The Tail of the Lion
Memoirs of Rafael Teitelbaum
Table of Contents
My
Experiences in the Nazi Concentration Camps
My
Life In Israel: From Farmer to Soldier
to Urban Dweller
Adjusting
to American Life and Raising a Family.
From
the Carpathian Mountains to the Rocky Mountains
I
have written these memoirs at the request of friends who have told me that my
life experiences are unique and that the beliefs I have developed from these
experiences should be shared. Like most
Holocaust survivors, I have seen the ultimate in human brutality. I have also been fortunate enough to witness
great human kindness.
As a young man
of twenty-one, recently liberated from the Ebensee concentration camp, I was
faced with many changes. I had been groomed
to be a Hasidic rabbi, but most of my community had been killed. I needed to find courage to accept what had
happened and to do what was necessary to prepare myself for a different life. My circumstances compelled me to give much
thought to my beliefs, values, and Hasidic traditions. I realized that the old ways would not fit
more modern times. Yet, all I knew were
the old ways. How could I change myself
and live a good, productive life with self-respect? This has been my struggle and my quest.
Although I
have not accumulated much material wealth nor have I earned university degrees,
I do have peace of mind and many good friends.
As I look back on my life, I feel content. I sincerely hope that by reading my memoirs,
people will find something of value to help them through difficult times.
In the 1920’s my hometown
of Tasnad in Transylvania, Hungary was surrounded by lush vineyards, abundant
fruit trees, and tall wheat fields. The
town’s population numbered about five thousand, and the town center included
City Hall and the public school. The Hasidic synagogue, where my father led
services, stood nearby.[1]
A variety of stores lined Main Street, which began at the town center, ran east
and ascended a hill on top of which was the larger, non-Hasidic synagogue. Our house was on a street which also began at
the town center, but ran west, away from the hill. People from diverse backgrounds lived in the
residential section of town; Hasidic and non-Hasidic Jews and Christians were
all neighbors. The majority of us who
lived there in 1923 spoke Hungarian, although the legal language was Romanian.[2]
It was here that my values were formed and here that my heart was infused with
the desire to live life to its fullest.
A private citizen who
owned the flour mill and oil press provided Tasnad with electricity from 5:30
a.m. until 1 a.m. We youngsters
sometimes stared at the big, powerful wheels and listened in awe to the drones
of the generators.
Travel was by donkey,
buffalo, oxcart or horse and buggy over dirt roads, dusty in summer and muddy –sometimes completely
unpassable -- in winter. Some people walked to the train station a
mile outside of town at a lower elevation, where they boarded the train to
Szatmar. A few wealthy residents owned
automobiles.
Communication was
primarily by word of mouth. Tasnad prided itself on having a weekly newspaper,
but only about half of its adult residents were literate, so the paper’s
circulation was small. However, literacy
began to rise in the 1920’s with the advent of compulsory education for
children.
The Tasnad area produced
bread for Germany. The town boasted
excellent soil from which farmers grew wheat and fruit. They also produced wine and raised poultry
and beef. Because for centuries the laws
had forbidden Jews to own farmland or to farm, we traditionally served as
merchants and professionals in town: watchmakers, letter writers, accountants,
dentists, doctors and lawyers. Most of
the merchants and professionals lived comfortably and were envied by the less
fortunate.
My family was descended
from a line of famous Hasidic rabbis: Rabbi Sighet, Rabbi Sanz, and Rabbi
Munkatch. My parents, the Hasidic rabbi
and rebbitsin of Tasnad, were cousins.
My father’s father, Shlomo, and my mother’s mother, Rosa, were brother
and sister. My father came from
Poland. All his family, except for one
sister who lived near Tasnad, still lived in Poland. My mother, her seven brothers, and one sister
all lived in Romania or Hungary.
I was the third of eight children, born
November 4, 1923. I had two older
sisters. Rachel, the oldest, was smart,
ambitious, and very responsible; she helped Mother take care of the younger
children. Next came Pesil, who was kind
and sweet, but a little slow. After me
came my sister, Handil, who was very beautiful and smart and also had a
pleasant disposition. After Handil came
Bile who was quiet, intense, and a deep thinker.
My only brother, Moses Leib, a handsome redhead, was born next, then
two more sisters, Hannah and Brach Sima.
I last saw Hannah and Brach Sima when they were six and four years
old. It is painful to realize that I
hardly remember them, because they, along with the rest of my immediate family,
were all murdered by the Nazis.
About 150 Jewish
families lived in the vicinity --- about 100 non-Hasidic families and about 50
families who clung to the Hasidic tradition.
Unlike larger cities, Tasnad had no division of Jews into orthodox,
conservative, or reformed sects. All
Jews, except for Hasidic Jews, worshipped at the main synagogue led by the
chief rabbi of the region. Members of
the main synagogue ranged widely in the extent of their religious practices,
but the majority were not very observant.
They belonged to the synagogue because it was the only social group to
which they could belong. All other
groups excluded Jews.
Hasidic Judaism does not
differ from orthodox Judaism in basic beliefs, but in expression of the
faith. Hasidic Jews pray and worship in
a more animated way. For example, in a
Hasidic synagogue people sing, clap, and dance to religious hymns, whereas in
an orthodox synagogue worshippers chant quietly and the entire atmosphere is
more subdued. Hasidic Jews believe it is
important to express joy; cheerfulness and hope
are viewed as essential
components of life. We also place
greater emphasis on dedicated Torah study, which is a source of moral strength.
Our Hasidic community
in Tasnad held fast to rituals and traditional Jewish customs. A small group of men would rise before 4 a.m
and immerse themselves in the ritual bath, the mikvah. This bath, originated for cleanliness at a
time when people had no baths or showers in their homes, was required of all
men daily and all married women after their menstrual periods. The bath usually consisted of a large tub or
pool filled with well water or accumulated rain water. In the winter the water felt like ice because
it was too expensive to heat the water.
After the mikvah, the men studied the Torah until sunrise; then they
prayed together with the rest of the community.
After this they left for work.
After sundown they returned to the synagogue to pray and study the Torah
with the whole community for about half an hour.
A traditional Hasidic
man wears a pair of long pants and a long, sleeveless shirt with fringes on the
four bottom corners. Over the fringed
shirt he wears a jacket. He also wears a
black hat, similar to the type of hat worn by the Amish in the United
States. A hatless man is considered to
have no fear of or respect for God. The
traditional Hasidic woman wears a long dress with long sleeves. She covers her legs with thick socks. In an earlier time, women’s socks didn’t have
to be thick. The story goes that one day
a man complained that some women’s socks were transparent (and therefore too
revealing). Since then, thick socks have
been required. Also, once a Hasidic
woman marries (usually very young at 14 to 17 years old), she shaves her head
and wears a kerchief at all times. This
practice originated because in Eastern Europe, Jewish women had often been
raped, with impunity, by Gentiles. It
was thought that a woman would be less desirable to a would-be attacker if she
were bald.[3]
The chief rabbi of the
area, who held his position before my father was recruited by the Hasidic
families to come to Tasnad, felt insecure and threatened by us. Despite the fact that he was popular with his
congregation, he tried to prevent my father from becoming more influential with
the non-Hasidic Jews. His actions were
hypocritical and actually violated Jewish ethics. His behavior directly affected me, because it
caused my family to live in poverty.
All the Jews in the region paid dues to the community for religious
expenses. The Hasidic Jews were a
minority within a minority. The dues
they paid to the community were supposed to pay my father’s salary, but the
chief rabbi kept these funds. I did not
know it as a child, but I later heard that the chief rabbi’s unethical behavior
extended even further. He had put his
son-in-law, who had no rabbinical duties, on the synagogue payroll instead of
my father.
Despite the efforts of
the Hasidic community to raise another salary for my father, it was barely
enough to feed and clothe our family.
Many times my father sent me to the treasurer of our synagogue to ask
for an advance from next month’s salary.
The treasurer’s sarcastic remarks humiliated me. I vowed to myself that when I grew up I would
not be a rabbi, because there were too many rabbis and too few communities to
support them. I liked manual labor and
considered doing that to earn a living.
When I reflect on my
father’s precarious financial situation combined with his tireless work for the
community, I feel sad. He had unquestioningly
followed tradition and was a victim of his background. Coming from a family of rabbis, he had no
choice but to be a rabbi. This was the
only training he could receive from his family, and the community would reject
the idea of a rabbi’s son assuming any other role. I realize now that had other occupations been
open to him, my father would have been a diligent and able provider for his
family. He did the best he could in his
circumstances and served God and his community to the best of his ability.
In a small town such as
Tasnad the rabbi functioned in many capacities and his work was never
done. My father led the prayer at
services, sang the prayer melodies with great emotion in his voice, taught
classes on the interpretation of the Torah, counseled married couples, resolved
disputes, and even advised people which doctor was best to see for a particular
malady.
One of my father’s
followers, Isaac Frankel, who owned a lumber yard, had been instrumental in
persuading my father to take the position as spiritual leader of the fifty
families in the area. Mr. Frankel was a
very kind and generous man who used to invite all the poor people who came to
town to his home. He would give them
food and a place to sleep. On Sabbath
evenings he sometimes fed forty people!
Mr. Frankel enthusiastically supported my father and had a house built
for our family.
The house was small and cozy.
There were four rooms. Consistent
with modest European homes of the time, there were no hallways; each room had a
door which would open to the adjoining room. At the back of the house was the
kitchen, which opened up to my sisters’ bedroom, which adjoined the main
room. In the main room we dined,
studied, and Father met with his followers.
I also slept in the main room at night.
My bed was tucked into a corner of the room. The main room adjoined my parents’ bedroom,
and I recall once hearing my mother’s cries during the birth of a younger
sibling. Outside were the well and the
outhouse.
In the kitchen there
stood a massive, cast iron stove in which we burned wood. There were two round holes on the top surface
where pots or pans could be placed for cooking.
Because there was no refrigeration in those days, all meals had to be
prepared just before they were eaten. I
fondly recall going to the kitchen with my sisters for a snack. Laughing and teasing each other, we would
dash into the kitchen and eagerly slice pieces of potato. Then we would crowd around the stove to toast
them and argue over who would get to toast his or her potato slice first.
The kitchen also served
as a laundry room. Mother placed dirty
laundry in a huge pot of boiling water on the stove. Then she used a washboard which she placed
over a basin on the kitchen floor.
Washing clothes by hand is a very long and arduous task, especially for
a family with eight children. We
children knew not to disturb Mother on laundry days, lest she lose her patience
with us.
An exciting event
occurred in 1926, just before my third birthday. Workers came to our house to wire it for
electricity. The overhead lights, which
had consisted of a simple round candleholder for a few candles, became a holder
for electric light bulbs. I recall when
the workers tested the lights, the room radiated. I was awed by its beauty. Years later, a Gentile girl from the
country, hired as a part-time housekeeper, arrived on Saturday morning to turn
out the lights. (Jewish law prohibits
Jews from working on the Sabbath, which includes creating or extinguishing a
fire or light.) Because she knew nothing
about electricity, she climbed onto a chair and tried to blow out the light
bulbs.
When I was five or six
years old, I wanted to catch and keep a pigeon as a pet. I constructed a trap using a wooden box, a
wooden stick, and some string attached to the stick. I did catch a pigeon in our front yard, and
Father let me keep it in a wooden cage on the bottom shelf of the wall-to-wall
bookcase in the main room. After a few
days, I had to let the pigeon go because it made a mess on the bookcase.
In 1929 tension began to
rise between Jews and Gentiles because of the Depression and the seeming
disparity of economic circumstances between them. Perhaps because I sensed this tension, I
began to suffer from nightmares and often woke up in the middle of the night
quite frightened. Some older boys had
told me stories about dead people rising at night from their graves and rousing
living persons to go to the synagogue to pray for them. One night I was awakened, not by a nightmare,
but by a knock on the window at midnight.
This window was directly opposite a house across the street and faced a
window in that house. Near my window was
a door which opened to the street. The
lock was not very secure, so the door could easily be pushed in from the
outside. A drunk had knocked on my
window and was pushing the door open. I
couldn’t understand what he wanted and was frightened. He saw me and left. A few days later I learned from some older
boys that my room was directly across the street from the room of a prostitute.
When I was eight years
old, Isaac Frankel, the lumberyard owner, invited my father and me to accompany
him on a trip to the town of Care-Mare to participate in the festival of
Purim. Purim celebrates the story of
Esther, a Jewish woman married to the Persian king, whose bravery saved her
people from an order of execution. This
is the only Jewish holiday in which it is a good deed to become so drunk that
you cannot tell the difference between a blessing and a curse. Mr. Frankel rented a horse and buggy to
travel twenty-five kilometers (about 15 miles).
I sat at their feet in the buggy.
This was my first trip in a horse and buggy and the first time to travel
such a distance, so I was very excited.
We passed through two villages and I enjoyed peering out of the buggy
and seeing all the fields and open spaces I had never seen before. We left for
the celebration in the morning and arrived in the late afternoon.
In the evening, we sat
at long tables in the synagogue and ate dinner.
After dinner, the tables were cleared and the performance began. The people acting in the skits stood on the
tables so everyone could see them. There
was a morality play, of sorts, in which a shepherd was faced with a dilemma regarding
sick sheep: should he take them up to a pasture on higher ground with the
healthy sheep, or should he leave them in the lower pasture to die? The rabbi’s answer was that we are not strong
enough to take up the sick sheep, therefore we must leave them so that the
healthy ones can survive. There was also
a clown who told funny stories, such as one about a poor man who put money in
his pocket, which had a hole in it. When
asked why he put money in a pocket with a hole, he replied, “Had God meant for
me to have money, even with a hole in my pocket, the money would not have
fallen out!” I had a great time. We
returned home the following morning.
Another joyful excursion
was our trip to visit my father’s second cousin, the rabbi who later became known
as the Szatmar rabbi. Until 1934, this
cousin, Joel Teitelbaum, led a group of followers in Care-Mare. Father was very close to him and had a great
deal of respect, admiration, and affection for him. My father used to praise him for his
uplifting sermons and his incisive understanding of the Torah and the nature of
things. Father always asked for advice
from his cousin Joel, who was considered by many to be a very holy man. Father visited every three months or so, at
each holiday, and helped him to expand his group of followers. In 1934 our cousin was offered a position as
chief rabbi of the Jewish community in Szatmar, which he accepted, and his
following continued to grow.
The Szatmar rabbi was of
average height and build with magnetic brown eyes. He had a certain charisma that attracted
everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike. In
1936, the King of Romania traveled through the town of Szatmar. The Szatmar rabbi was one of the few Jews who
was granted an audience with the king and was photographed with him. I myself saw this photograph of the rabbi and
the king shaking hands.
As a child, I greatly
admired this relative. He was very
patient and kind to all persons, regardless of their station in life. He understood human nature well. He was also an excellent orator, knowing just
the right timing and tone of voice to use at any point in a speech. Most important to me, he was a truly moral
and unselfish person who was totally dedicated to his faith. When I was about seven years old, he gave me
a special coin that he had blessed. I
treasured this gift from him. Later he
would come to play a major role in protecting me for a while from the Nazis.
On some Friday nights,
the Szatmar rabbi would hold special Sabbath services. He was so beloved that men from both Hungary
and Romania would attend. His wife would
prepare Sabbath meals for all who came.
People would socialize from about 6 p.m. until 10 or 11 p.m., at which
time they would sit on wooden benches at long wooden tables in the smaller hall
of the synagogue and wait for the rabbi to join them.
Dressed in a prayer
shawl and a special hat with fox tails--a shtreimel--which was worn only on the
Sabbath by the well-educated--the rabbi would enter the hall. I was always impressed with the way he
carried himself and how he looked in the candlelight and glow of the thorium
lamps. He would sing religious melodies
between each course of the meal.
During the service, held
in the larger hall of the synagogue, he would sing as if he were beckoning to
angels. One song was especially
beautiful and melodious. It was from
chapter 50 of the Book of Solomon, which praises women and their contribution
to the family and community. All of his
songs radiated healing energy and had the ability to pull us out of our sadness
and bring delight to our souls.
In addition to fond childhood memories of the Szatmar rabbi,
I also remember my first childhood “jobs.”
The first was for a chicken vendor who asked me and a few other Hasidic
boys walking home from Cheder (religious school) to help him grab the chickens
from a large cage and place them into smaller cages for shipping to his
wholesaler. With earlocks and fringed shirts flying, we jumped up and down as
we caught the squawking fowl. For our
services the vendor paid us each 8 lei
(Romanian currency.) I rushed to
my Uncle Michael’s grocery store where I bought some candy. After leaving the store I ate it all. My Uncle Michael later informed my father
that he had sold me some candy. My
father confronted me, “Where did you get the money to buy candy?” I had to confess my detour from my walk home
and “job” to my father who let it pass without further comment.
Another job (for which I
first obtained my father’s permission) was harvesting grapes in a vineyard. Except for me, the workers were all
Gentiles. I watched their mannerisms and
listened to them talking. I envied them. They had a more relaxed life style. They lived in their own country. They didn’t have to eat only kosher food. They didn’t have to get up early in the
morning to pray or to immerse themselves in a cold ritual bath. They enjoyed nature. Yet, once the job was completed and I was
paid, I did not dwell long on my envy.
Instead, I ran to the general store and purchased a special treat,
peanuts. (Peanuts, not grown in our
country, had to be imported, so they were quite expensive.) The peanuts tasted so good to me that I
thought I would be the happiest person alive if I could always have all the
peanuts I desired. To this day, I am quite fond of peanuts.
