Ballad of the Small Caf

In August 1958, when 37-year-old Kurt Sumpf opened a cafe in the little town of Koeppern near Frankfurt, he performed what was in effect a silent act of faith in the "new" democratic Germany. The son of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution, Sumpf had chosen to return to Germany after spending most of his life in Israel.

But unlike Kurt Sumpf, many of Koeppern's citizens were not willing to forget the bad old days. At school, Sumpf's ten-year-old son Peter was regularly greeted with the jeering chorus: "Jew-pig, Jew-pig." One evening soon after Sumpf's arrival, a gang of toughs led by the son of a former Nazi bigwig stalked into the cafe proclaiming that Sumpf "should have been gassed 20 years ago," spent a drunken half-hour smashing beer glasses against the wall. They returned two weeks later and began to smash up the cafe furniture. Sumpf called the cops, only to have a police sergeant snarl at him: "Why don't you close your dive up?"

Indignantly, Sumpf took his troubles to court, where the prosecution called to the stand 33 witnesses. The first 32 insisted that they simply could not remember the incident. The 33rd witness was 46-year-old Max Kaufmann who ran a taxi, trucking and building-materials business in Koeppern. Kaufmann looked at Sumpf's tired face: "I decided to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God and poor Sumpf." On the basis of Kaufmann's testimony, the judge gave one of Sumpf's tormentors four months in jail, sentenced four others to punishment ranging from a $7 fine to two days in jail.

For Kurt Sumpf, who now owns a small taxi business in Frankfurt, there was a happy ending of sorts. "The authorities have helped us build a new existence," he says. "We now live peacefully in Frankfurt, and our boy attends the local school, where his teachers and classmates are very friendly." But Witness Kaufmann did not get off so easily. Neighbors no longer even nodded to him or his family. The tires on his trucks were slashed and a boycott of his building-materials business cost him so many customers that he was finally forced to close it down.

Last week, refusing to abandon the town where he had spent his whole life, Max Kaufmann was eking out a precarious living from out-of-town customers for his trucking and taxi services. Bewildered and plaintive, he wails: "I stayed out of politics. I only told the truth."

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