The Transfer Agreement Read Online Free

woods, he came upon a leg protruding from the snow. This was my mother. Together, by night and by courage, these two Polish teenagers survived in the forest for two years. When the war was over, they cautiously emerged from the woods believing that nearly all Jews may have been exterminated—except them. The question for them was whether there was still any use being “Jewish.” And yet—believing themselves to be among the last of their people—they decided to live on, as Jews, and never forget.
    Quickly, my parents learned that others had survived, although almost none from their families. They resettled in the United States. I was born in Chicago, raised in Jewish neighborhoods, and my parents tried never to speak of their experience. Like the other children of Holocaust survivors, my life was overshadowed by my family’s tragedy. And, like other Jews, I saw the State of Israel as the salvation and redemption of the remnant of the Jewish people. I had spent time on a kibbutz and returned to Israel several times after that. For years, I considered emigrating to Israel. The very meaning of Israel was a deep motivation in my life.
    Yet there were incongruities I could never understand. Everywhere I looked in Israel, I saw German equipment. The icons of Nazi commerce— Mercedes, Grundig, Siemens, Krupp—were thriving in the Jewish State, even as the ban on Wagner’s music was strictly enforced. And so many families were German Jews who had come to Israel during the Hitler era.
    For a year, I filed Rabbi Sherwin’s rumor in a mental box of imponderables. He had said many times that the most important rule in approaching the Holocaust is that nothing makes sense. And yet I needed to make sense out of it. If I could, then perhaps there was a reason my mother and father had lived, while six million had died.
    Working through the staff and resources of Spertus College of Judaica, I was able to obtain some rare Hebrew and German materials that documented in skeletal form that the arrangement indeed existed. After a great deal of personal anguish, I made my decision.
    When I told my parents, my mother threatened to disown me and my father threatened to personally strangle me if I dared lend any credence to the notion of Nazi-Zionist cooperation. This was done against a background of rising anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli attempts to somehow link the Nazi regime with Zionists.
    When I later showed my parents a hundred-page summary of my proposed book, my mother cried and said, “Now I understand what I could never understand. Write the book.” My father, who fought in the war as a Zionist Betar partisan, also gave me his blessing with the simple words: “Go write the book.”
    My agent said he thought there was only one editor with the stamina to take on this book. That man was Edward T. Chase, editor-in-chief of new York Times Books, a man with preeminent credentials in WWII and Holocaust books. Chase read the proposal and said yes.
    I spent the next several years traveling through Germany, Israel, England, and the United States, locating forgotten files in archives, scouring newspapers of the era, interviewing principals, and surveying government papers. Millions of microfilm frames of captured Nazi documents had never been analyzed. Boxes of boycott papers had never been organized. Worse, I found that little had been written about Hitler’s first year—1933. For months, the information confounded me. Nothing made sense. There were so many contradictions. Nazis promoting Jewish nationalism. American Jewish leaders refusing even to criticize the Third Reich. Principal players who said one thing in public and did the opposite in private. Everything was upside down. And historians of the period told me they were equally confused about what had really occurred.
    Finally I was able to piece the information together and reconstruct events. To do so, I had to clear my mind of