 

One morning on the way to Euskirchen, the local doctor’s son led the other children in singing Nazi songs with lyrics about killing Jews. They sang directly at her. 

Shocked and terrified, she never returned to school and persuaded her parents to pull up roots and leave Germany.

The Tellers asked my parents to join them but like so many others my mother and father could not imagine the abyss that awaited. They stayed.

In 1992 Gisela and I met again in Gemünd at a survivors’ reunion and she told me the story of the sled and gave me a photo, dated 1937 that my mother had sent to her parents in Israel.

The White House, 28 February 2025

That moment takes me back to Gemünd. 

It is 1938, my father has been forced to close his business on the ground floor and sell to an Aryan at a very low price.

I stand close to my father at the top of the stairs. Our backs pressed against the closed wooden front door. Below us the new owner’s face is tilted upward, his eyes hard and hostile, his fingers point, out of his mouth spew hateful demeaning words.

Now I think about my father’s eyes, 

Were they filled with pain like Zelensky’s?

My father’s ordeal was private, Zelensky’s shaming was very public.

I question myself, Am I  exaggerating reality because of my past experiences?

And then I read Timothy Snyder’s response to the scene in the Oval Office,

…I am a historian of the Holocaust….I took in the tone and the body language, and my first, reflexive reactions were, these are non-Jews trying to intimidate a Jew. Three against one. An antisemitic scene.