I don’t know how my
father managed to circumvent Romanian law and keep me out of public school,
which was mandatory at the time. My
Polish-born father could be quite persuasive, despite the fact that the only
secular language he spoke was Polish.
He had already convinced the authorities to put all his children’s
Hebrew names on our legal birth certificates, which had never been accomplished
before. When all the other children --
including my sisters -- went to public school, I was the only child who
remained home.
My father used to
wake me before 6 a.m. to study the Talmud and the commentary. We studied the five books of Moses, but not
Prophets or Kings. The Book of Prophets
and the Book of Kings are very nationalistic.
It was considered pointless to stir nationalistic longings in us when,
at the time, it appeared hopeless that we would ever have our own nation. Furthermore, members of the Hasidic movement
believed that the Messiah and a Jewish homeland would come in God’s time and
could not be “forced” by people.
Father also guided me in
the study of the Book of Ecclesiastes.
It was discouraging to read that every joy is balanced with equal pain
in our physical life. Yet the resolve
that serving God gives us a purpose in life anchored me. As a Hasidic Jew I was
taught that each person is born with a spark of Divine origin. We who choose to
use our spark positively by serving God through serving others, find joy in
this life. This joy has helped me
through difficult times.
Father was very
selective about the education he chose for me.
He frowned on my reading secular books, such as novels, which he deemed
frivolous. He expected me to be a rabbi,
as our ancestors had been, so rather than “waste my time” with some of the
“irrelevant secular subjects” I would have studied in public school, he taught
me Jewish philosophy, mysticism, Hasidism, morality, and Kosher laws (dealing
with the purity of food eaten.) Although we spoke Yiddish at home, Father and I
switched to Hebrew and Aramaic for my Torah studies. Father also taught me that the Jewish culture
survives because we are educated to be strong mentally and physically. He always said that knowledge is precious,
because it is the only thing that cannot be taken from a person. Later I profoundly realized the truth of his
statement when, as a young adult faced with life in a Nazi concentration camp,
I used my knowledge of Proverbs and the Ethics of the Fathers[4]
to help me survive.
My study sessions with my
father would make me restless. In
between study sessions I would take every opportunity to go for a walk outside
or to chop wood in the backyard. I
especially liked chopping the eyes of the wood, which did not yield easily to
the ax and gave me an outlet for my pent up energy. I also helped dig septic tank holes. Manual labor was a relief after long hours
of study.
Although I obeyed my
father regarding my reading and studies, I secretly envied my sisters and
friends who went to public school and were learning about the world around
us. From them I learned a little about
world history, geography and literature.
More importantly, they taught me to speak both Hungarian (the popular
language) and Romanian (the official language) of Transylvania at the time,
because neither language was spoken at home.
Eventually, in 1935, the door to secular subjects was opened briefly to
me when the increase of Nazi propaganda and anti-Semitic hysteria caused the
one Jewish teacher at the public school to be fired. Immediately my father engaged him to tutor me
in mathematics and writing the Roman alphabet (so I could write Hungarian and
Romanian.) He tutored me from 1935 to 1937.
Not only did my father’s decision not to
enroll me in public school cause me to stand apart from other youngsters, but
my small stature did also. Being short
and skinny, I had to work hard to develop athletic skills. I was often confronted with anti-Semitism and
forced to fight non-Jewish children who used sticks, stones, hands and feet to
attack me. At times even the non-Hasidic
kids would make fun of my clothing.
Occasionally I would
leave the insults and attacks and walk up the street past the home of the
sausage maker whose pigs lived in his backyard.
Their stench filled the air, which was also pierced by the high-pitched
squeals of the animals being slaughtered.
Ironically, when I reached the main street where the merchants’ stores
were located, I would pass the sausage maker’s shop and then my nostrils
welcomed the aroma wafting in the air and my mouth watered while I coveted this
forbidden food.
As the son of a rabbi
destined to follow in his footsteps, I was not permitted to associate with
children whose families were not sufficiently devout. My one friend was Moses Solomon. His father, Israel Solomon, was a very devout
and respected member of our synagogue.
Ironically, Moses deeply wanted to become a rabbi, while I would have
preferred to be a farmer or manual laborer so that I could earn a better living
and enjoy the outdoors. Moses and I
played soccer together and enjoyed many boyhood activities. We loved to play a popular game using nuts
during the Feast of the Tabernacles (Succoth), which celebrates the fall
harvest and commemorates the wandering of the Jews in the desert during
Exodus. We enjoyed helping build the
Succoth hut and gazing at the stars and night sky through its open roof. Often on the Sabbath, while our parents would
sleep off a large meal of cholent (beans and barley stew) Moses and I would
take long walks. During these walks we were careful not to tear a branch from a
tree or use a fallen branch to draw figures in the dirt, because tearing and
writing are prohibited acts of “work” on the Sabbath. Afterwards we would return home and then go
to the synagogue before dark for more worship.
When it was getting dark, the adults would recite two long prayers and
sing mystic melodies while we restless children played hide and seek.
One year Moses and I
ventured into acting together and put on a skit for the Feast of Lots (Purim),
celebrating Esther’s saving the Jews from a massacre designed by Haman[5]. Pouring all our imagination and energy into
this task, we delightedly enacted the story of Joseph.[6] That was the extent of our acting
career. Today Moses, a friendly, devout,
and cheerful man, lives in Israel and is a kosher slaughterer and rabbi.
Despite the anti-Semitic
sentiments of the time, the neighborhoods of Tasnad were not segregated. Some Gentile children would not play with us
and some chose to pick on us and say mean things. Yet some Jewish and Gentile
children played together. I recall us
sledding in the snow. We also enjoyed an
occasional game of soccer, played with a “ball” fashioned from rolled up socks
tied with a string. One day when I was
ten years old, I had a discussion with a Gentile boy about God. He tried to convince me that his idea of God
was correct and that we Jews were misguided.
Of course I was equally sure of my concept of God. I decided that we couldn’t both be
right. My first efforts at critical
thinking emerged at this time. Despite
some questions, my religion remained a source of joy for me.
Another childhood
escapade I fondly recall was playing hooky from my studies one afternoon and
going with a few other children to a town ice skating exhibition. The young
skaters all looked so beautiful in their short skirts! When my father learned of this, he was
extremely angry. From his perspective,
not only was ice skating a worthless activity and a luxury which Jews could not
afford, but also Jewish boys ought not to be watching half naked girls like
this.
My childhood joys were
tainted by two factors, poverty and anti-Semitism, both rising in the
1930’s. In 1933 the price of food rose
dramatically, especially that of bread.
After a lengthy succession of meals made from beans prepared in an
assortment of ways, my mother had only cornmeal left. I recall eating cornmeal for supper. Many times there was not enough for all of
us, so my father divided the food among the children. He went to bed without eating.
Hunger helped me
discover that the mulberries from the trees on the street were edible and free,
and I began to eat them voraciously.
Then I was told that they were not kosher, because they had tiny worms
inside. After eating them, I felt
guilty. One day I devised a plan to rid
myself of this guilt. I decided to stuff
myself with as many mulberries as possible so that I would get nauseous and
forever lose my appetite for them. My
plan worked!
Meanwhile as
anti-Semitism was increasing, an ugly incident occurred one day while we
children were playing. A Jewish boy cut
the string of a kite belonging to a Gentile boy, and the kite flew away. The boy ran home and told his parents who
returned with him and started beating the Jewish boy. A riot almost broke out, but luckily some
other adults arrived who were able to restore order and resolve the
matter.
During these difficult
economic times in Europe, it was particularly hard for Jews to earn a living
(Jews were legally prohibited from owning large parcels of land and were
discriminated against in other ways as well).
Therefore, some begged and were arrested on vagrancy charges. Wolfe Frankel, son of Isaac Frankel who had
so generously helped Jews in our community, followed in his father’s footsteps
and used most of his money to help arrested Jews.
Meanwhile, the rabbis
were hearing of more and more problems from members of their
congregations. On the Sabbath and holy
days, prayers reflected the terrible situation for European Jews in the
1930’s. Jewish leaders realized the
seriousness of our situation. Only a few
Jews here and there were able to cross national borders and survive. For most of us, there was no way out of the
country and our difficulties. During a
time when all of Europe was suffering economically, no immigrants were desired,
especially ones of a different religion and culture. Furthermore, the Nazis were creating
anti-Jewish sentiment by their propaganda.
Accusing us of causing economic hardship, they used the media to
caricature and dehumanize us.
We felt that we could do
little to change the situation except hope for the best and keep the
faith. Later our faith helped a few of
us endure the concentration camps. Viktor
Frankl, in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, mentioned that Jewish faith was
so strong that even in the crematorium at Auschwitz, Jews were heard to say
with their last breaths, “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eluhaynu Adonai Echod.” (“Hear,
O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”)
This is the holiest sentence in the Torah. Those who survived, including some of my
relatives, continue to have a strong faith.
In his megalomaniac
desire to have a German super race control the world, Hitler destroyed millions
of bodies, but he could not destroy our spirit.
We Jews believe that God created us for a purpose. We are not created to
suffer in this world, but to contribute something of value to the world. I believe that it was our faith in God’s
purpose for us that gave us the strength to cope with unimaginable atrocities.
In 1935 when I was about
twelve years old and beginning my studies for my bar mitzvah, my father sent me
for a semester to a yeshiva, a school for religious studies, in the Carpathian Mountains in the town of
Sighet. He intended that not only should
I learn more about the Torah, but that I should develop more socially. A good rabbi must be practical and must have
diverse life experiences which help him guide his people; he must not be solely
a Torah scholar.
UncleYucateel, the head
of this yeshiva, had received a large donation from a wealthy American which he
had used to build a textile factory.
Being very practical, UncleYucateel had the yeshiva students age fifteen
and older trained in the factory to weave kitchen towels and tablecloths. Thus, they would combine religious study with
learning a trade.
I had a room at the
yeshiva, but I ate meals at different uncles’ homes. (This was the custom in those days, because
schools had no cafeterias.) We left the
yeshiva at 11 a.m. for lunch and returned at 1 p.m. There was no supervision of
students during the lunch period, and I would often forego lunch and hike into
the mountains. I would be sure to return
before the afternoon class began. I
wanted to enjoy a beautiful, sunny day outdoors, not study inside the
yeshiva. As so many youngsters have felt
about their studies, I also felt that what I was studying wasn’t “relevant” or
“practical.” My studies wouldn’t feed, clothe, or shelter me. I enjoyed my hikes, despite the fact that my
religious dress, including fringed shirt and long jacket, identified me as a
Jew, and caused people to harass me. I
would occasionally meet another hiker--almost always a non-Jew--and I would be
shoved, pushed, or even slapped in the face.
I do not believe that these people were vicious, but they lashed out at
me, a scapegoat for their anger and frustration over their economic
circumstances. There were no police in
the mountains to whom I could complain, but even had there been, this would
have been futile because such acts against Jews were tolerated.
Nevertheless, I
persisted in my hikes and recall occasionally listening to the local fire
department’s orchestra playing secular music as I sat on a mountainside. I was intrigued by this music which was quite
different from the religious music to which I was accustomed.
I had another enchanting
musical experience when I traveled to my mother’s birthplace, Berbesht, about
ten miles from Sighet. I visited an
uncle (one of my mother’s seven brothers) with whom my brother was
staying. I recall walking to this small
village at about sunset. The sky was
brilliant. The air was calm. A villager happened to be outside playing his
flute. It was the most exquisite flute
music I had ever heard. I began to feel
homesick. I thought about my walks in
Tasnad and the poor young housekeepers of Tatarian descent. Daily while beating
rugs and airing blankets and bedding, they sang Hungarian and Russian songs
expressing their longing for home. These
beautiful young women had families and boyfriends living in Hungarian villages
far away. They worked for room, board,
and a small allowance. All these
memories and the flute player’s music gave me goose bumps that day.
One Sabbath I visited a
paternal aunt who lived in a small village near Sighet. In the synagogue, there were the usual
prayers and reading from the Torah. As
was their custom, the affluent Jews left in the middle of the service (which
took about two and a half hours) and
went to their nearby homes,
ate coffee cake, and then returned to the synagogue for the conclusion
of the service. I was surprised to see
one poor family leave the synagogue at the same time as the affluent. I knew this family ate cornmeal all
week. Surely they had not left to eat
coffee cake. “Where did they go?” I wondered.
Curious, I quietly left
the synagogue and discovered they were giving their horse a drink at the well
behind the synagogue. This was the horse
they used to earn their meager living, the horse which they used to take people
to the border between Romania and Czechoslovakia. The man had taken off his religious belt and
used it to pull the horse to the well.
Although this use of the belt was sacrilegious, they probably justified
it because allowing an animal to suffer is also immoral in Jewish
teachings. Also they could not risk
having their horse weaken from thirst during the lengthy synagogue
service.
After studying for
awhile I was ready for my bar mitzvah at age thirteen. This is the Jewish rite
of passage for boys. It is the ceremony
celebrating a boy’s becoming a man and having sufficient knowledge of Jewish religion and law so that
he can be counted as one of the ten men--a minyan-- needed to begin a public
prayer service at the synagogue. In accordance with custom, on the Sabbath
before my bar mitzvah I read aloud in the synagogue. The story was about the seventy-year-old King
David being brought young virgins to keep him warm. Although I did not discuss this with anyone,
this story disturbed me. Religious boys
were forbidden to talk with or have any contact whatsoever with any unmarried
women, other than family members. This
story created more religious doubts during my teenage years.
Even though I had
doubts, I knew I was never to ask questions which would suggest my obedience to
God was in any way dependent upon my understanding or agreement with His
law. My entire upbringing stressed the
importance of religious study and total dedication to God. I was taught we must be humble before God and
that the Divine Plan requires neither human understanding nor agreement. Just as a soldier going to war knows he must
follow orders without question and that he may, indeed, give his life for his
country, so must a Jew commit himself to God and to following God’s
commandments, regardless of the consequences.
Despite my unspoken
doubts, my bar mitzvah went well. I gave
a half-hour speech in which I took a sentence from the Torah and explained
it. A maternal uncle, Uncle Samuel, who
was a very respected rabbi and who had encouraged my religious study,
complimented me on my interpretation of the Torah passage. I was very happy. We celebrated afterwards with a bar mitzvah
dinner at the house. We ate and sang
some very moving and uplifting religious songs.
Having been bar
mitzvahed did not exempt me from further religious study. Quite the contrary. Now I had to study very earnestly to learn
enough to become a rabbi. Diligently, I
studied the Talmud, and once again, I left to study at my Uncle Samuel’s yeshiva
in Care-Mare for a semester. This
time I lived with Uncle Samuel’s family.
Uncle Samuel was a
particularly adept yeshiva leader. Not
only was he a very good commentator of the Torah, but he managed to attract 100
students from the surrounding area. He
was astute and compassionate. He easily
surmised when a student had a need not being met, either physical or
spiritual. He would approach the
student, find out if he needed food, clothing, or some kind of encouragement,
and see to it that the student got what he needed. I had the greatest respect for my Uncle
Samuel. His instruction continued in
more entertaining fashion on Saturday nights.
After a light supper of herring
and borscht, we would listen to his engaging stories. People used to come from all over to listen
to his stories.
For example, one of his
stories took place near the town of Tokai in Keristur, Hungary, at the home of
Uncle Samuel’s father-in-law, a famous rabbi, during World War One. Everything was rationed and food was
scarce. Most people ate bread with a
little bit of oil spread on it. Uncle
Samuel’s father-in-law welcomed the hungry into his home and shared bread and
oil with them. The oil was contained in
a ceramic pot. One day while a villager
was taking some oil from the pot, he dropped it. The pot shattered into many pieces and the
remaining oil was lost. The other
villagers shouted angrily at him, but Uncle Samuel’s father-in-law said, “He
feels badly enough. Do not shout at him
this way.”
I recall another more
humorous story. There was a follower of
a rabbi who was a successful business man.
Every Sunday he would visit the rabbi for words of encouragement and
would leave some money to supplement the rabbi’s modest salary. One Sabbath, the rabbi’s sermon dealt with
the futility of human effort directed toward material things and the importance
of expending effort on prayer and Torah study. The following Sunday, the business man did
not visit the rabbi. In fact, the rabbi
learned on Tuesday that the business man was not at work, and the rabbi found
the man praying in the synagogue. The
rabbi asked the man, “Why aren’t you at work?”
The man replied that he had taken the rabbi’s sermon to heart, had given
up his business, and would spend all his time praying and not pursuing material
goals. To this the rabbi replied,
“That’s the way we must think on the Sabbath, but after the Sabbath, we have to
return to the world!”
Returning home after my stay with Uncle Samuel, I continued
to study hard and to learn the Kosher laws from my father. He taught me how to check animals for
diseases. Because Jewish law prohibits
eating animal blood, I also learned how to treat meat so that all blood is
drained away. I learned the laws about
separating dairy foods from meat[7],
such as how long one must wait after eating meat to eat dairy foods (6 hours)
and how long after eating dairy foods to eat meat (1/2 hour, unless it is hard
cheese, 6 hours.) It was believed that
this amount of time was necessary for digestion to take place. I made great progress in my religious
studies, but my father never complimented me.
Many years later my relative, Samuel Teitelbaum, who also survived the
concentration camps, told me how Father glowed with pride when he told others
about my rapid progress in my rabbinical studies.
While I was studying to
become a rabbi and leader of my people, the hard times continued, especially
for Jews, who experienced more severe poverty and more blatant discrimination.
