Here Comes Trouble (37 page)

G
ARY:
“Bitburg.”

M
E:
“Pittsburgh?”

G
ARY:
“Bitburg.”

M
E:
“Why do you want to go to Pittsburgh?”

G
ARY:
“I don’t ever want to go to Pittsburgh. I wanna go to
BIT
burg.”

M
E:
“Oh.”

Gary grew up in Flint. I did not know him when I was younger, but now as an adult he was, among other things, the pro bono attorney for my newspaper (and for me personally whenever I needed to get out of a traffic ticket or a landlord dispute).

“Mike, can you believe this business with Reagan going to Bitburg?” he asked, hoping I would share his same incredulousness, which I did.

“I want to go there and let him know how I feel. You wanna come?”

In the spring of 1985, the seven leading economies of the world (which would later be known as the G-7, then the G-8, then the G-20, and so on) decided to hold an economic summit in Bonn, West Germany. President Ronald Reagan would attend, representing the United States.

Somewhere along the way, someone in his administration thought it would be a good idea while Reagan was in the Fatherland to go and lay an official wreath on the graves of some Nazi soldiers. When various Jewish and human rights groups objected, he dug his heels in and refused to cancel the ceremony—and in fact, just to prove his stubbornness and his point, he upped the ante and said he would now lay the wreath on the graves of not just any run-of-the-mill Nazis, but on the burial plots of the psychopaths known as the Nazi SS. Nice.

The ceremony would take place in the small town of Bitburg near the Luxembourg border. And Gary wanted to go to Bitburg.

Gary was not a political activist. He was not prone to act on impulse. He was the kind of guy whose pattern of daily activities—eating, exercising, sleeping—is the kind you can set your watch to. So the anger in his voice and his eagerness to act politically—and publicly—was a pleasant jolt to my afternoon.

Gary was unique in another respect. His father
and
his mother were survivors of both the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Over one million died in Auschwitz, and 50,000 in Bergen-Belsen. His parents survived both. They were from a small city in Poland called Kielce. In 1940, Kielce had a population of 200,000, with about 20,000 Jewish citizens. The Germans and the Poles established the Jewish ghetto in 1941, but by August 1942 the ghetto was liquidated and most of its inhabitants were sent to the Treblinka concentration camp. Only a couple thousand was kept behind to work as forced laborers (i.e., slaves). Gary’s parents, Bella and Benny, were among the slaves. Each of them was married to their respective spouses, but neither of those spouses survived the war.

In 1944, they were sent to Auschwitz where they survived the “selection” process (they were deemed fit enough to do the slave labor). In 1945, when the Russians were days away from Auschwitz, the Germans took those they still needed for the slave work and marched them in the dead of winter to a rail station in Gliwice, Poland, a twenty-mile distance. Many died. Those who lived, including Gary’s parents, were loaded into cattle cars to Bergen-Belsen, where the British liberated them on April 15, 1945.

While in a refugee camp in Munich the following year they met and got married. One of them had an uncle who had emigrated to Flint, Michigan, twenty years earlier to work in the General Motors factories. Because of that connection they were able to come to the United States and to Flint, where they were welcomed and where they thrived.

The ordeal of Bella and Benny Boren took a toll not just on them, but, in years to come, also on their children, Gary and his three brothers. Nearly everyone else in his family in Europe—grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—were killed in the Holocaust.

The trip to Bitburg, he told me, would be his personal statement against those who did this to his parents—and perhaps, more important, his one-man act of defiance against his own president who was either insensitive or stupid or cruel. Each was inexcusable.

And what exactly was my purpose in going?

“You’ll know how to sneak us in to the cemetery,” Gary said matter-of-factly. Gary then ticked off my résumé of major break-ins: getting on the floor of the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco with no press credentials; traveling through Nicaragua to the Honduran border without proper papers or visas; sneaking backstage past security at concerts to meet Joan Baez or Pete Seeger.

“When’s Reagan going there?” I asked.

“This Sunday.”

“This Sunday?”

“Yes. C’mon. I’ll take care of the plane tickets.”

I didn’t need any convincing. I was up for the adventure and I was up for anything that would stick it to the Gipper. If Bonzo was going to Bitburg, so was I.

Forty-eight hours later, we were on a plane from Detroit to Hamburg, West Germany. We arrived in Bonn, the West German capital, late Friday afternoon.

Our first step upon deplaning was to go and convince the German authorities to give us the necessary press credentials we would need to follow Reagan into Bitburg. This was not going to be easy, considering the cutoff date to apply for said credentials was a month ago, and the Bonn Economic Summit was already half over.

There were thousands of press people in Bonn, all there to cover a major non-event conducted by the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and Japan. At the end of the summit, the leaders posed for pictures and issued a joint statement saying they were going to stay the course (they didn’t say which course was getting the “stay” treatment). They also said that they all opposed inflation. OK.

But the big news of the economic summit—other than the revelation that Reagan was staying in a castle owned by a guy whose godfather was Adolf Hitler—was Reagan’s first act when he got off the plane in Bonn. Unlike the rest of us who rush to file missing baggage claims, Reagan issued an Executive Order banning all trade with Nicaragua. The other world leaders were perplexed by this move—it had nothing to do with their economic summit—and they quickly tried to put as much distance between themselves and Reagan as possible. Not one of the leaders—not even his fellow righties, Margaret Thatcher of the U.K. or Brian Mulroney of Canada—endorsed Reagan’s embargo of what he called a “communist regime.”

