Inheritors of Memories and Dreams

We are in one the most horrible places on earth.

Here, at Birkenau, hundreds of thousands of Jews, almost one million Jews, were murdered.

Here is where I saw so many of my family, so many of my friends, for the very last time.

Here is where the smoke we saw rising to the sky was all that was left of children, women, and men who never did any harm to anyone, and who were tortured and killed by monsters.

My dear friend Hadassah Rosensaft, Menachem’s mother, said that after our liberation, we survivors were free from the fear of death, but not from the fear of life.

Today I speak not only for myself but for Hadassah, and for all my friends who were with me here at Birkenau, but who are not here anymore.

Hadassah was right. But this fear of life started for us long before the liberation.

Here in Birkenau, we were always afraid – afraid of being cold, afraid of being hungry, afraid of being beaten, afraid of being selected to die, afraid of seeing a member of our family or a friend selected to die. We all wanted desperately to live, but we knew that here tomorrow would not be better than today. We knew that the cold would continue, that the hunger would continue, that the SS and the kapos would continue to beat us. And we knew that many of the Jewish prisoners who were with us today would not be with us tomorrow.

But we also had dreams, even here in Birkenau.

We dreamed of our homes, of our parents, of our brothers and sisters. I dreamed about the life I had before the Germans came to Będzin and destroyed that life. I dreamed about the ghetto which seemed so bad, but was so much better than the hell of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

These dreams kept us human. They reminded us that we were better than those who wanted to kill us.

And each one of us also dreamed that the nightmare would end, and that we would be allowed to live again.

We dreamed that we would one day have homes again, and families, and nice clothes, and good food. Those dreams gave us a little hope.

I am here today with my daughter and my grandsons. I dreamed of you, that I would one day have you.

And I want to say to all the children and grandchildren of survivors here today: we all dreamed of you. We did not really believe that our hell would ever end, but we dreamed that it would, and that we would have you.

Here at Birkenau, I give you our memories and our dreams. They are your inheritance. Use them to fight against hatred, against injustice, and to prevent other genocides.

And never forget whose children and grandchildren you are.

Esther Peterseil, survivor or Auschwitz/Birkenau – August 2018.

 

I read these moving words that were quoted in an article published in Tablet by Menachem Rosensaft, the general counsel for the World Jewish Congress and a professor of law at Columbia and Cornell Law Schools.  I was privileged to meet Mr. Rosensaft two days ago in New York.

Mr. Rosensaft was born in Bergen Belsen, not when it was a concentration camp, but after the war, when it was transformed to a Displaced Person’s Camp in the British Zone of Germany.   Together with his parents, he moved from Bergen Belson to Switzerland and then, six years later, to the United States.  He is a Holocaust scholar, writer and teacher.  His work with the World Jewish Congress brings him in contact with the struggles and achievements of Jews all over the world.

His parents were from a region in Poland called Zaglembie (in Polish, Zagłębie), which had a Jewish population of 100,000 Jews in 1939.  In July of 2018, Mr. Rosensaft helped to organize and traveled with a group of survivors, children and grandchildren of survivors from the Zaglembie region of Poland.  

“During the course of the trip,” he writes, “we talked, cried together, sang together, sometimes even laughed together. We learned about one another, and discovered that we wanted to know more, about our families, about where we came from, and about one another. Being in Zaglembie made the past, our past, seem more real.”

There are those that believe Jews should not return to Poland.   But a return such as the one taken by Mr. Rosensaft, Ms. Peterseil and the other descendants from Zaglembie, enriched their lives with the music of the past and whispered secrets as they walked the streets of their childhood or the towns of their parents and grandparents.

I sense the power of that moment.  I felt it myself – as I stood in Bagatele in June of 2016, watching my four children stride towards their grandfather’s farm.  I too discovered that I wanted to know more as I felt the past push its way to the present and conflate time and space.  I felt that the Goldberg family ghosts were there.  They may have spoken the words intoned two years later by Esther Peterseil at Birkenau:

“I give you our memories and our dreams. They are your inheritance.”

Jack, Elisheva, Esther and Shoshana Goldberg walking down the street of Bagatele.