To make matters worse for me personally, I saw my mother’s health
declining. In 1938, when my father could
not possibly scrape together a dowry for my oldest sister to marry, he decided
my sister’s dowry would be his position as the Hasidic rabbi in Tasnad. (Rabbis have to build their own religious
following. There is no central
administrative organization which sends rabbis to a particular locale with an
already-established congregation.) So,
my older sister married and her husband became the rabbi in the synagogue, in
my father’s place.
In 1939 we moved to a
beautiful city, Oradea-mare, where there was said to be a Hasidic group with
intellectual leanings. Although there
were some Hasids there, Father couldn’t find enough followers to earn a
living. It was a very bad time for us,
and my father obtained assistance from my grandfather’s followers.
Despite
the difficult times, I was able to find comfort and inspiration once again from
my participation in Sabbath services. A famous rabbi of Vishnitz lived within
walking distance from where we lived, so I walked to his services on Friday
nights. He used to teach his followers
by song. He composed beautiful melodies,
with lyrics including a Torah sentence and an explanation of the sentence. He used to dance with his followers, and even
danced sometimes by himself. He was very
inspirational and his services would often last until midnight. Father approved
of my going to this rabbi’s services, because he felt it would broaden my
horizons.
We Jews faced poverty,
as we faced all other life challenges, with faith and diligent study. The Nazis did their best to make study more
difficult for us when, in 1939, they revised the education laws and imposed a
quota for Jews in public high schools. In response to this Jewish parents
enrolled their sons in yeshivas, because a religious education was the only one
available to them. We all believed that
it is vitally important to keep mentally alert.
The extreme poverty and
discrimination was taking its toll on us, and Mother started to complain about
pains in her heart. The doctors ran some
tests, but they found nothing conclusive.
Yet she continued to complain bitterly, and I was very worried about
her.
My mother did not
survive the Holocaust, but her memory lives with me. One particular remark she made is imprinted
forever in my memory. I was nine years
old. It was a Friday morning in the
autumn, a very dark day. We were in the
kitchen near a small window when Mother said, “In my family girls were not
valued at all. My mother only bragged
about my brothers. She was very proud of
them, but we girls were considered valueless.”
I can never forget the sorrow in her face and voice. At that moment I promised myself I would
never treat my wife or daughters like that.
My mother taught me two
very valuable lessons that stay with me to this day. She warned me to beware of religious
fanatics. Their motivation is not
devotion to God but a desire to judge others and to refuse to forgive. She also cautioned me to avoid the sin of
dedicating so much time, energy and money to community service that I might
sacrifice time, energy, and money needed for myself and my family.
Another valuable lesson
came from my father in 1940. One of my
father’s followers had told him that his son had played cards all night with
me. Father came to me to ask if this
were true. It was not, and I told Father
so. Father believed me and in a very
compassionate way explained, “Son, be careful.
It’s not how you actually behave that matters but how you are perceived
by other people.” I realized as a
rabbi’s son I was being held to a higher standard of behavior and that it
really behooved me to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. If not, one might live with an undeserved yet
tarnished reputation.
The lessons I was
learning from my parents and my religious studies were to be a fountain of
wisdom and knowledge from which to drink in the most difficult of times that
lay ahead of me. Nazi furor was rising
to a crescendo, and concomitantly the condition of Jews was plummeting.
In 1941 Germany gained
military and political control over most of western Europe and we received news
that Germany was advancing in Poland and planning to attack Russia. My paternal grandfather, a rabbi and chief
judge in the Jewish Court in Poland, and my paternal grandmother, were clearly
in jeopardy. I had only met my grandfather once, when I was eleven and he
visited us for three days. I remembered
him as an intelligent and just man. I
had never met my paternal grandmother, but many years later in America, an
acquaintance who had known her, told me she was very kind and would give him, a
poor boy, attention and some cake on Saturdays.
One day we received a
postcard from Russia from my paternal grandfather. I saw the distress in my father’s face as he
read it, so I asked him, “What is it, Father?”
Silently he handed me the postcard.
My grandparents had fled Poland for Russia. Grandfather had not complained at all about
leaving his house or position and now being a refugee. His only concern was his fear that they would
die without a Jewish burial. My
grandfather’s fear became a reality, and my parents ultimately shared my grandparents’
fate. The Nazis murdered all of them
somewhere in Russia.
In May, 1941, Father had
an insufficient number of followers to make his living as a rabbi, so he bought
a small knitting machine. Hungarian industry was almost dead, because it was virtually
impossible to get raw materials. With
the knitting machine Father planned to make socks and sell them on the black
market. He never did produce any socks
because he received a deportation letter.
Transylvania had been
returned to Hungarian rule. Because Father had been born in Poland, he was
ordered to return there. At first, he
ignored this. Later, the police came,
took him to jail for a couple of nights, and told him to prepare his
papers. They also said to Father, “We
will solve the Jewish problem. You are like fish in a lake from which we will
drain all the water.” After this they
let Father out of jail, and we hired a Jewish lawyer to fight the deportation
order. I talked to the lawyer myself who
told me the situation was very serious. The Germans had already advanced into
Russia. It looked like we would be taken
to a camp for non-citizens in Hungary.
For the first time in my life, I made my own decision and was
determined to carry it out, whether or not my father approved. I told my father that I would not go with the
family to the camp. I would run away and
hide from the authorities. My reasons
were: 1) If I were free, I would be able to help the family from the
outside. 2) If we were together in the
concentration camp, it would break both our hearts to see each other
suffer. My father did not argue with me
nor discourage me from carrying out my plan.
My Experiences as a Young Man
A few weeks later on a
Saturday afternoon in June, 1942, at about 2:30 p.m., two detectives came to
our house. I was in the corridor and saw
them in the front room. I heard them
tell Father that we each had a right to take 10 pounds of clothing and a very
small amount of money. When I heard
this, I knew this was it. I had to run
now.
I ran out the back of
the house and to the Lefkowitz family, followers of my father. They lived three doors down from us. Mr. Lefkowitz was a wealthy grocery
wholesaler and had a brother who also lived in town. That evening I learned that because one of my
older sisters had pneumonia, the two detectives had not taken my mother and
sick sister. They had intended to take
my other brother and sisters, but when the children started to scream, the
detectives just took my father and left.
All of my healthy sisters ran away to other families. My brother ran to the Lefkowitz’s, too.
The detectives returned
later that day for my mother and sister; they put my sister in the
hospital. My parents were put on a
train. When my father’s followers came
to the train to say good-bye, Father told them to have me go to the Szatmar
Rabbi who would take care of me. He also
said that my sisters should scatter to different maternal uncles we had living
in the area.
That evening while
hiding at the Lefkowitz’s, I had to be especially careful because of the
anti-Semitic janitor of their apartment complex. I recall that all my sisters, except for the
one who was in the hospital, came to see me that night. My sisters were frightened and were used to
Father making all the decisions. They
didn’t know what to do, so they turned to me.
I told them to go stay with various maternal uncles.
The next morning at 5
a.m. I couldn’t sleep and I heard Mrs. Lefkowitz on the telephone say, ”Let the
poor children sleep.” I knew at once something
was not right. I asked her with whom she
had spoken on the telephone. She told me
that her brother-in-law had telephoned to warn us that the police were looking
for my brother and me. I took my
brother, who was then eleven years old, and ran to the train station. I don’t remember how we got the money to
flee, but we did.
We took the train to
Szatmar. My brother was taken in by a
relative and I rented a room for myself.
My brother was eventually sent to Auschwitz where he died. My sisters also perished in Auschwitz.
Needing money to support
myself, I went back to Nagyvarad [called Oradea-mare when it was under Romanian
rule] to our family’s previous apartment.
To avoid being recognized, I went at night and wore glasses and a different
style hat. Because the apartment was
unlocked, I quickly succeeded in retrieving the knitting machine, my mother’s
inherited pearls and ring, our Sabbath candlesticks, menorah, and silver cup. I took them to my rented room in Szatmar, and
for about a month I made socks which I sold to my cousin who had a small sock
factory. Then Uncle Samuel and Uncle
Yucateel, both very respected rabbis, told me that they had talked with the
Rabbi of Szatmar’s wife, who was unable to have children. They had arranged for the Szatmar’s to adopt
me. My uncles encouraged me to agree to
the adoption and when I objected, they insisted. They said I would be banished from the
religious community if I refused, so I gave in.
It was an honor to be
adopted, but I encountered many new problems.
I was given a room attached to the synagogue and beautiful new religious
clothes--a long jacket and fringes. I
ate my meals with the rabbi’s family.
Despite meeting all my material needs, the Szatmar rabbi isolated me
from the other yeshiva students so that I had no friends. The rabbi’s sister, her daughter, and niece
lived with the rabbi. The daughter and
niece were about my age and were beautiful young ladies, yet the traditional
ritualistic separation of the genders prohibited me from talking with them.
Furthermore, I resented
the fact that in the privacy of the rabbi’s home, the rabbi’s valet did not
have this ritualistic separation imposed upon him; he was allowed to speak with
the young women. As a young man not
allowed to converse with the young women at the dining table, I felt tortured.
Because of the distance of the kitchen from the dining room, each silent meal
could last half an hour to an hour. In
the past, despite the somewhat isolated life my father had insisted upon for
me, I had managed to satisfy my social needs by going outdoors and talking with
others on the street as much as possible.
Yet, at the Rabbi of Szatmar’s home, I had no such outlet. Although the rabbi had found a Torah study
partner for me, we ate at different times and places. I was very lonely and despite my best
efforts, I couldn’t concentrate on my studies.
I resolved to change my
living arrangements to provide for more social interaction, I approached the
rebbitsin and pleaded my case first to her.
I explained that I felt isolated, that I was having a hard time
concentrating on my studies, and that I
was afraid I was wasting the most important years of my life by not properly
preparing myself with adequate education.
I told her I wanted to live in the yeshiva with the other students and
eat with them. She arranged a time for
me to speak with her husband. This was
the only time I spoke with the Szatmar rabbi the whole time I lived with him.
The rabbi’s refusal
totally devastated me. He explained that he couldn’t accept the arrangement I
proposed, because he would be unable to properly supervise me. I was 19 years old at this time. I felt rejected by the man I most
admired. I stopped eating, started
smoking, and fainted twice.
Uncle Samuel came to the
rescue and helped me reach a compromise acceptable to the Szatmar rabbi. I would share a room with the rabbi’s valet
near the synagogue, and my meals would be
sent to this room where I would eat completely alone.
Of course, this solution
acceptable to the rabbi further isolated me.
Blaming myself for my loneliness
and sadness, I searched for a solution in the Scriptures and the writings of
moral philosophers, especially The First Wisdom and The Obligation of the
Heart, both written by Sephardic sages.
Reading moral philosophy helped comfort me. Looking back on this situation, I realize the
rabbi was probably overly concerned with reputation. He would not permit me to be too close to
other congregation members lest they see my human frailties. The rabbi apparently believed that such
exposure would make it more difficult for me to assume my role as a rabbi
because the congregation might trust me less and take me less often into their
confidence.
Meanwhile, during this
time of personal turmoil I was also subjected to abuse by the Nazis and local
Gentiles. The Nazis had taken away my
father’s citizenship, and I had no legal identification while I lived with the
rabbi of Szatmar. Young men, before the
draft, were required to hold identification cards and attend pre-military
training, called “Levente,” weekly. At
each weekly training session the card was stamped. I had received an identification card from a
male cousin who lived in a distant town--Debrecen--and he obtained a duplicate
on the pretense of having lost his.
Moreover, there was another student at the yeshiva who was an excellent
forger and who forged the weekly stamp for me.
One morning while
returning from the ritual bath, I was stopped in the street by police who asked
for my identification. I showed them my
cousin’s card. They suspected a fraud
and asked me what I was doing in Szatmar.
They ordered me to follow them on foot while they rode their
bicycles. They led me to the police
station. Then they stopped and told me
to hold a heavy stone, which I did for what seemed like hours. Then they tormented me by saying they would
cut off my earlocks. (These long, curly locks, worn in front of the ears,
symbolize a Jew’s total dedication to God.)
I protested, and they finally decided they had tortured me enough and
let me go.
Meanwhile, during the
past year, 1943, the Nazis had forced my brother-in-law, Moses, to join a
working brigade, a forced labor group used by the Nazis for cleaning the mine
fields and doing other undesirable tasks.
He had been torn apart from his wife (my sister Rachel) and their
newborn child. While with the working
brigade in the Ukraine, my brother-in-law had been fed very little. One night he broke away from the group and
ran to a house that had lights on. He
knocked on a window and an older Ukrainian woman who lived there let him
in. She gave him water and a wash basin
to wash in and fed him. She told him,
”My son is in the army. I hope someone
does for my son what I am doing for you.”
After a year of servitude, Moses was released. I decided to make a trip to visit him, my
sister and the baby.
The ill-fated trip began
when I took the train to Tasnad. In the
train car with me were three women and a man.
They were middle-aged, Hungarian farmers. The man looked at me and started yelling
things like, “All you Jews are crooks!”
His harassment of me increased in severity until one of the women
interceded. She argued with the farmer, ”What do you want with him? He is only a youngster. He has not hurt anyone. Leave him alone.” It was abundantly clear
that Nazi propaganda was having its desired effect. We Jews had become the scapegoat for all the
frustrations of non-Jews in Europe. I
sighed in relief when I finally got off the train.
I visited for a day with
my sister, brother-in-law and the baby, and the next morning took a carriage
from Tasnad to the train station, a mile outside of town. I was the first passenger on this carriage,
and the driver did not tell me that he was stopping for another passenger at
the camp for new recruits to the working brigade. This camp was a central location for all new
workers who were being sent to join the brigade in the Ukraine. I waited inside the carriage while the driver
went to get a passenger. Suddenly two
gendarmes pulled me from the carriage and accused me of being a spy. They took me to a nearby shed containing
axes, shovels and other large tools.
They threw me onto an iron table and started to beat me brutally with a
thick cable. I begged them to stop, but
they made fun of my begging. At that
point, I swore to myself that I would never beg again for my life. Next they said they were going to cut off my
earlocks. I told them, “You can kill me,
but don’t cut these.” The gendarmes
eventually tired of their sadistic acts, and let me go. I was lucky enough to run and catch the only
train scheduled that day to return to Szatmar.
Meanwhile, intent on
abandoning a life as a rabbi, I sneaked out one day and went back to the city
of Nagyvarad, where my father’s followers still were. I tried to find employment as a physical
laborer. However, everyone knew I was
the rabbi’s son and none of them would give me a job.
Having failed in my first effort to become a
manual laborer, I returned to the Szatmar rabbi. Despite my frustration with rabbinical life,
I realized what a privilege and comfort it was for me to spend every day with
him. I watched him tend his flock. His followers came, burdened and overwhelmed
with problems; they were trying to earn a living despite the mounting
obstacles. The rabbi was very responsive to them. His prayers with them expressed the deepest
pain and yet, at the same time, hope. He
also gave practical advice, because as the community leader, he knew everyone
and was able to direct people to available community resources. I
witnessed the dramatic change in his
visitors during the course of a visit.
They came looking dejected and left feeling inspired.
Despite his loyalty and
helpfulness to his congregation, he did not know how to help me overcome my
depression, so he sent me to a psychiatrist in Budapest. The few therapy sessions I had and the
prescription medication did not help me.
Still trying to find a
means to relieve my depression, the rabbi of Szatmar finally decided that I
should go to Sighet to visit my maternal Uncle Yucateel, whose yeshiva was
affiliated with the weaving factory.
During the time I stayed with Uncle Yucateel, one of my paternal great
uncles, Uncle Aaron, decided that some rest and relaxation would cure me. He offered to take me to his family house in
Valova, deep in the Carpathian Mountains.
The rest and relaxation
were short-lived. Only a few days after
we arrived, the gendarmes knocked on my window and yelled anti-Semitic
remarks. They took Uncle Aaron’s
daughter, Leah, and me to the police station.
Some Jews who had been sent on a work brigade had fled, and the police
were seeking replacements. Uncle Aaron
was able to convince the police to release us, but the entire family was told
to leave the area immediately. Leah
survived the Holocaust and is the wife of a famous rabbi today.
I returned to the home
of the Rabbi of Szatmar, but I remained depressed. After awhile Uncle Samuel returned and said
it had been arranged that I should leave the Szatmar rabbi and go live with
him. It was very sad and disappointing
for me that although the Szatmar rabbi was quite adept at comforting and
counseling his followers, he was unable to assist me, his adopted son. Despite my disappointment, to this day I hold
him in the highest esteem.
After leaving the
Szatmar rabbi’s home and living with Uncle Samuel and his family, I considered
the increasing acts of anti-Semitism and focused my thoughts on how to
escape. Some people who had succeeded in
fleeing from Poland to Hungary told us about the deaths in the Polish
concentration camps. Concluding I had
the best chance of escape if I fled to Romania,
where I believed Jews were safe, I discussed this with my uncle. He
discouraged me because, although it might provide an individual solution, this
was no solution for the entire Jewish community. He could not advise me to do
something that he would not advise all his followers to do.
My cousins and I
brainstormed daily trying to think of a means of escape. My cousin, Jehuda Frankl (no relation to
Isaac Frankel of Tasnad nor of Dr. Viktor Frankl), suggested we go to Israel, but we already
knew it was virtually impossible for a Jew to travel safely through Europe and
be granted permission to emigrate to Israel.
