Tag #130823 - Interview #78461 (Stefan Guth)

In high school I became involved in a Zionist organization, Gordonia [11]. It was a left-wing social-democratic organization, but not an extremist one. My father had nothing to do with me becoming a Zionist; the truth was very simple: I played ping-pong, and Gordonia had the best ping-pong table in town. So I started to go there, and the whole gang followed me there. And we stayed there, we were very united and Gordonia started to have a very good reputation. One very important role that it played was that we made contact with young Jews from Bessarabia [12], from Cernauti, like Manin Rudich, Melitta Seiler, Erika Seiler and others. We were so united at Gordonia, we could hardly remember who was from where. This was an important role of the Zionist organization back then, in the early 1940s. And I remained a social democrat in my political convictions ever since.

At Gordonia, we had classes about Jewish writers, Jewish politicians, about the political situation every week: it was before 1948, before the state of Israel was established, that we talked about the Balfour Declaration [13]; we were well informed.