Mysterious Traveler

At the airport at Lydda, a chubby man in dark glasses stepped out of the plane just in from Amsterdam. An Israeli security officer approached him and asked, "Are you the traveler to Cyprus?" "Yes," replied the man, "I am." "Then follow me."

For the next 17 days, the "traveler to Cyprus" crisscrossed the state of Israel, inspecting homes, factories and collective farms, watching soldiers drill, meeting covertly with Israeli officials, educators, businessmen. Everywhere he went, he was accompanied by three shadows assigned by the Israeli government. Part of the time he called himself Erich Hamburger, at other times, Julius Bermann.

Only the Israeli government knew his real name, Erich Lueth, and that he was not a Jew at all but a German. At his own request, Lueth was visiting Israel on a labor of love: hoping to heal the wounds between his country and the new state.

Lueth, sometime journalist and poet and now aide to Socialist Mayor Brauer of Hamburg, has waged a one-man campaign to remind Germans of the enormity of the Nazi crimes against Jews, helped campaign for a restitution payment ($822 million, most of it to be paid to the Israel government), persuaded thousands of Germans to sign declarations acknowledging the onus of national guilt, and launched a campaign among schoolchildren to plant 10,000 olive trees in Israel.

Israel decided to honor him with the first visa ever granted to a non-Jewish German tourist. But when the news got out, there were mutterings from unforgiving Jewish extremists, so the Israeli government told Lueth to come incognito, if at all. and fibbed to the press that his trip had been canceled. Not until his trip was over and he was back home in Hamburg last week did the story of the "traveler to Cyprus" come out. "Israel has been defiled," cried the jingoist daily Herut, but other Israelis found the situation wryly humorous. "When the Germans have to travel incognito among Jews," said one, "then the wheel has really turned."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.