Even assuming we could overcome the obstacles and reach this safe
harbor, we knew that in Israel Jews did not strictly adhere to the laws of the
Torah. Considering this, I told Jehuda
that I did not see Israel as a solution.
I stated, “I’d rather die than live without values.” I didn’t know it then, but I have been forced
to address these issues repeatedly in my life.
Today Jehuda lives in Jerusalem.
The likelihood of
successful escape diminished with each passing day. A Jewish business leader warned my uncle that
a friend of his, a Gentile train engineer, told him that the engineer had taken
Jews to a Polish concentration camp, not a Hungarian one. We all knew that the Polish camps were death
camps. My uncle’s sole response was,
“God will help us.”
In 1943 on Yom Kippur, the rabbi of Szatmar
gave a shocking sermon. In the synagogue
he stood in front of the doors of the Ark of the Covenant (an enclosure
containing the Five Books of Moses handwritten on parchment scrolls). Wearing his prayer shawl and a white gown
(kittel), he faced the congregation and in a trembling voice said:
When we sinned, God cast us into a pit surging with
snakes and scorpions. Yet, with every
sincere prayer and every good deed, we steadily rise up, above the vermin, and
move toward the light shining from above the pit. Let us be sure to pray our
most ardent prayers and lovingly perform the most difficult of good deeds to
assure that we will emerge from the pit in triumph over the snakes and
scorpions. We are almost at the last step before emerging from the pit. Let us pray that we are not thrown back into
the bottom of the pit.
This ending horrified people.
The rabbi’s speech reflected the reality of the time; yet it was
tempered with hope.
A true spiritual leader,
the rabbi from Szatmar held fast to his principles and stood by and with his
congregation throughout this hellish time.
Even though survival was becoming more and more difficult as the Nazi influence
increased in February 1944, he rejected an offer from a Zionist organization to
immigrate to Israel. The group had
managed, with great difficulties, to get three certificates (like
passports) to allow safe passage through
all the countries of Europe and permission from the British consulate to
emigrate to Israel. The certificates
were for three rabbis --- the Rabbis
from Szatmar, Beltz, and Munkatch. I witnessed his refusal to succumb to
the pressure. He ignored the pleas and
cries of his wife who wanted to flee, and told them that he would stay with his
congregation. Of course, I also knew
that he strongly opposed the Zionist way of life, which he believed to be
Godless because of its abandonment of some Torah laws. I was very moved by his dedication, his
refusal to abandon his followers in their hour of need, and his unwillingness
to compromise his principles to save his own life. The other two rabbis accepted the offer.
Eventually, I learned
that the rabbi of Szatmar was sent to a concentration camp at Bergen Belsen. There he was told he was not allowed to have
a beard, but he kept it anyway. One day
the SS in charge of the camp told him, “If I see you tomorrow with a beard, I
will send you to the crematorium. The
next day at the morning counting of prisoners, the Szatmar rabbi appeared with
his beard. However, there was a
different SS in charge, unaware of the former SS’s
statement. The rabbi survived the camp
with his beard intact.
The most remarkable
aspect of the increased exploitation and oppression of Jews was the Nazi’s
systematic and combined use of psychology and laws to create a social
environment in which such behavior was acceptable to the majority of the
population. The Nazis had been slowly
and steadily preparing the German people to think of Jews as “the enemy,”
worthy of defeat by complete annihilation.
Hitler’s political base of support was garnered from groups who were
disillusioned, frustrated and bitter about their relative poverty. Like the Hungarian farmer who had rebuked me
on my train ride to Szatmar, they sought a scapegoat to hate and blame for
their unhappy circumstances. History is
repetitive; today I am always leery of politicians whose campaigns are based on
what they oppose rather than what they
propose.
By March, 1944, Germany
started occupying Hungary. New laws
provided for routine confiscation of our homes which were then assigned as
quarters for German soldiers. As more
and more German soldiers arrived, more and more homes were confiscated. The circumscribed area where Jews were
allowed to live -- the ghetto -- became progressively smaller and our living
conditions became progressively more crowded.
Exacerbating matters were other newly enacted laws prohibiting Jews from
any gainful employment.
Because I already lived
in the core neighborhood designated as the ghetto, I did not move for a month. Single family houses were being occupied by
several families; we shared our housing because there was no place else for the
dislocated Jews to go. Despite the
overcrowding, we were not as badly off as the Jews in Poland where the people
in the ghetto were cut off from food and actually starved to death. In contrast, we had a grocery store in our
ghetto and we shared the available food.
Hearing the news about Polish Jews was so distressing that we tried to
deny the stories we heard. We comforted
ourselves with the thought that while the Hungarian government was forced to
follow Nazi orders, we hoped that the Hungarian population would influence the
government to resist.
While the daily
mistreatment of Jews under Nazi influence was escalating, my youthful ideals
were disintegrating. For months now a
law was in place which deprived Jews of any legal way to earn a living. We, who had for years been prohibited from
farming and had been forced into being merchants, were no longer allowed to own
a business. Some Jews circumvented this
law by silent partnerships with Christians who legally owned their businesses
as sole proprietors. My widowed aunt who
had five children did this. She had two business partners, one Christian, who
had a license to sell garments, and one Jewish, who helped finance the
business. She complained bitterly that
the Jewish partner exploited and cheated her.
I was shocked and distressed that a Jew should exploit another Jew who
needed support and help. I recalled a
statement from Exodus 22:22-24:
Ye
shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child.
If thou afflict them in any wise--for if they
cry at all unto Me,
I
will surely hear their cry---
My
wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword;
And
your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless.
I soon became
disillusioned again by a story I heard while living in the crowded ghetto. A Jewish man who had lived in Germany after
World War One told us about his former business dealings there and laughed
about cheating people. It disturbed me
to think that such behavior may have helped fuel the anti-Semitic fires fanned
by the Nazis. I wished that we religious
Jews, who had been so immersed in our faith, had been more alert to the reality
of the world around us.
Meanwhile, rather than
remain idle while purposeful employment was denied to us, we gathered together
to study the Torah and pray. We would
recite the entire Book of Psalms two or three times daily. After awhile, I became discouraged and
believed our prayer was meaningless. God
was not listening. Despite my
discouragement, I continued to pray for want of anything else to do.
While praying, we
continued to be forced to deal with reality.
People were being sent away and the prospect of their surviving was
unlikely. We were prohibited from
walking on the streets at night. One
evening my Uncle Samuel received a message from his brother, Hananya, who had
been ordered to go to the forced labor camp the next morning. Uncle Samuel asked me to convince him to
avoid the forced labor camp and come to live with us. There was so much chaos at the time,that
Uncle Samuel thought his brother’s absence might not be missed. I went alone at night to deliver this message
to Hananya. However, because I believed
his chances of survival were greater if he joined the forced labor camp, I
advised him to go. He did go, and he was
liberated near the end of March, 1945.
His wife and children, like most women and children, were sent to
Auschwitz and did not survive.
The
overcrowding in the local ghetto resulted in our being moved, near the end of
April, 1944, to another ghetto in a larger city, but we only stayed there ten
days. Then the Nazis came for all of us,
including my Uncle Samuel’s family and me. They took us from the ghetto and
loaded us on freight trains, sixty to eighty people in each car. We rode for six days without food, water, or
sanitary facilities.
We arrived at dawn at
Auschwitz. The SS first separated us
into three groups: strong men, strong women, and old people and women with
children. It became clear from the way
they screamed their orders at us in German and menacingly carried clubs, that
should we even hesitate to carry out their orders, we would die. Since most Jews speak Yiddish which is
similar to German, communication was not a big problem. The men were then marched off to a separate
area where we waited in lines for our hair to be cut. (To facilitate identification and capture of
any concentration camp escapees, the Nazis had our hair cut to about one inch
in length, except for a swath that was completely shaved lengthwise down the
middle.) Already frightened, people were
further distressed by the young Polish barber who had been at Auschwitz for a
longer time than most and whose job was to cut our hair. Looking at our group he muttered, “You stupid
Hungarian Jews! Why did you let
yourselves get fooled into coming here?
Why didn’t you flee?” Hearing his
remark, some people said he was very mean.
Yet, seeing the pain in his eyes, I defended him and said, “He only said
that because it really hurts him to see us in this situation.”
Next, the SS ordered us
to discard all our clothes, which meant we were headed for the disinfectant
chamber or the gas chamber, we didn’t know which. Disrobing was difficult for me personally,
because I was then confronted with the first in a long series of life-or-death
choices. They ordered us to discard all our possessions. The last thing I held in my hand were my
phylacteries, (tefillin) handwritten copies of the holiest prayers. These prayers are so holy that if one
accidentally drops his tefillin onto the floor, he must fast all day. My phylacteries had been given to me, as with
all Jewish boys, upon my Bar Mitzvah, and I carried them in a velvet pouch
which was embroidered beautifully to signify the great worth of the pouch’s
contents. While a religious Jew prays for a half hour to an hour each morning,
he wears these prayers on his forehead and left arm. Three times the SS ordered our group to let
go of our possessions. It became clear
that those who failed to obey would immediately be sent to the crematorium. Then, I finally let go, because although it
is a sin to leave behind the phylacteries, it is also forbidden to commit
suicide. I had to determine how best to
obey God’s will. At the time, I was
devastated by my release of the phylacteries, which were a part of my
identity.
I also was thinking that
I had been unwise to seek my uncle’s approval for my idea to flee to
Romania. I now believed I would have
been better off if I had relied on my own judgment and acted upon it. I resolved that from then on I would never
seek others’ approval for my decisions about my own life. I would be guided only by God.
After leaving behind all
our clothes and worldly possessions, we filed into a huge room. Suddenly, I smelled a strong odor and was
terrified that it was the fatal gas.
However, it was a disinfectant added to the water for our shower. We were then given blue-and-white-striped
clothes to wear. Extremely relieved, we
joked about the ill-fitting garments.
Nazi dehumanization
techniques included referring to us as Haeftling, neither workers nor slaves; I
believe it means the dregs in German.
The number inscribed on my shirt was 71286; I became that number and had
no other name. I later learned that by
this time in the war, the Nazis had chosen to inscribe numbers on prisoners’
shirts rather than tattooing numbers on their arms.
Thirty-six hours from
the time we disembarked from the freight train, showered, dressed and been
assigned barracks, they served us our first meal in chamber pots. Some people were so appalled by this that
they realized what lay ahead and committed suicide by running and throwing
themselves against the electric fence.
Refusing to inform us
of future events was another favorite Nazi intimidation tactic. We heard shots, smelled the smoke from the
crematoriums, and waited in our barracks to be told what to do next. Our guards and intimidators came from three
separate groups. First there were the SS
soldiers, part of the brutal commando team, who were sadistic killers. Second were the Kapos, fellow prisoners
chosen by the SS to act as foremen, with whom I had the most interaction. Some Kapos wore yellow triangles, which meant
they were Jews; some wore red triangles, which meant they were political prisoners,
usually dissenting Germans. The third
group were the Wehrmacht, regular German
soldiers who had fought the Allies, and with whom I had the least interaction.
From fellow prisoners I
learned that you improved your chance of survival by being selected for work
and working. Nevertheless, survival at
Auschwitz was always precarious, because the Nazis liked to fill the
ovens. Not looking especially strong --
I am 5 foot two and have usually weighed about 105 pounds -- I was afraid I
would not be selected for work. Standing
outside the barracks I was told by a fellow prisoner, “Three blocks from here
they are selecting people to go to work.”
Because there were no names or lists yet, I decided to make a run for
that barrack. I looked all around and there
was no guard, so I ran to that barrack. Three SS guards were picking out
workers. They were looking for men who
appeared strong enough to withstand the work.
I was put aside with a group of five other people. I looked at them and saw that they were old
and weak-looking or young and pale. I
realized where this group was headed.
What should I do? As if God were directing me to use my brain
to assist in my own survival, I suddenly recalled a Talmudic statement, “It is
better to be the tail of the lion than the head of the fox.” While this statement really means one should
associate with persons who are better educated than oneself, to stimulate and
challenge oneself to experience wider horizons, I interpreted it in this
situation to mean that I should take action.
Noting that there was no SS guard around and only a sympathetic Kapo, I
boldly put my foot out to go back to the yet unselected group. The Kapo winked at me and let me return to
this group. When the SS guards
approached me in line this time, I flexed my muscles and tried to look as
strong as possible. Compared to the
other people in the unselected group, I looked strong. They selected me to be a worker.
After five days in
Auschwitz, they transferred my group of workers to Mauthausen. There we were separated from the Prime
Minister of Hungary by a wire fence.
Although he had given up Hungarian Jews to the Nazis, he had rejected
further German demands and had subsequently been incarcerated with us.
Because Mauthausen was a
central organization camp where workers were assigned to different locations, I
was there for only a few days. Then I
was sent to a camp in the town of Melk, located between Vienna and Linz. The Germans had decided to build a
Messerschmidt airplane factory there.
When we arrived in Melk, French resistance prisoners told us, “A year
ago, we were 5,000. Now we are only
100.” I burst out, “If only three people
survive, I will be one of them!” I was
shocked by my own statement, but the memory of it stayed with me.
Nazi fanaticism and
sadism were clearly reflected in their counting procedures for inmates. We were
aroused before our shift, given a cup of coffee at the barrack, and
counted. Then we walked to a central
gathering place where we were again counted.
The count had to be accurate.
Kapos would call out the number of persons there yesterday, the number
of persons present today, and the number who had died in the past twenty-four
hours. (Hearing this last number always
brought a chill to my bones, regardless of the weather.) Whenever the number of those present plus the
number of those who had died did not add up to yesterday’s count, there was big
trouble. Everything stopped until an
accounting was made for any missing persons. We often stood in the cold for
hours. The Nazis didn’t care if we froze to death. Once the count was completed to Nazi
satisfaction, we walked to the train station, took a freight train to a train
platform near the hills, and then walked to the construction site five kilometers
(3.1 miles) away.
The work we did was both physically demanding and dangerous.
We dug out tunnels in the sand hills where the Messerschmidt factory would be
built and concealed underground. We also built a camp for the civilian
management who worked at the factory.
Once when we were digging in the sand, the Allies started bombing
us. Everything shook and I realized we
could be buried alive. I prayed, “God,
if I survive, please don’t make me crippled.
I don’t want to be forced to depend on charity.” After the bombing, former yeshiva classmates
and I comforted ourselves spiritually by gathering together and reciting the
Torah from memory whenever we could.
Because of the
unsanitary conditions, lice and typhus spread throughout the camp. In keeping with the Nazi intimidation and
humiliation tactics, sometimes when we
would return from work we would suddenly be told to strip and walk outdoors in
the cold. Naked and shivering, we were
led to the disinfectant chamber.
After a few months of
working at Melk, I got sick and experienced yet another example of Nazi
humiliation tactics. I went to the infirmary and waited in line for
medication. I was ill, hungry, and
dirty. I looked up and saw on the wall
inside the infirmary the following statement:
“Besser in Ehre zu sterben als in Schande zu leben.” (“Better to die in
honor than to live in shame.”) This
humiliation spurred me to resolve that should I survive this concentration camp
experience, I would never let a human being do this to me again. Should an enemy try to catch me, I would not
be caught alive. As it happened I
arrived at the infirmary during a very rare time --- a time when they actually
had medication to dispense. Moreover, I
was deemed ill enough to receive medication.
Once again, I was lucky to survive.
At the beginning of November, 1944, I was selected for a
special worker group called “The Punishment Group.” There were forty people in
this group, three Jews and thirty-seven Polish Christians who had revolted
against German occupation. We were told
to cover the sewer lines outside the barracks being built for the civilian
foremen. The ground was frozen like a
rock, yet notwithstanding the futility of our task, we were forced to stay
outside there all day. This lasted for
over a month. Of the forty people,
thirty-five froze to death and only five survived. We survivors carried the dead bodies back to
the train station and the camp. One
Jewish man, who had longer experience in the camps than I, told me how best to
survive, “When you feel as if you are starting to freeze and especially when
your consciousness starts to get hazy, start moving; otherwise, you’ll freeze
to death.” Because we were on starvation
rations, we had little energy and couldn’t possibly move constantly. Yet, movement at critical moments saved the
five of us.
While suffering from yet
another incident of inhumane conditions, I was reminded that there still was
some humanity left. The shoes issued by
the concentration camp were made of wood and plastic. One evening after work while I was walking
the five kilometers from the construction site to the train platform, one of my
shoes fell apart. There was ice and snow
on the ground then, so I took paper and tried to cover the holes with
paper. This, of course, was futile; the
snow disintegrated the paper. A
German soldier, from the Wehrmacht--not
an SS--saw my problem. I heard him say
to himself, “Oh, my God! How can this
happen?”
Realizing I would not
survive without shoes, I lay awake that night.
I knew that if I walked the next day without shoes, my feet would become
frost bitten in a few hours, and I would become disabled. Then, I would be sent to the gas chamber. At about 11 p.m., I heard a whisper from the
Kapo in charge of our barracks. He
announced in a very low voice that the people who needed shoes should queue up
for them. I ran to get into line, but
there were ten people ahead of me. I was
the last person in line. When it was my turn, there was only one pair of shoes
left. The same Kapo who had given me a
pair of shoes only a month ago recognized me.
Cursing at me in German, he reluctantly gave me that last pair of
shoes. I felt like I was miraculously
saved again.
Another
life-threatening incident followed shortly.
In the barracks I slept on a top bunk.
