When I flew back to Berlin this summer, I overheard a conversation between two girls from Tel Aviv. One, who had never been here before, was asking the other — a resident — if she ever felt unsafe wearing her Star of David necklace in the city. Naively perhaps, the question surprised me. But not as much as the answer — which was a depressing shade of grey.
I thought about those girls last week when I read an almost throwaway line about how Berlin has one of fastest-growing Jewish communities anywhere. That, in turn, stood in contrast to a recent report by the Körber Foundation that revealed just four in 10 German students between the ages of 14 and 16 know that Auschwitz was a Nazi concentration camp. Read on… or listen…