Auschwitz, Not Long Ago, Not Far Away

“What do you think they sell at the gift shop at Auschwitz?” asked a senior from the Northwest Yeshiva High School who was sitting at our Shabbat table the week before going to Poland on the March for the Living.

“Shoes,” Shlomo responded.

With this response, Shlomo erupted in bursts of laughter while the students around the table stared dumbfounded – not knowing exactly how to respond to this Holocaust joke.

This moment flooded back to my mind as I stood in one of the first rooms of the special exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York called Auschwitz, Not Long Ago, Not Far Away.  In contrast to the exhibit at Auschwitz in Poland which has thousands of shoes jumbled in a heap, this exhibit displays one simple red shoe enclosed in a museum case, like a crowned jewel.  Behind the shoe is a photo of the shoes at the Auschwitz Museum.

On the wall nearby, they have an excerpt of a poem titled I Saw a Mountain, by Moshe Schulstein (1974):

We are the shoes,

we are the last witnesses.

We are the shoes

from the grandchildren

and grandfathers,

From Prague, Paris

and Amsterdam,

And because we are only

made of fabric and leather

And not of blood and flesh,

Each one of us avoided

the hellfire.

If you are in New York, I highly recommend visiting the exhibit.   Its artifacts, testimony and historical photos and video will take you on a journey through this dark history.   The visitor slowly wends their way through the early history of Nazi Germany, to the beginning of the war on September 1, 1939, the attack on the Soviet Union in June of 1941, to the mass murder by bullets in eastern Poland and the lands of the Soviet Union, to murder by gas.  The focus, of course, is on Auschwitz, but Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek, and Chelmno got honorable mention.

I learned a few new things.  For example, I thought that the plan to send all the Jews to the French colony of Madagascar (an African Island), came about in 1940 after Germany conquered France and thus controlled the island.  But I learned that this terrific idea originated in 1885!  A German nationalist Paul de Lagarde suggested that all eastern European Jews be shipped to Madagascar.

After Germany attacked the Soviet Union, it is well known that they took millions of Soviet soldiers as prisoners.  Sam was one of them – captured in June of 1941 after the initial attack.   Sam described his short stay in the POW camp in Zembrow as one where they lay on the ground to sleep, were fed very little food and had only small amounts of water to drink.  This inhumane treatment of captured Soviet soldiers was repeated in POW camps throughout eastern Poland and the Soviet Union.  The exhibit has this photo of Soviet soldiers in a German POW camp – gives a visual to the imagined horrific situation.

At the end of the war, the Germans destroyed much of Auschwitz/Birkenau, especially the gas chambers and the crematoria.   However, in the ruins of the Crematorium 2, a shower head used to gas the victims was found.  It is chillingly on display.

Another artifact that nearly brought me to tears is this Tzitzit – tallit kattan – that was hidden by an Auschwitz inmate and made it out of the camp.  It is here to testify to the resilience of the Jewish people.

Finally, I will share that the location of the Museum is purposeful.   As you look out the window, you see New York Harbor and Lady Liberty.  It was this statue that welcomed many of the survivors of the Holocaust, including Sam, Esther and Faiga Goldberg on May 28, 1949.

In 5 days – May 28, 2019 – it will be the 70^th anniversary of the Goldberg family’s arrival in America.  Happy Anniversary!

Johan van Hulst, Savior of 600 Jewish Children Dies at 107

“The choices we make matter.”

This is a mantra I have been intoning as I make presentations about My Soul is Filled with Joy: A Holocaust Story.

Check out this story of how choices matter.

In the summer of 1943, Johan van Hulst, a non-Jew, smuggled 600 Jewish children out of Amsterdam to safety – saving them from death.  Mr. van Hulst recently died – on March 22 — in Amsterdam at the age of 107.

These children, ages infants to 12 years old, had been taken from their parents at the deportation center (parents went to Auschwitz and other concentration camps).  The children were brought to a nursery in Amsterdam.  That nursery was just next door to a teacher’s college where Mr. van Hulst was the principal.  Mr. van Hulst learned of the situation of the Jewish children and he constructed a plan to smuggle the children out of town.  The children were passed through the hedge between the buildings and hidden in classrooms until they could be transferred to the countryside.   They were orphans, but they survived the war in the countryside.