The roof began to leak and my blanket got wet from the rain. I developed pneumonia. My teeth were chattering. Nevertheless I went to work. Our group was laying the cement floor of the
barracks for the civilian workers. I had
such a high fever that I stood by the wall.
The Kapo advanced toward me and said, “Go to work or I’ll club you to
death.” I took the wheelbarrow and
begged my co-workers to fill it quickly.
Then I ran back and forth like crazy.
I sweated and sweated. I must
have sweated my fever away.
The
cumulative effect of the humiliation,
intimidation, and surrounding deaths caused me immense spiritual anguish. Then one day we were standing on the platform
waiting for the freight train to take us back to the barracks. It was snowing, hailing, and sleeting. I was wearing the regulation clothes -- a
thin shirt and a pair of pants and the sleet felt like needles piercing my
skin. At that moment I thought, “God,
why are You doing this to me? I have
tried to serve You honestly and to the best of my ability. I have fasted, prayed and studied the
Torah. I have been totally dedicated to
You.” Despite my despair and suffering,
I could not believe that God is a sadist.
Suddenly I remembered studying that when humanity degenerates to a
certain point, God gives Satan the power to clean out the barn. Satan destroys and cleanses with no
discrimination between the innocent and the guilty. I also recalled the mystic teachings that the
feminine part of God, the Schina, suffers with the innocent Jews during this
time. At that precise moment I felt two
warm rain drops on my shoulder, as if Heaven were crying with me. This experience stayed with me throughout my
ordeals in the camps.
Despite the fact that
many people might think that I imagined the warm rain drops, I truly believe I
felt God’s compassion and Presence. My
faith strengthened and enabled me to endure and overcome hardships. I perceived that from now on, to survive both
spiritually and physically, I had to help others. Because there was rarely anything I could do
physically to help someone suffering, I tried to give each person some hope.
My spiritual experience
strengthened the beliefs I was taught as a child. The world wasn’t created to please us. Our real joy in life comes from contributing
to others and our community. Also we
need to learn which desires we should nourish and which we ought to manage and
control. Our capacity for physical joy
increases in proportion to our tolerance of physical pain. There are no limits to spiritual joy.
One afternoon I entered
the “washroom,” a bleak room with a few faucets, cold water, and no soap or
towels. While washing my hands I
observed a Greek and a Spaniard trying to communicate but neither knew the
other’s language. They didn’t know much
German either, but they thought they did.
Their effort to communicate in “German” was hilarious. One tried to help the other find the right
word in German but really couldn’t. The
“German” words they used didn’t mean anything. They had no idea what they were
saying to each other. To this day, I
have no idea either.
I found some comfort in
having a family member in the same camp with me. My cousin Betzalel, Uncle Samuel’s son, and I
were like brothers, because I had lived with his family for a semester when I
had gone to his father’s yeshiva and spent time with them after leaving the
Szatmar rabbi’s home. By nature Betzalel
was very quiet and had a somewhat passive personality. Because I had already experienced much
emotional pain before the war, when I had felt isolated at the home of the
Szatmar rabbi, I knew I could comfort him.
I used to go to his barracks after work and we would talk about how to
get through this. Also, as starving
people do, we talked frequently about food and reminisced about his mother’s
cooking.
When the Nazis started
to experience defeat, their viciousness in the camps increased. One evening in January, 1945 when there was
no work that needed to be done, they took our group of about forty people to
the entrance of the tunnel, gave us rubber baskets, and told us to move the
gravel about twenty meters and empty the baskets.. Then we were to refill the baskets from that
same pile and return the gravel to the original spot. The sole purpose of this “work” was to
humiliate us. I did this for one or two
hours. I have never been suicidal, but I
couldn’t tolerate this senseless brutality any longer. Therefore, I waited until a Kapo would not
see me, and then ran into a tunnel of the Messerschmidt factory. I sat down in a corner and dozed off.
My brief escape and nap
came at a price. Awakening to silence, I
knew I was in deep trouble. My heart
pounding, I ran outside in the dark and saw my group being counted by the Kapo
who was already reading off the list of numbers. I quietly sneaked back into the group.
Someone assured the Kapo that a person had come back into line. Glad the count was now accurate, he took us
back to the barrack. The next day before
beginning work I saw the Kapo comparing the two lists: the list of the numbers
of persons he had taken to do the basket “work” and the list of those he had
recorded on the return count. I knew
that he had identified me as the latecomer.
To avoid the likely punishment, death, I volunteered when another Kapo
asked for volunteers for a special project.
My fellow prisoners thought I had gone mad, because no one ever
volunteered for the “volunteer” jobs, which were the worst jobs one could
possibly imagine. This ploy worked and
I never got into trouble for my temporary defection and nap.
It was common knowledge
that the so-called infirmary rarely dispensed medication, and patients usually
were left to die. I saw many people with
serious medical conditions, yet they avoided the infirmary. In February a wound in my foot became
infected. The pain was so extreme that I
considered going to the infirmary.
However, a man I barely knew and to whom I owe my life said, “Rafael,
don’t give up. If you survive this, life
will be worthwhile again.” Luckily my
body eventually fought off the infection.
Later that February I
had a wonderful dream. I dreamed that I
was at home with my entire family celebrating the Sabbath and having a fine
dinner. It was a very comforting dream. When I began to wake and opened my eyes, I
saw the high electric fence and the guards.
This shocked me into complete wakefulness. I cannot describe the horror I felt at that
moment. I thought, “Will I ever get out
of this alive?”
When the Russians
advanced, the Nazis transferred us from Melk concentration camp near Vienna to
the Ebensee concentration camp in the Austrian Lake Country. In April, 1945, we learned from other people
who were brought to Ebensee that none of the women and children who had
originally been at Auschwitz with us had survived. My brother-in-law, Moses,
had been brought to Ebensee after he had spent additional time on the working
brigade. He was crushed by the knowledge
that his wife and baby had been killed.
I tried to comfort him. What do you say to someone whose spouse and baby
have been brutally murdered? Once again
I drew upon my faith and religious training to help me speak with Moses. The Talmud refers to depression as “the
bitter darkness,” which is considered anger toward God turned inward. According to the Talmud, whatever happens to
a person, he or she must not be angry with God.
Whatever happens, God will give one the strength to deal with it, if
that person turns to God. No one has the
right to throw one’s life away. Thinking
all this, I said to Moses, “What has happened is very horrible. Please do not throw your life away; I have
lost my sister and nephew, I would hate to lose you, too.” Despite my efforts to help him gain courage
to continue, a few days later he went to the infirmary. The frostbite in his foot was so severe that
the tissue had been damaged. He did not
survive.
Brutality, starvation,
and death were the norm in this environment.
The brutal treatment included starvation-level rationing which became
more severe as the Germans headed toward defeat. At the beginning of my imprisonment, we were
given two “meals” daily, breakfast and lunch.
Breakfast consisted of weak, black coffee and “bread” that tasted like
sawdust mixed with some unknown substance.
Lunch was Gemuse Suppe, which consisted of a few dried vegetables mixed
with a large quantity of water. Each
prisoner had to carry his mess tin with him at all times. In the last months, the Suppe had diminished
in both quantity and quality. It was
made with more water and potato peels only.
We ate no dinner.
Tension mounted as the
Allies advanced but German brutality did not diminish. At this time I was placed with a group of
people in a small oil refinery. It was
warm inside but there was no work to do, so we would occasionally doze
off. One day a young Kapo -- the young
ones were usually more brutal than the older ones -- accused another man and me
of sleeping on the job, a potentially fatal infraction. He took me with him to the SS. The SS ordered him to take us back to the
refinery and beat us in front of the others.
He started to beat me with a cable. Because a Kapo’s job was also to
weed out the weak, beatings frequently resulted in death. I started to scream but soon realized this
made no difference. I intentionally
collapsed. He stopped beating me, which
was the only reason I did not die that day.
When I returned to my barrack, I saw the other man sitting on his
bunk. I asked him what had happened to
him. He told me that he had managed to
escape the beating by bribing the Kapo with a cigarette.
The next day at the
refinery the Kapo who had beaten me was surprised to see me alive and started
to pick on me. I realized he was determined to kill me. I was very scared but I
stood up straight and stayed very alert, so as to give him no excuse to report
me. I
noticed that the man who had successfully avoided the beating was not at
work. Yet, he appeared that night at the
barrack. I asked him what he had done to
be relieved from work. He confided to me
his successful scheme. Everyone had to
go outside to be counted each morning.
Those who had just been released from the infirmary stood in a separate
area with their hat in their hands, so they would not be taken to work. They then were allowed to return to the
barracks. The strict order previously
set by the Nazis in the concentration camps was slowly disintegrating as the
war was drawing to an end. Because my
life was in imminent danger from the sadistic Kapo, I decided to try my fellow
prisoner’s scheme. The next morning I
stood with my hat in my hand. I got away
with it. I continued to do this.
The last two weeks
before we were liberated were extremely bleak; there was starvation and death
everywhere. One day I saw my cousin Betzalel walking by himself looking
dazed. I asked him, “Betzalel, where are
you going?” He told me that most of the
people from his barrack had died, they were closing his barrack and he had been
ordered to go to Barrack 11. Because I
was not working those last days and had had conversations with other prisoners,
I knew that Barrack 11 was the killing barrack --- the one where they
overcrowded people and clubbed them to death for the slightest infraction. In contrast my barrack, although dreadfully
overcrowded and chaotic, was not the scene of imminent assault and murder. Nobody was recording prisoners by their
registration numbers. We were sleeping
three in a bunk. One of my bunk mates
had just died and the Kapo didn’t know that yet. I told Betzalel to come with me and pretend
to be my bunk mate. He followed my
advice and survived. Today he lives in
Jerusalem and his son told me that his father had told him this story.
In the last few days
before liberation while we were standing in line to be counted, a Kapo told us
that an abominable act had been committed; someone had cut off the behind of a
dead prisoner and eaten it. He asked,
“Who did it?” We were all fully aware of
the collective punishment that would likely ensue -- execution -- if there was
no reply. Yet we all stood mute. Surprisingly, we received no collective
punishment.
The last few days
breakfast consisted of watery coffee.
Lunch was about 100 grams of bread mixed with sawdust and a bowl of soup
made from a minimal amount of potato peel.
A very famous (religious) sage at the camp was actually arguing with
others as to whether the soup was made from one tablespoonful of potato peel or
two. In our condition, the difference
between one or two tablespoonfuls was significant; the more peels, the longer
we might survive. At this time I recall
making a circle with the thumb and middle finger of one of my hands and being
able to completely encircle my upper arm with it.
About three weeks before
liberation, there were 821 prisoners in my barrack. A few days before liberation less than 300
still survived. Near the end I felt we
were existing like animals. Starving and
searching for something edible, I found some grass growing by the barracks
where the SS had their office. I ate it.
To the bitter end the
Germans adhered to their fanatic bookkeeping and brutality. Outside the SS officers’ building there stood
a bulletin board with a listing of 18 countries of origin. In two columns to the right of each country
was a chalk entry of the number of prisoners alive yesterday and the number of
prisoners alive today. It is important
to remember that the Nazis exterminated people of many different religions from
many different countries.
Hope arrived the next
afternoon when I was told that the night shift was not going out to work. This had never happened, so I knew that this
meant we would be liberated soon. I
already knew that the Russians were advancing, because people from more eastern
camps had been arriving here. That night
I was greatly comforted by a dream about the rabbi of Szatmar, from whom I had
learned the importance of faith and of bringing hope and comfort to
others. He asked me, “Why are your
clothes so dirty?” I told him, “I’m
coming from a very difficult journey.”
He nodded solemnly. When I woke
up I knew we would be liberated very soon.
The next morning as we
were walking to the counting area, we were fortunate to have to walk by some
alert Spaniards in the two barracks closest to the camp exit. These Spanish Gentiles had revolted against
Franco, who had allied himself with the Nazis.
They were treated somewhat better than the rest of us. As we walked by them, the Spaniards shouted and
warned us, “Don’t go! Don’t go!”
At first, we didn’t know
what they were talking about. Then the
SS commander told us, “The American army is coming. Go into the tunnel to be saved.” At this point the Spaniards screamed, “We
won’t go!” Then the entire camp
revolted, chanting, “We won’t go!” The
three SS commanders and two remaining guards fled. After the SS ran away, we saw outside the
electric fence of the camp a few old Wehrmacht soldiers. Later that afternoon we heard a big explosion
in the tunnel which had been wired with a time bomb. Years later I read in Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews that this was the
only Nazi concentration camp where prisoners revolted and survived!
About 5 p.m. on May 7,
1945, two American tanks arrived in advance of the American army. We all ran to the tanks; we were so excited. I jumped onto one and was lucky I didn’t get
run over! After this moment of
jubilation and weak from starvation, I started searching in the SS barracks for
food. I found some ground chicory coffee
beans and shoveled them into my mouth.
Then, unfortunately, I found a bottle with a few drops in it that
smelled like alcohol and drank it. It
had a bitter aftertaste. Someone came
in, saw me drinking it, and told me it was shoe polish. Since then, despite the fact that I am not a
picky eater, I cannot stand the taste of cilantro, which reminds me of the
taste of the shoe polish!
While the two American
tanks waited for the rest of their unit to arrive, Betzalel and I left the camp
to find food. We walked like 80-year-old
men, not like the 20- year-olds that we were.
We asked local farmers for food, and one gave us a potato and a small
piece of bread. Then another came out
with a gun. Realizing this was too
dangerous, we stopped asking for food and returned to the camp.
Upon our return, we learned
that a particularly brutal and sadistic Kapo -- luckily, I had never had any
dealings with this Kapo -- had been at the camp at the time of liberation. A mob of prisoners captured him and killed
him by skinning him alive.
The next day, after the
American army arrived, they cooked us a very excellent and nourishing dinner, a
beef stew. I woke up in the middle of
the night and felt like I was choking to death.
It seemed that my stomach was incapable of digesting solid food. Sadly, some people actually died from their
first real meal in such a long time.
Because the Americans
were understaffed, they asked for help assisting the bedridden that night. Despite my stomach problems, I was still
capable of moving and working and felt well enough to help the less
fortunate. That night I helped turn the
bedridden over, take them to the restroom, and feed them. The next day I helped with burial tasks.
In the morning, I had another initially satisfying, yet
ultimately disturbing culinary experience.
The Americans served us bacon for breakfast. I got severe heartburn. I felt angry that now, when I finally had the
opportunity to eat, I had to go through this!
I became extremely careful of what and how I ate.
Continuing in their
efforts to help us regain our health and dignity, the Americans, with the
assistance of some young, local women, fed and cleaned people who were too ill
to move. They also brought trucks with
showers for those of us who were mobile. We needed showers desperately, because
we were all full of lice. While showering, I became startled and frightened
when I realized that at 21 years of age, I had just seen young, beautiful women
and had not had a normal masculine response.
During my imprisonment, I had feared the Nazis would castrate us. Now I feared I would never have a normal
life. A more knowledgeable man assured
me that this was normal for our physical condition and that when we got our strength
back, we would be all right.
We stayed at the camp
for a few more weeks. The American
military authority told us that we had two choices: to stay in the camp and wait to see which
countries would accept refugees, or try to go back to our own native
countries. Despite the fact that
returning to my family would make it more difficult to break with tradition and
the family plan for me to become a rabbi, I felt compelled to return to my
birthplace to see if I could find any of them.
There were some people who knew that they would not find anyone, so they
stayed in the camp and waited to see which countries would accept them. Those who chose to leave were transported in
American military trucks to the Russian-occupied side of Austria. On arrival, we all started talking
excitedly. Suddenly, a female Russian
soldier started screaming at us from the window of her office, “You loud Jewish
people. What do you think? You are in the synagogue?”
Immediately after World War II, chaos ruled
Europe. The Russian-occupied side had
only military authority, and trains were the only form of mass transportation
available. There was high demand and
short supply of every imaginable resource, including trains. Therefore, people actually rode on top of the
trains as well as inside them. To return
to my birthplace, I rode on top of a train.
Because of the scarcity of food, public kitchens were created to feed
the hungry.
When I arrived in
Budapest, I found a small Jewish community and recognized one of my cousins,
Jehuda Frankl, with whom I had brainstormed about escape before our capture
during the war. I was so excited that I
gave him a hearty slap on the back. He
was so weak that this blow almost caused him to faint. I then realized our joy in surviving and
seeing each other again had to be celebrated very, very carefully.
I was filled with more
joy upon finding other surviving relatives in Debrecen. My
Uncle Naftoly and his entire immediate family had survived intact. They had been taken a little later than I,
and they owed their survival to the ingeniousness of Uncle Naftoly’s wife, my
Aunt Malka. Because the Russians
destroyed many train tracks to Auschwitz, the Nazis were forced to decrease the
number of Jews they sent to Auschwitz and increase the number they sent to
occupied countries to work on farms. The
selection process involved visual inspection by the SS followed by stamping
some people’s hands and not others. One
group was destined for Auschwitz, the other for the farms. No one knew which, but Aunt Malka had
observed that the older, weaker persons had been stamped. She surmised that she and her family had
received the mark of death.
Surreptitiously she rubbed and rubbed till she had erased all traces of
her family’s stamps. The Nazis didn’t
notice this, so my aunt’s family were all sent to farms to work.
Aunt Malka, the daughter
of a rabbi, had been taught to be charitable.
