Who hasn't heard of hard-working businessmen and entrepreneurs who receive awards for excellence and get rich selling food products at relatively low prices? We've heard that they even sell used cars, vegetables from the territories, meat from Eastern Europe, and recently, cheap flights.
How can you turn a fairly small airline into a very large one, without buying more planes?
They rent planes from foreign companies.
If we assume I rent a cheap car and use it as a taxi, that would be a great method that would exempt me from having to buy a car, maintain it, pay taxes, insure it, and have it tested annually. What is not allowed in cars is apparently allowed in airplanes.
I left the country on a "Yashratos" flight to Berlin. The plane, the pilots, and the flight attendants were Romanians. The flight was pleasant. There was no alcohol on the flight and no duty-free (so that the passengers wouldn't demand chocolates, as is customary with "rich" families).
After delays at Ben Gurion Airport, in the luxurious and crowded Terminal 3, we set off about an hour and a half after the time listed on the boarding pass.
The thin Romanian flight attendants passed among the passengers, speaking excellent Romanian and good English, and in Hebrew they only knew one word – Ashpa-Ashpa, which I didn't understand their meaning until I saw them collecting the paper cups and snack wrappers from the passengers.
At Berlin Airport – BER, the landing was a “boom trach.” It was necessary to walk hundreds of meters through the corridors of the airport, decorated in a retro style with walls covered in Scandinavian wood.
Passport checks are a bit complicated. You have to stand in front of identification machines, similar to McDonald's order stations, put down your passport and put your hand in a black slot in the machine. (It is possible that if you are not allowed to enter Europe, your hand will be held in the machine until the police arrive.)
In retrospect, it turned out that inside this pit was a so-called fingerprint camera. We approached the officer in charge, and he took another photo of the fingers, but only 4 of them. I thought they only did something like that for carpenters who had a work accident…
Berlin welcomed us warmly. A modern, luxurious train took us to the city center with two changes for half an hour. At the stations, you could tell from the giant advertisements what was on the city's mind these days: the upcoming regional elections.
Alongside them appeared new instructions on how to use the toilets, "Do not pour fats and oils down the toilet, in order to maintain the purity of our water." I wondered if they recycle the wastewater into drinking water? Without a doubt. High-tech in Germany is very developed, then.
I went into the nearest supermarket and discovered that most products are sold at half the price compared to Israel. It's better for the economic commentators on TV not to confuse people by saying that Israel is only 17% more expensive. And I have many examples of this.
On the main streets, you can see small stands manned by old and young activists, who recommend voting for a particular party. I came across an ad for the left – Die Linke. They have a leader with a stern look, but a mouth full of smiles. I asked the activists: “If you are left-wing and your ads are red, are you simply communists?” The older Heike replied: “We are communists and not communists.” “So when will you decide what you are?” He replied: “Our leader will decide when she is elected, and then Germany will be great.” “And what do the polls predict for you?” He replied: 20%. And what is your position on the Jews?” The answer was: “We have no position.”
Speaking of no position on Jews, when I walk the streets of Berlin, I occasionally come across "stumbling blocks" on the sidewalks. These are brass cubes embedded in the sidewalks near houses where Jews lived in Berlin before World War II. Each such stumbling block is inscribed with the name of the Jewish resident, the place and date of his birth, and the place where he perished. The Jewish point cannot be ignored.
And something optimistic to end with, I read in a book that there were Jews who served in Hitler's army without the Nazis recognizing them. During the war, the Nazis published a poster with a photograph of an Aryan German soldier, who served as an example of the ideal soldier. You won't believe it, the soldier in the photograph was Jewish!
PS: The Left Party won more than 25% in the local elections, and some say that mayoral candidate Elif Erlap, who is of Turkish origin, could be Berlin's "democracy."
Goldberg's father was Jewish, but his mother was Aryan, and therefore the blond, blue-eyed Goldberg was also considered an Aryan by the Nazi authorities (until 1940), and was drafted, like other young men of mixed ethnicity, into the army.
Lovely article.
Perhaps the soldier who was recruited for Hitler thus saved himself from a cruel end.
His name is Werner Goldberg.