36
Friday, April 5, 1985
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
OBSERVATIONS
The Management
and Staff
heartily wish
their customers
and
friends
A Healthful And
Joyful
Now Easily They Forget
BY VICTOR M. BIENSTOCK
Special to The Jewish News
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It had long been reported that
George Papandreou, a former
prime minister of Greece and
father of the present Greek prime
minister, owed his life in World
War II to the Zionist under-
ground. The reports have been
confirmed by a former Israeli
Foreign Ministry official who had
worked for the Haganah in Greece
during the war.
A fugitive from the Nazis, with
a price on his head, the elder
Papandreou was taken aboard a
vessel used by the Haganah to
carry Jewish refugees from
Greece to Izmir, in Turkish Asia
Minor, from whence they were
later smuggled into Palestine.
From Izmir, Papandreou made his
way to Egypt.
The records do not show that
George Papandreou ever dis-
played any gratitude to the Jews
who had risked their lives in sav-
ing him. During the two World
War years I knew him in Cairo
when he was a member of success-
ive Greek governments-in-exile, I
never heard him voice sympathy
for Jews suffering under the Nazi
boot or understanding for the
Zionist endeavors in Palestine.
Jewish Agency political envoys
who maintained close contacts
with many of the leaders in the
several exile governments based
in Cairo, rarely, to my knowledge,
obtained a sympathetic hearing
from him and although he was a
Socialist, ever found any com-
monality of interests.
His son, Andreas, currently the
Greek prime minister, has been
extremely critical of the Israeli
government and sympathetic to
Yassir Arafat and the Palestine
Liberation Organization. He
warmly welcomed Arafat in
Athens after his ignominious rout
in Lebanon and he has permitted
the PLO to establish an office in
the Greek capital. He has, how-
ever, promised Greek Jews pro-
tection against terrorism.
Helmut Schmidt, the former
West German chancellor, has re-
vealed that his family had a deep,
Helmut Schmidt
dark secret and lived in a dread of
exposure all through the Nazi re-
gime. The secret? Helmut's
grandfather was Jewish and
under the Nuremburg Laws, •
Helmut's father would have been
considered half-Jewish and there- -
fore deportable, and Helmut him-
self a "mischlinge."
What's more, Schmidt declares,
when Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin denounced
Schmidt, then German chancel-
Norman Mailer
lor, as a Nazi, "the old war horse"
knew the story about Schmidt's
ancestrty.
"I had a Jewish grandfather,"
Schmidt declared. "We managed
to hide this fact from the
authorities by falsifying docu-
ments, my father anal. His father
was Jewish, but because my
father was illegitimate, it was
rather easy to pretend that his
father was unknown. Of course he
was not unknown — he had paid
child support — but my father
managed to get this confirmed in
a document of the Hamburg State
Archives and I managed to get a
Nazi stamp on it, and thereby gOt
an affirmation of Aryan descent
which was then applied to my
brother and me."
His father, Schmidt added, "suf-
fered tremendously under this
permanent angst — you have to
use the German word. He was al-
ways afraid that it would come out
and after the Nazi period was
over, he was a completely broken
man."
Schmidt does not agree with his
successor, Chancellor Helmut
Kohl, that the younger genera-
tion of Germans do not bear any
guilt for the Holocaust because of
their youth at the time. "There
is," he said, quoting former
President Theodor Huess, "a col-
lective sense of shame from which
you cannot disentangle yourself,
and there is, of course, the opinion
of the outside world — and that
will last as long as no other insane
individual inflicts such great mis-
ery and such great evil on so many
people."
Confronted by a conflict be-
tween the arts — more room for
writer Norman Mailer to work in,
or sunlight for artist Lily Harmon
to paint in, the Provincetown
(Cape Cod) Board of Zoning Appe-
als ruled recently that the
novelist should have the space he
sought. Besides, the board dis-
covered, Provincetown had no
bylaw protecting anyone's source
of light, even the artists who flock
to the cape resort.
The industrious and often pug-
nacious Mailer shares a house
with another writer on Prov-
incetown's Commercial Street,
the locale of his recent murder
mystery. He has, according to my
correspondent, Marilyn Miller,
writing in the Provincetown Ad-
vocate, a kitchen, dining room and
a bar area on the ground floor, a
bathroom and two bedrooms on
the second floor and the entire
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