“We had to make a choice,” Mr. van Hulst told the Dutch broadcaster last year, “and one of the most horrible things was to make a choice.”  (He meant choosing which children to save – he could not save them all.)

But make a choice he did – he chose to help, to save, to put his own life at risk – to save these Dutch Jewish children.  Emile Schrijver, general director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam, flipped the idea of choice as stated by Mr. van Hulst and said that Mr. van Hulst had demonstrated that “we all have a choice to do the right thing at any time; even in times of enormous trouble; he used the power of disruption; disruption of an evil system and of the arrogance it entailed.”

The deportation center — a former theater — was managed by Walter Süskind, a German refugee.  He made the childrens’ names “disappear” from the deportation lists.

In 1972 Mr. van Hulst was named one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a designation for non-Jews who rescued Jews granted by Yad Vashem. He is one of 5,595 Dutch people given the honor.

The choices van Hulst made had a huge impact – let’s allow his choice to affect us – how do we make choices?   Please remember, our choices matter too.

Reference:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/obituaries/johan-van-hulst-who-helped-save-600-children-from-the-nazis-dies-at-107.html?fbclid=IwAR08lApXKwPsoktkbwa4H2AHEJ3YR5Pcfey3sMFqxI9oKqGxOYGLpR1_Szg

Yom HaShoah – A Day to Reflect Guest Writer – Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

 

I thought all week about what to post for Yom Hashoah, which begins this evening and takes us into Thursday.   But then I received in my in-box the thoughts shared by Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, the Rabbi of Seattle’s Kavana community, with whom I have the honor of commemoration this evening.   Rabbi Nussbaum articulated many of my own thoughts and feelings – here are Rabbi Nussbaum’s meaningful words.

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Sometimes it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the time scale of Jewish history. A week and a half ago, we recalled the Exodus from Egypt, an event that took place some 3500 years ago, while sitting around Seder tables much like our rabbinic ancestors might have done 2000 years ago.  Our Jewish tradition connects us to the ancient past, and that is part of the great power of it.

Tonight, we mark Yom HaShoah and commemorate the Holocaust. This event took place a scant 75 years ago… truly, the blink of an eye, viewed against the backdrop of the Jewish timeline. While in many ways, the experience of the Jews in Europe during World War II may feel remote to our experience of contemporary Jewish life in America, the Holocaust is much closer to us than we might like to imagine. Even in a community like Kavana — where we have poured everything into forging “positive Jewish identity” (meaning, an engaged Jewish life rooted more in joy and meaning than in fear or guilt) — we continue to live in its shadow, demographically, sociologically, and even theologically. But, especially in a week when violence against Jews has come so close to our doorstep (in Poway, California), 75 years feels like no buffer at all.

Think about this for a minute: We are the last generation to have a direct historical link to this dark chapter. We will be the last ones in the scope of Jewish history to say that we knew survivors, or that we have heard first-hand accounts of the horrors of Nazi Europe. It is our sacred obligation to listen, to remember, and to assimilate the stories of our people into our being. It is our duty to preserve and reinvigorate Jewish life for our generation, in fulfillment of what Emil Fackenheim termed the 614th commandment, “not to grant Hitler a posthumous victory.” It is on us to give the words “Never Again” meaning, as we determine that we will not tolerate antisemitism as it continues to rear its ugly head, nor will we allow the hatred and violence that were poured on our people to be directed towards any other group.

I hope that many of you will join us tonight, to hear local author (and friend-of-Kavana) Karen Treiger share from the award-winning book she has written about her inlaws’ story of survival. If not, find another way to observe and remember this day. Light a yahrtzeit candle that will burn for the next 24 hours in your home. Read a Holocaust book or an article, or watch a film or on-line testimonials… even if the content is sad and you would rather look away. Initiate an important (if challenging) conversation with a child, or with a parent. Purchase tickets to see The Diary of Anne Frank at the Seattle Children’s Theater (a small Kavana group will be attending the 3:30pm performance on Sunday 5/12 and all are welcome), or make plans to visit the Holocaust Center for Humanity this month.  

May the memories of those who perished in the Shoah and the legacies of those who survived be a source of blessing and inspiration for us. May we find the courage to remember and observe Yom HaShoah, and to live boldly in the shadow of the Holocaust, as we continue to find our place in the scope of Jewish history.

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum