As a person who finds it difficult to sit still, I like nothing better than to travel. The road is in my very blood. My father taught me to drive when I was 12. By the time I was 23, I had driven through all 48 of the contiguous United States and, by boat, had toured Hawaii as well.

I can think of very few places that I would not love to visit before I die.

Unfair as I know it is, Germany is the only one which immediately comes to mind.

I have a generous list of places I yearn to tour, sites of rapture, repositories of culture, fine art and architecture, treasure troves of natural splendor, countries where a great time is guaranteed, nations justly renowned for food, music and hospitality.

Germany is, without question, all of these. By any measure, it deserves to be right there on the agenda. But I can't do it. I can't seem to add Germany to the list.

The reason, I have come to believe, is racism.

My racism.

My heart goes out to the people of Germany. The vast majority were born well after Adolf Hitler killed himself 62 years ago next week. Yet they still must contend with, seek to make sense of, or strive to ignore, the crimes that the Nazi regime committed in the name of the German people. Part of this is only natural, in view of the enormity of the crimes. But another part of this is because of people like me.

There is no rational reason for me to want to avoid Germany.

I have had the true pleasure of getting to know many Germans who have visited and worked here in Israel. I found them to be lovely people, people of humor and intellect and sensitivity, of ethics and good-heartedness. They're no different from anyone else.

Yet, somewhere very deep inside, I still blame their country for what happened to my people. And if I blame their country, I blame them too.

The perceptive will note that in trying not to forget, I have managed not to forgive. Moreover, I don't believe that I am alone in this.

All those years ago, when I was learning to drive, there were adults who insisted that they would never buy a German car, never use a German camera, never fly Lufthansa. "The Volkswagen was Hitler's baby," they would tell me. "Mercedes? The fuhrer rode them in parades. Porsche? Ferdinand Porsche designed the Beetle."

Some of them were Holocaust survivors. Others were American Jews who felt a certain guilt over Roosevelt's failure to stop the Nazi extermination machine in time. I understood their boycotts.

But I don't really understand mine.

In the years since the war, Germany has been of tremendous aid to Israel. It has been an ally diplomatically, and Germany has also tried its best to ease the financial burdens of survivors.

I know all this, and yet my suspicion of Germany, my inability to reconcile, remain. They surfaced this week, when I went to see Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), the Oscar-winning German film, which suggested to me that in some respects the East German regime, formally the antithesis of Nazism, was in fact its direct heir.

Is there something cultural about Germany that allowed Nazism to construct a genocide apparatus of unrivaled efficacy? Perhaps. But that is a question for Germans to address.

As for me, I have to learn that Never Again does not mean never forgive. It does not mean that the war against the Nazis is still going on. I have to learn that my anger, let's call it what it is, my anti-German racism, is energy selfishly wasted, energy that could be mobilized to fight the actual evils of this day; unchecked genocide in Africa, runaway war in Iraq and runaway war right here.

My heart goes out to the German people. May I someday find a way to learn the lessons they have to teach.