Her family was famous for feeding the poor. Today in the United States there are still
people who are grateful to her, because she took from her own rations at the
farm and gave to others who might not live if they didn’t have more to
eat. My aunt lived in Brooklyn, New York
for a while and then moved to Florida where she lived until her death a few
years ago. She was often visited by the
children of those she had helped during those terrible times.
Continuing on my journey
home, cousin Betzalel, another acquaintance, and I eventually arrived in
Care-Mare. Typical of the disorder and
lack of resources, there was a blackout when we arrived. As we walked through the town, our
acquaintance walked in front of us and acted as a look-out on the dark
streets. Suddenly we heard him
screaming. We ran to help him and saw
that he was being beaten by two Gentiles who claimed he had tried to steal
their watch. Our acquaintance said this
was not true. We were furious and
started to fight them. (The reason that
Jews received such a bad reception upon returning home is that all of our homes
had been taken over by Gentiles.)
Hearing the commotion,
some Russian soldiers approached and yelled, “Stoi!” (“Stop!”) We all froze.
They took us to their headquarters.
To our surprise the Russian officer in charge was Jewish. He took Betzalel, our acquaintance, and me
aside and spoke to us in Yiddish. “You
deserve to be put in jail,” he told us.
“Why?” we asked innocently.
“Because you should have
killed those guys! They’ve killed enough
of us!” We were speechless. Of course,
we knew that many Russian Jews had lost family members during the Nazi occupation
of parts of Russia, so even though he was a soldier, his situation was not so
different from ours. “Stand up for
yourselves and don’t let yourselves be abused!
Get out of here now, and don’t let me see you again, or you’ll end up in
jail!” he admonished us. Meanwhile, the
Gentiles were booked.
After this episode, we
three decided to go our separate ways. I
continued on my travels and sought other relatives in the midst of the chaos,
which reigned for several months. Many
people had been displaced, inflation was rampant, and in Budapest you had to
have a suitcase full of money to buy a loaf of bread.
From Uncle Naftoly I had
learned the remarkable fate of his and my mother’s sister, Aunt Malka, (not the
same Aunt Malka who was Uncle Naftoly’s wife).
Aunt Malka and her immediate family had lived for a while near Tasnad
and moved to Timasura some time before the war.
When Hungary regained most of Transylvania during World War II, it did
not, for reasons unknown to me, regain a few small towns, including
Timasura. Romania retained this small
area, and the Jews who lived there were not touched by the Nazis. Eventually, in 1951 Aunt Malka and her family
decided to leave Romania and immigrate to the United States. The family traveled on two different
airplanes. Unfortunately, her son Rafael
and his wife did not survive a plane crash.
Their infant son, Jacob, was swaddled in a pillow which broke loose from
the plane and soared safely onto a tree branch.
Aunt Malka raised Jacob, who grew up and worked as a computer programmer
for the New York Times and now owns a print shop in Brooklyn, New York.
Upon reaching the town
of Berbesht where my mother’s family grew up, I located another maternal uncle,
Uncle Lipa. I was especially happy to
see Uncle Lipa, whom I greatly admired for his unflinching honesty and
compassion. Many years later Uncle Lipa
consoled me when I was worrying about my success as a parent. His son had gone to a yeshiva, while my children
received a secular education. I
complimented him, “You have raised your son more responsibly than I.” I said this because his son appeared to be
more disciplined than my children. He
responded with total honesty, “No, our system is very disciplined until the age
of 15 or 16; then we lose control of our children and they behave
irresponsibly.” I was impressed by his
admission which few religious persons would make.
After spending a short
time visiting with Uncle Lipa, I steeled myself to return to Szatmar. It was
unbearable to see the empty houses. I
was haunted by memories of the people, probably all dead, who had lived in
them. I did not find my father’s second
cousin, Joel Teitelbaum, the Szatmar rabbi.
However, I did meet a distant relative who warned me, “Don’t stay
here. The Russians will take over and
you’ll have to stand in line for every little thing, even a shoe lace.” I located the Szatmar rabbi’s synagogue. The
roof was damaged, the floor was broken up, and there was grass growing in the
cracks. I was reminded of a Talmudic
passage in which the destruction of the temple is mourned. Standing there in the deserted synagogue with
grass growing in it and knowing that the community was completely destroyed
filled me with overwhelming sorrow.
During the course of my
travels in Szatmar, I had another disturbing experience which convinced me to
leave the town and consider leaving the whole area. I went to a small restaurant for
breakfast. The owner was a concentration
camp survivor. I witnessed his business
dealings with a local peasant woman who had walked into the restaurant to sell
butter. When negotiating the price, the
restaurant owner claimed the butter was not fresh and had water in it. He used every argument he could to drive down
the price. The woman argued back but
eventually they agreed on a price for the butter, based on weight. The owner weighed the butter in front of
her. Then he gave her some money. Taking the money and counting it, the woman
became very angry and cried out, “What, do you think I don’t know how to
calculate the price?” This upset me very
much. The same atmosphere of hostility
from before the war had returned.
Analyzing
this upsetting experience, I realized that sales are intrinsically
adversarial. The buyer and seller each
try to maximize the value received from the transaction. Hard feelings develop when one party feels
the other has taken advantage of him or her.
When a minority, such as the Jews, are the merchants, they frequently
become a scapegoat for the business and personal frustrations of the
majority. I was not eager to assume the
potentially dangerous occupation that Jews had been forced to assume for
centuries. I was all the more determined
to leave my native land and not be a merchant.
Perhaps I’d be a factory worker or a farmer, but not a merchant. I was more interested in dedicating my life
to making and keeping the peace.
I decided to return to
Care-Mare where I met up with Betsalel at his family’s house. We broke a hole in the cellar wall where we
had stored the family valuables before we went to the Ghetto of Szatmar and
then Auschwitz. We recovered my mother’s
ring and ritual pearls, our candle holder, menorah, and silver cup, and
Betzalel recovered his family valuables.
Because the Russian soldiers would rob you of everything of value you carried
when they let you board a train, we did not want to take these things with
us. They were the only reminders I had
of my immediate family. I decided to
sell them to my uncle Lipa in order to keep them in the family. Since they didn’t have much money, I sold
everything for a fraction of their worth.
Pessimistic about the
likelihood of a positive change for Jews occurring in Romania, grieving the
loss of my immediate family, but determined not to live under communist rule, I
was the first of my extended family’s survivors to leave our homeland in search
of freedom. With no money, no trade,
and not speaking any western European language, but with much hope and no fear
of hard work, I put a few pieces of clothing in a back pack and left on my
journey.
Having only a vague idea
where I could catch a train, I walked along a farmer’s field and asked him
where the Hungarian-Romanian border was.
He told me I was on a border.
(People were supposed to cross countries only at border checkpoints, not
at the edge of a farmer’s field.
However, there were insufficient soldiers to enforce this, and the
civilian police of each country were disorganized and ineffective.) I was too tired to walk to the border check
point, so I walked through the field, got to a village, and took the train to
Debrecen. Then I transferred to another
train for Budapest.
From the Jewish
community in Budapest I learned that there was an underground Jewish
organization called the Briha (in Hebrew: “the runners”), who smuggled young
people over the borders and helped them get to Palestine to help fight the
British. At the time Israel was not yet
a country. Palestine was under British
control and the British did not allow Jews unlimited immigration. There was a long history of tension between
the Jews and Arabs in Palestine, dating from the 1500’s, when the area was
owned by the Turks. In 1918 Turkey was
defeated and the British took over Palestine as a mandate from the League of
Nations. Initially the British gave Jews
the right to settle in Palestine, although not to form an independent
state. The Palestinian Arabs felt
threatened, even though the region where the Jews settled was primarily swamps and
deserts. The Arabs knew that Jews relocating
to Palestine did so because they wanted eventually to create an independent
Jewish state. To ease tensions, in 1936
the British instituted a quota for Jews coming to Palestine.
I joined up with the
Briha and they arranged for a group to travel to a displaced person (DP) camp
in Vienna. There I met Uncle Naftoly and
his family from Debrecen and joined them.
From Vienna, we went to a small village, Brno. At the time, the eastern side of Austria,
including Vienna, was under Russian occupation.
The western side, including Salzburg, was under American
occupation.) Because the Russian side
was under Communist control, most Jews didn’t want to stay there.
I rejoined the Briha who
arranged to take a group of Jewish
refugees to a small river where they would try to smuggle us across in the
middle of the night. Carrying all of our
belongings in suitcases and backpacks, we boarded a boat and crossed the
river. All of a sudden we heard an
American soldier shout to his commander, “People are here!” These were the first English words I had ever
heard. The commander came and told the
Briha leader that we had to go back.
They weren’t allowed to let refugees come over to the American
side. We returned to Brno.
While living again with
Uncle Naftoly’s family, I was encouraged to return to my old religious
lifestyle and become a rabbi. I knew
that if I stayed with my uncle, who was also a rabbi, my fate would be
cast. Resolved that I would not become
a rabbi, I told Uncle Naftoly that I wanted to go to Palestine. Because his own life had been so shattered
and he was totally uncertain of the future himself, he did not try to hold me
back. So within a few days of the unsuccessful
effort to cross to the American zone, I joined another group of young people
trying to sneak over to the American-occupied side of Austria. I knew I had to act quickly lest I be enticed
by the comfort of family to return to a life I really didn’t want. This time
our crossing was successful, and because no one after the war had
identification cards or passports, I was free to stay.
I stayed in Salzburg
a few days and then traveled further west into Germany. The German people avoided refugees who were
reminders of the war and whom the locals could not assist anyway. We were
personae non grata, and we were treated like homeless people are often treated
in the United States today. The local
people would pretend they didn’t see us, hold their children close to them, and
go on their way. I recall once walking
on the streets of Nuremberg in the spring of 1946, looking for a train station
so I could continue my journey. Most of
the buildings had been reduced to rubble.
As I passed by Spandau prison (where German war criminals were being
held), I saw a man walking in the street and asked him where the train station
was. He told me it wasn’t far. I walked for two hours before I arrived at a
working train station!
Consistent with our
status as outcasts, we lived in displaced persons camps created outside of towns
in former military forts or other institutions.
On the institutional land, there would be several buildings. The military authorities segregated us from
the locals because they feared violence might erupt if we mixed. In the DP camp I promised myself that I would
never have children. We Jews are a
minority everywhere in the world and whenever our host country has bad times,
we are blamed. I did not want to bring
children into a world where they would be subjected to this prejudice. I did not yet know that Israel would become a
country. When this happened in 1948, my
feelings about becoming a parent changed.
From Nuremberg I took a
train to Munich, where I found out about a refugee camp named Fernwald. A
distant relative, Rabbi Halberstam, had set up a religious study group there,
and I joined it. While I had rejected
the very strict Hasidic lifestyle, I certainly had not rejected Judaism
altogether. Rabbi Halberstam had met with General Eisenhower during the
occupation and told him that we Jewish refugees in Germany needed a synagogue
and Torahs. Eisenhower arranged for one
of the buildings in the Fernwald DP camp to be designated a synagogue and
yeshiva.
Yet the religious study
was quite discouraging to me. Here we
were, primarily young people in their 20’s who had survived concentration
camps, discussing pilpul --i.e. arguing over hair-splitting interpretations of
the Torah. This was not practical. How would we earn a living in this
world? I wanted us to use our religious
study as a springboard to become teachers or kosher slaughterers. Yet, this desire for vocational training was
not shared by most of the people in the camp. When I circulated a petition to
create vocational training at Fernwald, the rabbi told us that if we focused on
vocational training in lieu of religious study, we would be rejecting our
heritage. His condemnation of my
petition ensured its failure. Feeling
embarrassed and rejected, I left the Fernwald synagogue and yeshiva.
Uncertain of future
goals, many displaced persons drifted in this environment. It took up to five years to arrange to go to
the United States or other countries.
Also, because of the British quota on Jewish immigration to Palestine,
it also took a long time to get there.
Many people stayed in the DP camps for years; I left within three
months.
Yet, I, too, experienced a period of drifting
while I waited for a chance to go to Palestine.
Four times I took advantage of the black market. I bought cigarettes from American soldiers in
Germany. Then I took a train to a town
not far from the Czech border. I crossed
the border at night through a forest to a town called Ash in the Sudeten, where
I sold the cigarettes. Though I realized
I could stay and earn a good living as a smuggler, I resisted the temptation,
discontinued smuggling, and looked more diligently for a way to get to
Palestine.
My efforts were rewarded
when I located the Briha again; they were much more focused on getting people
to Palestine. They took us on freight trucks from near
Frankfurt, Germany to the town of La Ciotat, France, near the port of
Marseilles on the Mediterranean coast.
There, for the first time in my life, I saw an ocean. We traveled
through beautiful mountains and arrived on the Riviera. We stayed there in a DP camp for about six
months which was organized by the Briha, not the military authorities, and
which we ran ourselves. We planned to
stay until we could find a boat to smuggle ourselves into Palestine.
At this DP camp, I was
reunited with my cousin, Betzalel, who had met Jehuda Frankl’s sister and
married her. Betzalel’s wife is very
lovely and has a very positive and pleasant disposition. They managed to get on a boat which
succeeded in avoiding the British blockade and settled in Jerusalem.
Still waiting for our
chance to break through the British blockade, we withstood the uncomfortable
conditions at the DP camp. We covered
ourselves at night with blankets to avoid the mosquitoes which overran the camp,
but they persistently bored right through the blankets. I was frightened at first, but eventually I
got used to them. Once again food was in short supply. Our stay was brightened by the periodic
delivery of Hebrew newspapers from
Palestine, which I read and began translating for others who could not read
Hebrew. Fortunately, there was a fellow
in our group who knew modern Hebrew. (I
had studied the Hebrew of the Torah). Joseph
was tall and slim, had blond hair and wore glasses. He came from an educated, orthodox Jewish
family which had been Zionist before the war.
(Zionists believed Jews should establish a Jewish state in
Palestine.) He explained to me that
there is a big difference between modern and Torah Hebrew and that I had turned
the stories upside down! Although I was
glad he told me this, I was immensely disappointed because my knowledge of the
Hebrew language was the one thing I had learned as a child that I thought would
be of practical use.
Resolved to be prepared
for life in Palestine, I studied modern Hebrew daily. Still wearing my earlocks, I sat on a small
cot in the DP camp barracks and studied a book about Jewish history, written by
Dubnoff in modern Hebrew.
Another group that
helped me achieve a modern outlook was called “Enlightened Jews” from
Lithuania. They had developed a
philosophy combining religious ideas with the latest scientific
advancements. They felt scientific study
and knowledge were instrumental to our survival. This group had become increasingly widespread
and popular. They also were Zionists and
believed that the only way for Jews to survive was to build a Jewish homeland
in Palestine. We had long discussions
about faith and philosophy. They had
extensive knowledge of the secular and I had deep knowledge of Jewish
tradition, law, literature and mysticism.
They explained to me the difference between values and faith on the one
hand, and tradition on the other. I
concluded that tradition and blind adherence to ritual can be negative when
people are inflexible and use it as an excuse for failing to accommodate to
changed circumstances. Indeed, in Jewish
literature it is written that there are times when it is necessary to break
religious laws in order to serve God.
While
studying, discussing, and thinking about our future in Palestine, we still had
to take care of our daily needs at the DP camp in France. As a member of a group of three in charge of
sanitation, my daily routine was to take out the garbage in the morning and
clean up the mess hall after each meal.
In the afternoon, we went to an abandoned beach for a swim and more conversation.
Planning
for our future home in Palestine, we searched and finally obtained a boat which
we hoped would enable us to sneak into Palestine. If we failed to break through the British blockade, we hoped that at
least our attempt would demonstrate to the world the plight of displaced
Jews. In the middle of an October night
in 1946 we boarded the boat, which was originally used for transporting animals
along the Mediterranean coast. The Briha
had constructed three levels of bunks and squeezed 650 people into this boat. Our voyage was met with a number of
obstacles. First, when we left the port,
we hit a rock which made a hole in the boat.
The lower level filled with water.
Everyone got seasick and the smell of vomit became intolerable. People ran from the bottom level of the boat
to the top deck. The Briha leaders
constantly directed people from one side of the boat to the other to avoid
capsizing. We endured this for 13 days
while trying also to prevent detection by the British who watched the shores
for illegal aliens.
Aggravating the situation was the sea water
constantly seeping into the boat. One
day it reached the middle level. We
opened a door to bail out the sea water, when a sudden storm arose. It was very difficult to close the door, but
absolutely necessary to prevent sinking. We barely managed to get the door
shut.
Then another problem
presented itself. The toilets located on
the middle level of the boat clogged and overflowed. The Briha leaders called the sanitation group
from the DP camp up to the captain’s cabin.
They offered us a bottle of cognac and explained the seriousness of the
situation, that we could all get typhus if the mess were not cleaned. We went down to clean the mess, but the other
two in my group couldn’t stand the smell.
They ran out and I was left alone.
I remembered how the Gentiles used to make fun of us and humiliate us by
saying things like, “You Jews can’t do your own dirty work. You will always need servants to do your
dirty work for you.” The bitter memory
of this taunting gave me the strength to clean the mess. I didn’t stop until I had cleaned it all. My personal victory tasted sweeter than the
cognac.
Our final obstacle was
being detected one night by the British.
They sent a destroyer, boarded our boat, and told us we must follow them
to Cypress. At first we tried to resist
and threw sweet potato cans at the boarding British soldiers. We were so close
to our new home for which we had endured so much. They left the boat and used their destroyer
to tilt our boat at a 45 degree angle.
They threatened to continue tilting the boat until we sank if we did not
follow them to Cypress. We ultimately
relented.