We went to the summit’s press office and were told by the White House press officer that we should speak to “Herr Peters at the U.S. Press Center near the Bundestag” about press credentials.

“I’m sorry, but I believe you’re a little late,” Peters told us when we finally found him. “There are no more press credentials to be issued.”

We insisted that we were assured of credentials and that he was supposed to take care of us.

“I’m afraid all you can do at this point,” he said, “is to take it up with Frau Schmidt.”

Oh, great. The old “Frau Schmidt” handoff.

We found Frau Schmidt. She was packing up to go home when we got to her desk.

“I’m sorry, you’re not on the list,” she said as she leafed through a file of index cards.

“But we must be on the list,” I replied. “I spoke to the White House last week and we were guaranteed press credentials: ‘Just check with Frau Schmidt when you get to Bonn,’ I was told. So now we’ve flown all the way here, at great expense to our newspaper, and because of some
foul-up,
there are no credentials here for us!”

The possibility that there may have been a “foul-up,” a mistake made through carelessness, perhaps laziness, was a revolting thought to an older German, and highly insulting. She walked away—and within ten minutes she returned, handing us our official P
RESIDENT
R
EAGAN
S
TATE
V
ISIT
press passes with complimentary lanyard embroidered with the colors of the flag of the Federal Republic of Germany.

We didn’t have much use for the passes in Bonn, except they got us our first real meal in thirty hours. The German government had opened up their parliament building to feed the press with all the free food and drinks they could consume. The spread of food was easily two blocks long.

“You know what they say,” Gary remarked with a smile as he wolfed down his fifth caviar pâté. “A well-fed press always tells the truth.”

We took off for Bitburg in the morning. Located about one hundred miles south of Bonn, Bitburg was a town of 24,000 inhabitants—12,000 Germans and 12,000 American servicemen and -women and their dependents from the nearby air force base. Leveled by the United States in an air attack on Christmas Eve, 1944 (Bitburg was a staging area and supply depot for the Nazi troops in the Battle of the Bulge), it was now a quaint little city nestled in the hills of the Rhineland.

We weren’t off the bus five minutes when we were approached by the local Welcome Wagon that had been set up for the visiting press. No running from office to office begging for press credentials here in Bitburg—these people had the red carpet rolled out for anyone with a camera, notepad, or sharpened pencil. Bernd Quirin, a financial officer with the city and head of the local German Army Reserves, recognized us as Americans and offered to give us a personal tour of Bitburg, including the cemetery.

We took him up on it, and he chauffeured us around in his Audi for the next two hours. We heard the whole history of Bitburg, how his father was wounded on the Russian front, how much he and all the Bitburgers loved America and Ronald Reagan. The 12,000 U.S. soldiers never caused a problem in town, and there was no dissension over Reagan’s visit to those SS graves—after all, he explained, those SS were “just kids forced into the Nazi army.”

Bernd then took us to the cemetery. Of course he had no idea he was participating in a reconnaissance mission, aiding and abetting a Jew and a journalist who planned on raising a ruckus the next day. We felt bad that after our arrests he’d probably be hauled in for questioning as to why he was “the driver” for these anarchists.

At first glance, what one notices about the Bitburg cemetery is how small it is. If you had visions of Arlington or Normandy in your head, they were quickly dashed by this half-acre plot of flat grave markers with six cement crosses and a chapel that more resembled a crematorium.

This was The Day Before, and the local Germans were busy laying flowers on all the graves and tidying up for the president’s visit. The press was there, too, photographing the SS graves from every angle imaginable and interviewing Bitburgers about their connection to the SS.

One elderly German woman was going around and taking flowers off non-Nazi graves and placing them in abundance on the SS graves. She was mumbling something nasty in German as she went about her one-woman “up yours” crusade as the cameras rolled. Her presence was making the Bitburg city officials a bit nervous. “Why are you filming her?” the deputy mayor of Bitburg asked the ABC-TV crew.

“Just try to stay out of our way if you can” was the response of an ABC field producer as the crew shoved the deputy mayor aside.

Humiliated by this treatment, he turned to me and said, “You Americans. You don’t listen. You print what you want to fit your ideas of what is and what isn’t.” He then pulled out two covers of
Newsweek
magazine. One was the U.S. edition, the other the international. Both had the same cover of an SS grave, but the U.S. edition had two West German flags stuck into the Nazi grave.

“
Newsweek
doctored this photo,” he said, “so as to imply that we Germans today honor the Nazis. Have you read
The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum
? This is what you Americans want—to strip us of our dignity and our honor.”

We awoke Sunday morning for the big day and began to implement our plan. Underneath his sweater, Gary wrapped around his torso a forty-square-foot banner our friends Jack and Laurie had painted for us back in Ann Arbor. It read:

We Came from Michigan, USA, to Remind You:

They Murdered My Family

With both real and fake press passes around our necks and camera bags in hand, we set off on our two-mile walk to the cemetery.

What we discovered was that overnight Bitburg had turned into a police state, with 17,000 German army soldiers, security officials, and cops from every walk of life having surrounded the town and set up a series of checkpoints, making it almost impossible to get to the cemetery. One thing the Germans were making certain of: no one would get within a mile of the Bitburg cemetery without having proved that they were Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley. And there on the road leading up to the cemetery, about a half mile away, the German police nabbed us.

“This is as far as you go,” the officers barked at us in German. Gary, who is fluent in German, told him that we were assured that we would be allowed in the cemetery.