A poster announced that the following Friday there would be a joint synagogue service in which a rabbi, a priest, and a minister would participate. This would be the first joint Jewish-Christian service in a Berlin synagogue in recent history.

We left the Center and walked around the city. I felt as if I had stepped back in time to the '20s and '30s. The streets seemed so much like the Berlin of the past about which my parents had spoken.

Both West and East Berlin were a curious commingling of past and present for me. One day in East Berlin, as I was crossing the street, I saw two uniformed Gestapo men coming to get me. I cringed, until I realized they were just two East Berlin policemen crossing the street.

Despite such experiences, I loved being in Berlin—walking along streets on which my parents had walked and seeing street names that had resounded through my childhood: Alexanderplatz, Kottbusser Damm, Koepenicker Strasse, Gipsstrasse, and Unter den Linden.

A friend in the States had recommended a West Berlin restaurant named Xantener Eck. We went there one night for dinner. In Germany, if there is no empty table, the maître d' seats you at one that is partially occupied. On this night, we were seated with two men in their early forties who, we later learned, were printers. As we poured over the menus, one of them recommended several entrees to us in halting English. Between his English and my German, we were able to converse. When he learned I was Jewish, he immediately said, "I feel no guilt. I was born in 1937." He then embarked upon a tirade against Jews and Israel and referred to the head of the Jewish Center we had just visited as a Fascist.

"Why does he have to be a Jew first and a German second?" he asked. "If I were a member of a proud people like the Jews, I would not take money from Germany, as Israel has done, as individual Jews have done, and as the Center continues to do. All people are equal: Jews and Christians, whites and Blacks, Israelis and Arabs. Why does the Jew think he's better than everyone else?"

I shifted uneasily in my seat.

"And look what they've done to the Arabs in Israel," he continued. "Two thousand years ago, Celts lived on the land where my house stands today. Their descendants now live in France. They don't come back here and say they have a right to my house. What gives Jews the right to do this?"

His companion had paradoxical views. On the one hand, he seemed to share his friend's sentiments, if not his vehemence. But he also asked me whether I had any special feelings as a Jew returning to Germany. When I told him I had, he said, "You know, my father was involved during the Nazi regime. I have to live with that."

We spent several hours at dinner, during which we shared drinks and reminiscences with these men. When we left, we exchanged business cards, and they promised to visit if they ever came to the States. One of them came close to hugging me when we parted.

I was in a state of utter depression as we walked the foggy streets of West Berlin after this encounter. "Those men really liked me, Roberto," I said. "And yet it wouldn't take too much for them to come for me again." The discussion in the restaurant brought home to me the fact that what had happened in Berlin was still there in some of its people.

A day or two later I had the oppportunity of sharing that experience with a law professor and his feminist wife while having breakfast in their home. The professor said that he resented the burden of guilt that had been laid on Germans, but his wife did not echo his sentiments. His students did not like being reminded of this guilt, he said. They did not want to be made to feel responsible for events that took place before they were born.

The next day, we visited the Center again, this time for a meeting with the assistant to the director. I asked him about the conflict between some Germans' desire to forget and the Center's commitment to remind them.

"Do they want to get rid of the past," he asked, "or do they want to continue it?

It is in the interest of Germany not to forget. This has nothing to do with guilt or responsibility. Germany must cleanse itself of these things. It must be different in the future from what it was in the past. How can this be done without history, without knowing why it happened and how it happened?"

"How long will it take?" I asked. "After all, this happened forty years ago."

"Forty years is not a long time in the history of mankind," he reminded me.

We rented a car and spent days looking for the addresses Hermann had given me, in both East and West Berlin. I knew that the city had been reduced to rubble during the war and that I might not be able to locate any of the streets I was looking for, much less the buildings. But that was not the case. We found all the addresses. With one exception, the buildings had all been demolished and rebuilt. The exception was the apartment house where I was born at 83-A Linienstrasse in East Berlin. It was still standing, unbombed, intact. There were lights on in some of the apartments. I went inside and knocked on a door at random. The door opened and a woman came out.

"Is there anyone here who might remember a family named Pressman that used to live here in 1928?" I asked.

"No," she answered. She told me that the oldest resident had moved into the building in 1947. There was no one to remember us.

A friend in the States had put me in contact with a German friend who had been living in Berlin for many years. I went to visit her, and we had a wonderful time together. We talked, as women do, about our lives, our husbands, our hopes for our children. When I left we hugged, but a strange thought crossed my mind: She wouldn't have done it to me, would she? And then I thought, Why not? Why would I have been the exception?

We left Berlin and spent the rest of our trip driving through the German countryside and to the other cities where I lectured: Dusseldorf, Heidelberg, Freiburg, and Munich. I looked at the people and wondered what had happened to them. They looked just like anyone else. What madness had seized their ancestors?

Copyright 1999

"Return to Germany" was first published earlier this year in iAgora, http://www.iagora.com.

This article is an excerpt from Ms. Fuentes' memoirs, Eat First--You Don't Know What They'll Give You, The Adventures of an Immigrant Family and Their Feminist Daughter , which will be published in paperback in December 1999. Eat First may be ordered after publication from Xlibris by contacting orders@xlibris.com, amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble and Borders book stores.

Ms. Fuentes, who lives in Potomac, Maryland, and winters in Sarasota, Florida, was born in Berlin, Germany, and came to the US as a child with her family. She was the first woman attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a founder of NOW. Ms. Fuentes, who gives talks on the women's movement and does memoirs-readings for a fee plus expenses, may be reached at sfuentes@erols.com.