At Cypress we waited in yet
another DP camp to go to Palestine. We
were promised that 1500 of us a month would be allowed to go. However, other refugee boats had managed to
break through the British blockade, and the British reduced the number of our
group who could leave for Palestine each month.
Worried that we would never get to Palestine, we demonstrated and tried
to open the gate of the camp where we were essentially imprisoned. The British retaliated by shooting at the
legs of the first few who tried to escape.
We backed off. We were lucky we
were dealing with the British, I thought at that time, because had it been the
Russians, they would have shot to kill.
During my time in
Cypress, I widened my horizons with secular education from books and
discussions to increase my vocational opportunities. I desperately wanted to get to Palestine
where we Jews, if not completely safe, could at least defend ourselves.
After about six months
in Cypress, I finally was allowed into Palestine. For a month I stayed in a British DP camp
called Latrun, where the British supplied us with identification cards. During this time I grappled with several
questions burning in my mind: 1) Why did
God let such horrible things happen? 2)
Why had I survived? 3) What should my
life purpose be?
I thought of my
grandfather who had died in some unknown field and had not received a Jewish
ritual burial. I thought of my father
and how he had not eaten dinner at times so that we children could eat. I thought of my mother working hard to scrub
and clean clothes for eight children. I
remembered my sisters doing their homework together and my kid brother playing
soccer with neighborhood friends. I
thought of Rachel, my oldest sister, and her baby and my brother-in-law, Moses, going to the
infirmary. They were all good people
with a deep faith. They had all
perished. I couldn’t understand why God
would let such misfortune befall them. I
cried openly.
To assist us in
reconstructing our lives, we each met with a counselor who helped us decide
what location and occupation would best suit our individual skills and
needs. The Israelis tried to prepare us
for the tense environment we were entering --neighboring Arabs were very hostile
to the major influx of Jews to the area.
We were warned that Sabbath laws were regularly violated by the military
in the interest of our survival, and we were encouraged to join the military. Having had my life on the line every moment
that I was a concentration camp inmate, I did not want to do this. I considered joining one of the few Hasidic
settlements in Israel, but these were the butt of many jokes made by other
Israelis. So, I continued to slowly
relinquish my religious lifestyle. It
was a very big step for me to go to a barber and have him cut my earlocks. Then I joined a modern -- not Hasidic
--religious organization.
For my first year in Israel I chose to work on
a private farm with animals because I had become terribly disillusioned with
people. Of course the Holocaust
experience was the major reason for my disillusionment, but another was my
post-war experience as one of many displaced persons, shunned by the majority,
whose guilty conscience led them to segregate us. Also I had noticed the clear class divisions
between workers, merchants, and politicians.
I disliked the ill treatment the so-called upper classes gave the lower
classes. I reasoned that I could avoid
all this if I spent most of my time with animals.
In
addition to farming skills, I improved my social skills. The private farm where I worked from May 1947
to May 1948 was owned by a couple who had emigrated from London. I felt very comfortable with them because
they also came from very religious backgrounds and had come to Palestine to
help create a sanctuary for Jews. They
had three sons. Although the farmer’s
wife was very busy with housework and the care of the children, she made a
special effort to talk with me. (Having
been brought up to become a Hasidic rabbi, I had spent all my time in religious
study and had had no interaction at all with women.) She also prepared very delicious and
nutritious meals. That year, in contrast
to recent years of eating slim rations of institutional food, I ate my fill of
home-cooked meals and felt like a king.
I also enjoyed talking with the farmer and helping him add two rooms
onto his house.
I remember fondly my
first Sabbath there. I had walked out
through some fields towards the houses of a nearby kibbutz. As I passed by a tree near the houses I
suddenly found myself facing five playpens with babies in them, all about the
same age, smiling at me. The warmth that
this brought to my heart overwhelmed me.
From May 1944, when I arrived in Auschwitz, until now, I had not seen a
child up close who had smiled at me. I
have very good memories of this year.
In addition to
relearning to trust people, I also benefited from the farm skills I
learned. The farm consisted of a few
acres. On one acre sat the house, barn,
garden and chicken coop. The remaining
land was used to produce crops. The farm
was part of a collective located about 60 miles from Haifa. Every day the farmer would collect the farm
products from the local warehouse and drive his truck to the distribution center
in Haifa where he would leave them to be sold.
He also bought and brought back the items needed by the farmers. He trained me to care for the animals while
he traveled. I took care of the chicken
coop, fed and milked the three cows and tended a small orchard with orange,
apple and peach trees. .
While time and my work
gradually helped increase my trust in humans, my naive trust in animals was
diminished one day. I was letting the
cows out of the barn when one cow abruptly turned and threw me into a
corner. I could have been killed. I realized then that even four-legged animals
can be unpredictable.
When the United Nations
declared that there would be a Jewish state, hostilities between Arabs and Jews
erupted. Again I felt the survival of my
people was threatened. I wanted to
volunteer at once for the “undeclared army,” but was advised that food
production was critical because we were being cut off from the Arab
supply. Therefore, I fulfilled my year’s
commitment on the farm. To assist my
people further I volunteered four hours nightly as a watchman at the village
fortress.
One night I was holding
my rifle and looking out a peephole of the fortress. I saw something
moving. It gave me one hell of a scare,
because I had only the most minimal military training for this volunteer
position. Shortly thereafter, I realized
it was only a donkey and was quite relieved.
Discussions with the
Lithuanian Enlightened Jews and the Briha had prepared me to change my attitude
and perceptions of life. I couldn’t
survive with my old religious ways. I
became a Zionist and believed that the only place where we Jews could live and
realize our full potential was Israel. I
also realized that Israel had to be run on a somewhat secular plan. Strict adherence to the prohibition against
bearing arms on the Sabbath would result in our swift defeat. If your enemy knows you won’t fight on the
Sabbath, that’s exactly when they will attack.
On May 15, 1948, the
British left Palestine which became the independent state of Israel. Immediately the Arabs attacked and I
volunteered for the Israeli military. My
number was 24916. After three days of
getting organized, I was with a group of about thirty people when an officer
asked for volunteers to work with explosives and putting up mine fields. He explained that you can make only one
mistake on this kind of assignment. You
never get a chance to make another.
First I thought, “I’ve
suffered enough. Let somebody else
go.” But no one else volunteered. After the second call, I argued with myself,
“People who have a father, or mother, or wife, or children, or brothers and
sisters, if they get killed, there will be family to grieve them. I have nobody, so it’s my obligation to go.” Standing in the third line from the front
where the officer stood, I said in a very low voice, “I’ll do it.” I spoke so softly that under normal
circumstances I probably wouldn’t have been heard. But the group was so quiet that he heard me
immediately and picked me out of the group.
As with farming, I again
sought to obtain practical, modern training to help my people survive. This kind of training was quite different.
The explosives team was taught to recognize all kinds of mines from different
militaries because the enemy used all kinds.
We were trained in explosives so that we could go behind the enemy lines
and destroy or damage their fuel tanks. Without fuel, the enemy could not
attack. In learning how explosive
devices were built to increase their potential for damage, I also learned how
to use the minimum explosive material for the maximum effect. We explosives team members wore special,
noiseless rubber shoes and carried a special knife for digging to place the
mines. We were very proud to walk around
the camp in our outfits. Unlike a few
who tried to horse around with their weapons and actually lost fingers, I had a
great deal of respect for my rifle and detonators.
Another weapon which we
carried on our backs were flame throwers containing napalm. We used the flame throwers to destroy
attacking tanks. The flame throwers used
gas pressure to project flames. We had
to wait until a tank was about 40 meters away and then,by aiming at the opening
of the tank, we could project the burning napalm into the tank and burst it into
flames. Because of the vow I made in
Melk, I was determined not to let a tank get by me nor get caught alive. I would never be a prisoner again.
I recall vividly one
harrowing assignment we had on a Sabbath night.
Our group was ordered to place mines in an area between an old deserted
British camp and the hills where Arab forces were in control of a narrow strip
of land. The enemy would come out of the
hills, climb on top of the British barracks and snipe at the road which led
from Tel Aviv to Haifa in an attempt to split Israel in half. Our mission was to mine the area between the
hills and the barracks to prevent the enemy from reaching the barracks. Unfortunately, the enemy in the hills
spotted us laden with mines and started shooting. We crouched down in a dried out creekbed and
our commander ordered us to put down the mines and lay on top of them. He explained that if a bullet hit any of the
mines we were carrying, our whole group would be killed. But if we lay on top of the mines, then more of
our group was likely to survive. With
the arrival of supporting troops who managed to divert the enemy and draw their
fire, we ultimately succeeded in mining the area. Only one of our group was wounded, and no one
died.
Occasionally we were given a few days off during the cease
fires. People would go visit their
families. I would usually go to visit
the farm where I had worked before and help out. They would pay me with food, because food was
scarce in the cities. Afterward,
carrying gifts of food, I would rush to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and give the food
to my relatives.
During one military
leave, I decided to feed my own soul. I
visited the ancient, mystic city of Safad, in the Galilee. This city is
well-known because Isaac Luria, the sixteenth century creator of Lurianic
mysticism, lived there. Luria revived
Jewish mysticism, added his own interpretation to it, and helped it grow. I went to the Luria synagogue, still intact
and in the same condition it had been hundreds of years before. The low-ceilinged synagogue was dark
inside. Near a bench by the ark was a
podium where the prayer leader would stand.
There stood some ancient scrolls with Luria’s message about the
cleansing of the soul. I admired Isaac
Luria, who has been called, “The Lion,” and I was deeply awed by this
place. I studied Luria years ago, but
never dreamed I would ever see his synagogue.
I imagined Luria still alive, taking a group of people to the Mountains
of Galilee to sing melodies, including the entrancing Lecha Dodi, “Welcome the Bride, the Sabbath
Queen.” This song is still sung on
Friday evenings at sunset to welcome the Sabbath. It is said that Luria’s melodies acted like a
meditative mantra, raising people to a higher level of consciousness. Luria believed that if ten people would
dedicate themselves selflessly to the praising of God, they could hasten the
coming of the Messiah and the redemption of the Jews. He never wrote his interpretation of the
Zohar, the main mystical work, but one of his followers, Chaim Vital, wrote
about Luria’s contributions and influence.
My visit to Safad and the synagogue was a very rewarding spiritual
experience. It helped fill the void in
my soul created by the Holocaust.
The last military battle
I fought was in March of 1948, and was an attempt to capture an Arab village
located in the middle of the Sinai Desert.
Faluja was a thorn in Israel’s side because, although we had captured
the area surrounding it, we had not captured Faluja itself from the Egyptians
who had fortified it against us. Abdel
Nassar, who subsequently became President of Egypt, was the commander in charge
of Faluja, which was being supplied at night by caravans from Egypt. For three nights we cut off the supply
caravans. On the fourth night, exhausted
from lack of sleep, we approached and captured three Egyptian soldiers. Our officer’s orders were to execute any
prisoners caught at night because it was too difficult to keep track of them in
the dark. This posed a moral dilemma for
us. Although our officer was probably
right that to succeed in battle and win freedom for our people we would have to
kill these men, it required a very cold heart to look at an unarmed human
being, and shoot him to death. The man who
was assigned to kill the POWs did not carry out his orders. When one of the Egyptians saw his chance, he
pulled out a concealed gun and started shooting at us. There was mass confusion for a while but the
POWs were eventually disarmed and executed.
We managed to capture
part of the village; however, a corner of it had not yet surrendered. We posted men throughout the captured
area. Standing by the outside wall near
the gateway to an Arab home, I suddenly heard a big commotion. We were being fired upon by Arab troops who
suddenly materialized from the village corner.
We were ordered to retreat. I was
the last to jump the wall and flee through a muddy creek bed. I was wounded in my shoulder by shrapnel but
I continued to run until I reached our forces in a safe area. They gathered the non-critical wounded and
transported them via freight train to a hospital near Tel Aviv.
My memory of this is
very hazy, and I next remember waking in a hospital, totally disoriented, with
no idea where I was nor what had happened to me. After a few minutes, I began to remember and
prayed that I was in an Israeli, not an Egyptian hospital. I leaned over the hospital bed and looked out
the open door into the corridor. When I saw
Israeli nurses bustling about I was greatly relieved. The battle was a terrible loss for us. We started with about 500 in our battalion,
and lost about 100. The Arabs recaptured
the area. I believe this battle was the
biggest Israeli defeat during the war.
In the summer of 1949,
still convinced I must dedicate my life to the survival of my people and
Israel, I responded to an appeal from the Jewish Agency for people to become
“farming soldiers.” These people were
needed to settle on the troubled borders, farm the land, and protect the
borders. I recognized that in this mission
I could combine my two newly-obtained practical skills, farming and being a
soldier. Near Afula I joined a moshov
shitufi (cooperative settlement). Each
settler would eventually own his own house and farm, but the farm products
would be marketed and distributed collectively.
I was attracted to this group because they were ready to use every ounce
of their strength to ensure Jewish survival.
They had recently transferred from a settlement near Beersheba, where
they had been totally surrounded by Arab forces. For months this group had lived in
underground bunkers and fought the Arabs while dealing with constant shortages
of ammunition. This took a great deal of
stamina and determination.
One day I was plowing a
field with an older farmer who taught me a practical lesson. It was lunch time and he stopped working and
called me to lunch. I said, “I have to
finish. It’s only another half hour’s
worth of work.” He replied, “Rafael,
Listen. If you always want to finish
something, you will never have a life.
Don’t be a slave to circumstances.
It is time to eat. Stop, eat, and
finish later!”
In the moshov everything
was done as a community. We lived in
tents while family housing units were being built by the entire group and we
all ate in a common kitchen. Besides
farming we performed outside tasks as needed to supplement the moshov
income. A construction project nearby
needed some manual laborers and I eagerly volunteered. The contractor would pick us up in his truck
and drive us to the building site. Five
of us were assigned to build a cement roof for a warehouse. There was only one small cement mixer and,
unfortunately, after a few hours it broke down.
Because we were building a roof we couldn’t stop in the middle. We worked feverishly, mixing cement with our
hands, until we completed the job late at night.
When we arrived home,
there was a meeting in progress. The
family housing units had been completed and the moshov members agreed to
dissolve the common kitchen and assign each bachelor a family to eat with. I was assigned to a very nice, childless
couple, but I felt uncomfortable, like a fifth wheel at meal-time, the only
time the couple had to share their day with each other. I decided to leave the settlement. I had focused on basic survival issues for my
people long enough. It was time to
consider my individual future.
I went to visit my
relatives in Tel Aviv. Wanting to earn a
living by working with my hands, I spoke with Chaim Mannheimer, who was married
to my second cousin, Rickel Goldberg.
Chaim was making a living by changing the oil in cars and greasing the
wheel bearings. He asked me if I could
get money from an American relative to buy another machine and suggested we
could be partners. This didn’t work out
because the income was too meager to support both his family and me. Being single, I was free to walk away from
the business and consider other ways to earn a living.
Having always been
attracted to physical labor and the outdoors, I moved to Haifa, rented a room,
and became a construction worker. I
learned to work as a carpenter on construction sites, building frames for
cement. However, my bliss as a
blue-collar worker was spoiled by the continual pressure I received from my
extended family members, especially a woman cousin. She had lived at the Rabbi of Szatmar’s home
before the war, and now she tried to convince me to return to religious school
and become a rabbi. I explained to her
and to my extended family members, “When I am in my working clothes, I feel
like a king. I live from my labor, even
though my hands sometimes bleed from the cement.” Nevertheless, my cousin persisted in her
efforts to bring me back into the fold and even tried to make a match for me
with a niece of the Szatmar Rebbetsin.
I evaluated the situation from every angle and
realized I had two choices: 1) return to my old lifestyle, renew connections
with my family and cut myself off from the secular world or 2) break away from
my family and go my own way. I spoke
with the niece of the Szatmar Rebbitsin and told her that if I had to choose
between holding a job requiring work on the Sabbath, or being a rabbi
financially dependent on the Hasidic community, I would choose to work on the
Sabbath. This was clearly unacceptable
to her. Even though I wasn’t clear where
my own way was leading, I decided I had to blaze a new trail for myself.
Although I rejected a
religious lifestyle, I did not reject all values nor the fundamental value of a
life of service to others. I had seen
too many Holocaust survivors decide to pursue only pleasure and it seemed to me
they had degenerated into a meaningless existence which I myself could never
tolerate. Painstakingly, I examined each
value and decided whether it would permit my survival and fit with the times,
or whether I must dispense with it.
This evaluation required rigorous honesty and determination to follow
through with my decisions. I felt like I
was taking a machine gun apart and putting it back together in the dark. The values I would not give up included the
following: 1) Adhering to moral codes
having to do with relationships, i.e. not lying, cheating, stealing, etc., 2)
Helping those less fortunate, 3) Helping those in spiritual turmoil. The values I decided I could let go included:
1) Not working on the Sabbath,
2) Ritual praying every morning with tefillin (phylacteries), 3) Eating
only strictly Kosher food, 4) Dressing in traditional ways.
Not long after making
these decisions, I awakened to a new outlook on life. I went for a walk in Haifa with Samuel and
Moses Feig, two brothers with whom I had worked in the Messerschmidt
factory. Haifa is a port town including
both a valley and hills. The older
section of the city is in the valley and includes the business section. The famous Technion of Haifa is located there
and many Arabs live in this area. The
hilly sections of Haifa were settled later, primarily by relocating Jews. We walked in the hilly neighborhoods and
Samuel and Moses kept remarking on the beauty of the lush, green, rounded hills
and how happy they were to be living in such beauty. When I looked at the hills I thought, “It’s
just some hilly land. Why are they going
on like this? I’m getting tired of
politely saying, ‘Yes, it is beautiful.”
