Finally, a Thaw at the ‘White Lake’ : Berlin: The wall’s opening is as large and as small a matter as being able to visit a grandfather’s grave.

I never knew my grandfather. He died in 1922, when my mother was 15 years old.

But the past week’s events in Germany have given me, from as far away as New York, a new sense of freedom. For the first time since I left Germany with my parents in 1936, a refugee from the Third Reich, I can visit my grandfather’s grave without a hassle, without the long wait at the East Berlin border, without the indignity of intense questioning as to why I wanted to spend a few hours in East Berlin.

It is ironic that the postwar partition left Weissensee, the landmark Jewish cemetery, in East Berlin, which today has a Jewish community of only 200 or so. In West Berlin, the Jewish community is a thriving 6,000.

Even before the wall was put up, it was difficult for Westerners to get into the east zone to visit Weissensee, althought for some years now, rabbis and cantors from the West have been allowed to travel with mourners through Checkpoint Charlie and on to the cemetery.

From 1880 until the Nazi persecution, Weissensee was the final resting place of Jews from all of Berlin. My grandfather, Sally Bacharach, lies in grave 62456, field B IV, row 15. Like so many of those resting nearby, he was, in a sense, fortunate. He didn’t have to suffer under Hitler. He knew nothing of the Great Depression, the Cold War, nuclear war.

Today, Weissensee--”White Lake”--is a serene place, a monument to nearly a century of German Jewry’s history. I have been back to Berlin half a dozen times. I have never failed to visit the cemetery, to clean the ivy growth off the gravestone whose lettering has been greatly but not entirely eroded by nearly 70 years of summers and winters, storms and winds and political change.

My great-grandparents, Heymann and Emelie Nathan, are also buried there, but the exact location of their graves has eluded me. They are in a section of Weissensee damaged during the intensive bombing of Berlin by American planes near the war’s end. It is now covered by underbrush.

A visit to Weissensee, about a 10-minute car ride into East Berlin, is a sad lesson in the history of modern German Jewry. Here lie many who died when royalty ruled. Others are in a field of honor that contains graves of the Jewish soldiers who gave their lives for Germany in World War I. (My father, Arthur Dzialoszynski, was wounded in combat and awarded the Iron Cross. His brother, Salo, did not survive his wounds; he died on his 28th birthday, while en route home for medical treatment.) Twenty years later, the relatives of the honored dead were being rounded up, to end their lives in places like Dachau and Auschwitz. As late as 1936, four years into the Hitler regime, German-Jewish veterans still commemorated their military service with ceremonies at Weissensee.

Now the veterans, too, are only a memory, but evidence of the evil days abounds. Sigmund Deutsch and his wife Martha, for example, are buried together. They died on the same day, Oct. 22, 1942. They had committed suicide, unable to carry on. They are only two of the 811 Jews who took their own lives that year as an alternative to being hauled off to concentration camps. There is the single monument in memory of Mendel Wachsmann, born May 21, 1886, murdered Feb. 4, 1941, at Sachenhausen; Georg Wachsmann, born April 27, 1918, killed May 27, 1942, and Leo Wachsmann, born Feb. 11, 1923, died in Auschwitz sometime in 1943. A father and his two sons, the whereabouts of their real graves unknown.

Here, too, lie those who died when the century was new and full of promise. Their remains are marked by simple headstones and ostentatious mausoleums. There is one row of Berlin’s rabbis. Another contains the most prominent Jewish physicians, among them Abraham Adolf Baer, Adolf Baginsky, Albert Fraenkel. Theodore Wolff, the editor of the Berliner Tagesblatt, and jurist Eugen Fuchs are buried here.

As events unfold now, one thing is clear: Weissensee cemetery belongs to all of Berlin once again. And my grandfather is a bit closer.

The wall is gone.