Then Moses started singing a prayer of appreciation and gratitude for
God’s creations. The song was
beautiful. I felt my annoyance
completely dissolve. As I listened and
looked around, I began to enjoy the natural beauty of the area. I realized that for a long time I had ignored
the scenery, never really stopping to appreciate it. I decided to change my attitude.
While working in Haifa
in 1950, I made another life-changing decision.
Every day I would see a neighbor, an older bachelor, taking out his
trash. He looked tired, lonely and
lifeless. Contrasting the look on his
face with the lively expressions on the faces of the married apartment
dwellers, I realized that I did not want to live my life as a bachelor. At that time I was working for a remodeling
contractor. One day I met a beautiful
young woman, who was the daughter of the owner of the house we were
remodeling. Not knowing how to approach
her and not having access to a matchmaker, I agonized about whether I should
write her a letter to see if she had any interest in me. I finally did write her a letter but she
never responded.
In 1951 inflation in
Israel was getting out of control. It
was almost impossible to rent an apartment in a city. One could only buy an apartment. The government, the principal owner of
housing, intentionally refused to rent apartments to residents, only to new
immigrants. The reason for this policy
was to encourage young people to settle on the borders and become
farmer-soldiers. I didn’t have enough
money to buy an apartment and found myself cornered. I wasn’t sure I wanted to join a kibbutz.
While trying to resolve
my housing and employment dilemmas, my cousin Jacob Gross from the United
States came to visit and urged me to emigrate.
(His father was Uncle Michael, the grocer.) Jacob owns a construction company in
Allentown, Pennsylvania. I gave this
considerable thought, but couldn’t bring myself to leave Israel. Even though I had already served in the
Israeli military, I felt a moral obligation to stay. The worsening economy and continued military
threats made Israel very unstable. I
wanted to help build a solid foundation for a Jewish state so that something
like the Holocaust could never happen again.
After a lot of soul
searching, I decided to join a kibbutz in the Galilee near Tiberias on the
Jordan River. This kibbutz was quite
isolated and there was no radio or television.
The fifty or so members used to read books from different cultures
translated into Hebrew. There was a
friendly competition of who could read the most books and we spent most of our
free time reading and discussing these books.
Life on the kibbutz was
laborious. We would get up, have
breakfast, and then divide into groups to work in the fields, the laundry, or
the kitchen. The field workers were the largest group, growing vegetables and
grain. However, there was not enough
other foods because of strict rationing in the whole country. Those who worked in the kitchen added water
to the marmalade to stretch it, and the rationed serving of eggs was 1/2 egg
per person per day. We joked that the
chickens all had razors in their behinds because they could not lay a whole egg
at once!
I recall one young
Polish woman who had been part of a test group at a concentration camp in which
the Nazis wanted to see how long children could survive without food. Even though this experience had occurred six
or seven years ago, she always took an extra slice of bread and placed it in
her pocket after breakfast before she left to go to work.
In addition to the
constant back-breaking labor, we were frequently threatened by Arab
snipers. One day a beautiful runaway
horse wandered onto our kibbutz. It had
apparently forded the Jordan River and obviously belonged to an Arab. We kept the horse. A few days later at dusk, a kibbutz member
named Yoshua was in the outhouse near the barn when he heard unfamiliar voices. He ran to the barn and saw two Arabs jumping
onto the horse. They fired at him and
then galloped away. The military
commander of the kibbutz heard the shots and ordered all kibbutz members to arm
themselves and prepare to defend the settlement. After awhile we realized the two Arabs had
come solely to reclaim their horse. We
were all relieved that it was not an attack.
During this tumultuous
time, I met and fell in love with another kibbutz member, Violet Sorani. She was a few inches taller than me, had long
black hair which she wore in braids, and a smile that lit up her whole face. I admired her for her uncompromising
dedication to her ideals. She was from
Iraq and I was fascinated by her background which was quite different from
mine. At the age of two, she had been
seriously ill and was thought to have died.
While she was being taken away in the wagon for the dead, someone saw
her moving, so she was returned to her family.
Her mother never quite recovered from this upsetting experience. Violet’s strong-willed nature contributed to
her black sheep status. As a Jewish
child in an Arab school, she was discriminated against by her Arab teachers and
was held back without apparent reason.
She began playing hooky at the age of eleven. At the age of sixteen she was attracted to
the cause of Zionism and joined an underground Zionist organization. She worked for them zealously, which helped
her as much as them. Her mother bitterly
opposed her participation in the underground.
If caught, she and her entire family would be killed. The trainer for the underground was an
Israeli. His superiors falsified papers
for him and Violet and they left Iraq posing as an Arab couple seeking the
services of a European physician. Violet
eventually emigrated to Israel in 1948 and arrived at the kibbutz in 1950 where
she organized orientations for Iraqi immigrants. In 1950 there was a large wave of Iraqi
immigrants to Israel, including Violet’s parents.
During one of their
visits to Violet on the kibbutz, I learned more about her family. Violet’s father was a merchant from
Baghdad. I liked him because he was an
honest, unpretentious family man. Violet
told me he used to walk through undesirable, crime-ridden neighborhoods to get
to the synagogue and would study and pray there for hours. When there was a riot in Baghdad in 1939, his
store was robbed and burned down. He
came home after losing everything and assured his frightened family that they
would be all right. “Even if I have to
be a water carrier for the coffee vendors, I will make sure you have all the
food and clothing you need.”
My enchantment with
Violet continued and heightened during Passover that year. The bountiful Passover feast and the happy,
spirited hora dancing afterward was the culmination and reward for a year of
hard work. In the recent past, many of
our group had been starved and worked almost to death by Hitler’s fiends, who
had been bent on annihilating us and our faith.
More recently we had been challenged to carve a homeland for ourselves
out of a small desert and swampland. We
had labored long and hard and had willingly rationed our meager food
supply. This night was different from
all other nights. On all other nights we
ate chicken in only one of two situations: the chicken was sick or the person
was sick. But on this night we all ate
chicken. On all other nights women and
men dressed alike, in the drab yet practical kibbutz attire, khakis and
shirts. But on this night everyone wore
his or her best, and color filled the room as the lively dancing began. On all other nights we pondered the problems of
raising enough food for our people and preserving our new homeland against the
threat of enemies. But on this night, grateful to God, we
focused on all that we had achieved, creating farms out of the desert and
successfully defending our home against enemies. On this night we remembered the words of
Isaiah:
And it shall come to pass...
...He shall judge between the nations,
And shall decide for many peoples;
And they shall beat their swords into
plowshares,
And their spears into pruning-hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against
nation,
Neither shall they learn war any more.
We sang a lively song to our new
homeland:
A
song for you, my homeland, my country
The
hills will be full of blossoms
At
the time the hora is danced
And
all the flowers will surround us
As we
dance to you.
After singing and dancing together, Violet and I went outside, walked
under a starry sky, and discussed our future.
We talked of marriage. I told her
that I was a person who liked taking chances and was not afraid of change. I told her that because of this, our life
together would probably be difficult, but it would also be interesting. She cautioned me that she was a very
steadfast person; indeed her family name, Sorani, means “rock.” She would accept change only when necessary
to further her ideals.
Violet had taken out a
government loan so that her parents could leave their temporary residence at a
refugee camp, buy a place to live, and start a grocery store. Because the Israeli government needed young
working soldiers on the kibbutzim, it would lend to kibbutz members more
readily than others. However, a member
couldn’t leave the kibbutz until the loan was repaid. These loans were somewhat different from
ordinary loans. Essentially, it was a
government vehicle to assure that young, healthy people would patrol our
ever-threatened borders. No regular
payments were required or expected, and the loan became due and payable only
when the kibbutz member chose to leave the kibbutz. Violet and I made about $10 a year, over and
above our room and board at the kibbutz, so the chance of us ever being able to
repay the loan was nil. I was not
comfortable with staying on the kibbutz indefinitely, or until my in-laws would
become sufficiently successful in their new business to retire the debt.
In January, 1953, I went
to Jerusalem to see the rabbi of Szatmar who was visiting some of his followers
there. (He had survived Bergen-Belsen and relocated to New York.) I heard that he had helped many people get settled. I planned to tell him of my engagement and
ask for his help so that Violet and I could marry and leave the kibbutz. When I arrived, his wife took me to his room
and said, “Here is your Rafael.” “No, he
is your Rafael,” the rabbi replied. I
felt horrible, like the black sheep of the family each wished to attribute to
the other and disown. The rabbi asked me
about my situation. I told him I was
living on a kibbutz. I tried to make it
sound not as secular as it was. Of
course, I couldn’t fool him. I told him
about Violet and our plans to marry. He
did not approve because she was not European and, more importantly, she had not
had a religious upbringing. He told me
he wanted to speak with my uncle.
Thinking he would help us, I returned later with Uncle Lipa. Surprisingly, the rabbi proceeded to make
derogatory remarks about me and belittle me in front of my uncle. Upset, I left the room. Then I overheard him telling Uncle Lipa that
our part of the family had always been a burden. I was terribly crushed by his remarks. Nevertheless, to this day I believe he was a
good and wise man. After I came to live
with him during the war, he had soon realized that it was not my destiny to
become a rabbi. After the war he never
tried to persuade me to join him, because he knew how much I admired him and
how influenced I would be by his desires.
Without the rabbi from
Szatmar’s blessings, Violet and I married on February 27, 1953. The ceremony took place outdoors at the
kibbutz. Rifles served as the poles for
the canopy. Violet wore a simple,
knee-length white dress and I wore the best khakis and shirt I could get from
the laundry. In accordance with Israeli
law, a rabbi performed the ceremony. He
came from the town of Bet She’an near the Jordan River. Suddenly a storm blew in. The rain and dust created mud
everywhere. The bride’s family, dressed
in wedding clothes, had a difficult time getting from the ceremony to the
kibbutz dining room.
During our time on the
kibbutz, Violet and I both kept quite busy.
As suited our different personalities, I held a variety of jobs while
Violet focused primarily on receiving the training and credentials to work with
troubled youth as a counselor and teacher.
My first assignment was working on blue prints and building, because of
my past experience with construction in Haifa.
I helped build a chicken coop, a building for the sheep, a barn for the
cows, and a garage. (In 1983, when I
returned with my son Chaim for a visit, I noted with pride that the garage still
stood.) After a year of construction
work, I attended a week-long seminar in Tel Aviv on bookkeeping and then worked
for a few months as a bookkeeper on the kibbutz. I found I had no patience for sitting long
hours, so I volunteered to be a shepherd, a job which most people disliked and
avoided because of the mosquitoes and odor in the summer and the rain and cold
in the winter. I was quite successful at
this. When I started there were 250
sheep. After a year there were 500. It was difficult work, milking the sheep
early in the morning and remaining outside all day, regardless of the
weather. After each day of milking, my
fingers were so stiff I couldn’t bend them.
A year later I took up gardening and miscellaneous farm work. During this period Violet continued her
training and was completing a year and a half program in Jerusalem to become a
credentialed youth counselor. I saw her
on weekends when she would return to the kibbutz.
One day while admiring a
new tractor for our kibbutz, an event occurred which could have dramatically
altered my life path. One fellow was
driving the tractor and five or six of us jumped on it and were hanging onto
the sides. As we ascended a hill, I lost
my grip, fell under the tractor and was trapped. Fortunately for me, the driver immediately
realized the problem and stopped.
Another man grabbed my shirt, but couldn’t pull me out. An ambulance was called and the paramedics
were able to extricate me.
I was taken to Afula
Hospital, about 15 miles away. I couldn’t
move my back or my fingers without excruciating pain. Three doctors consulted about my condition
and on the second day they told me it was serious and that I might be
paralyzed. I refused to believe the
doctors. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was the belief of personal
indestructibility that young people have.
I simply said, “I don’t think so.
I think I’ll be okay.” I never
despaired. The third night in the
hospital I had an urgent need to urinate, so I jumped out of bed and ran to the
toilet. A nurse saw me and almost
fainted. The next day I was sent home
but told not to work for four weeks.
They had taken X-rays, and now realized I had no broken bones nor
permanent spinal injury. I was told that
if the tractor had gone one inch further, I would have been paralyzed for
life. When I returned to work I lifted a
sack of wheat that weighed at least 80 pounds and loaded it onto a truck. I was thrilled as I realized I was pain-free
and fully recovered.
The kibbutz consisted of
several distinct groups which created tensions that ultimately led to its
demise. One group, who had started the
settlement, consisted of young, educated Iraqi Jews. A second group was young people from Hungary
who had escaped to Russia but had been sent to remote villages where they were
refugees and faced starvation due to food shortages. A third group was young people from Poland
who had survived concentration camps.
Despite our youth, idealism, and shared religion, we came from very
different cultures and had very different expectations and attitudes. This caused much friction among the members
of the kibbutz.
The Iraqi group wore
Arabic dress and spoke Arabic languages.
The Hungarian and Polish groups dressed in European fashion and spoke
European languages. Each group reminded
the other of non-Jews who had oppressed them.
Specifically, the European Jews reminded the Iraqi Jews of the British
and French who had controlled Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. They had been ill treated by the British and
French and saw little or no difference between those Europeans and the
Hungarians and Poles. The European Jews
had a hard time distinguishing between Iraqi Jews and “the enemy.”
Aggravating the tension
was the fact that most of the European Jews had lost their entire families,
whereas the Iraqi Jews had families. The
Iraqi kibbutz members received frequent visits from family members who would
spend several days at the kibbutz. This
caused the European Jews to be regularly and painfully reminded of their own losses. They also resented kibbutz guests who did not
offer to help with the demanding physical labor required to feed everyone. Further conflict arose because many of the
European Jews, who had been deprived of an education earlier, were eager to
study and looked forward to continuing university studies in the city and
eventually leaving the kibbutz. Most of the Iraqi Jews were content to remain
in the kibbutz. Even in the laundry room
friction began to grow. The Hungarian and Polish laundry workers showed
favoritism by distributing the clothes which were in better condition to other
Hungarians and Poles. When the European
Jews started assigning the more menial tasks to the Iraqi Jews, tensions
erupted.
Our kibbutz held an
organizational meeting every Saturday night usually lasting about two
hours. At these meetings we would decide
on work assignments, determine what supplies were needed and who would buy
them, who would take and sell our products at the market, what new crops we
would grow, who would attend which seminars off the kibbutz to bring needed
training back to us, etc. I observed a
number of European men and women vying
for the opportunity to attend the seminars which would lead to adequate
training for city jobs. I knew they were
planning to get the training and leave.
This upset me because I believed that everyone should be willing to make
sacrifices to make our homeland safe and prosperous. Since we were quite isolated on the kibbutz,
there was little entertainment other than conversation with our fellow
kibbutzniks. If they left, I would
sorely miss these ambitious and intellectually stimulating members. Also the increasing dissension caused by cultural
differences discouraged new people from joining our kibbutz. I sensed that it might fall apart.
I was deeply troubled
during this time. Because of the loan, I
felt trapped on the kibbutz, where there was no sense of community and no
chance for advancement. I felt torn between
my allegiances to both the European and Iraqi groups. I couldn’t sleep. I felt nauseated and couldn’t eat. I lost 20 pounds. My military rating went down from “A” to “B”
and I wasn’t considered fit enough to go out for maneuvers.
The conflict had grown
so much that the United Kibbutzim Headquarters sent a committee of three to
visit us and listen to each group’s grievances and impose a solution. The committee observed our Saturday night
meeting. The next day they met separately with a representative from each group
in a barrack room. I was not a representative
of either group because I had been trying to get everyone to stay on the
kibbutz and make it a success. I went to
an adjacent room and eavesdropped through the thin wall. Violet did not approve of this at all. She thought it was immoral. But I believed I was acting out of a need to
survive.
The Iraqi group
representative stated that they felt they were not being treated fairly by the
European group. They felt that the
Europeans looked down on them. More
importantly they complained that some European kibbutzniks were being trained
at the expense of the kibbutz and then leaving it for city jobs. This left the kibbutz with fewer people and
fewer resources to train other kibbutzniks for the same skilled work.
The European group
representative tried to justify the European position by claiming that the
Iraqi group invited their family members for visits and that the family members
used resources without contributing labor.
He disagreed with the Iraqi group’s complaint that they were being
treated unfairly. He stated that
assignments to undesirable tasks were not made disproportionately and that this
was only the imagination of the Iraqi Jews who he believed had an inferiority
complex.
Despite the United
Kibbutz Headquarters’ efforts, our differences were irreconcilable and our
kibbutz fell apart. Violet and I were
faced with the choice of going to another kibbutz or finding work
elsewhere. We decided we didn’t want to
go to another kibbutz with an already established group in which we would be
newcomers. The government forgave our
loan and the United Kibbutz Headquarters offered us a stipend to sustain us
until our first paycheck at a new job. Violet
had completed her training to be a youth counselor and she accepted a position
as a camp counselor for troubled and orphaned youth. I accepted a position as secretary to the
camp manager. We moved to Camp Kiryat
Yaarim, about 10 miles from Jerusalem near Abougoush, an ancient city.
With renewed faith in
our ability to survive, Violet and I decided to have a child. Our son was born in the Old Hadassah hospital
in Jerusalem on January 20, 1955. We
named him Chaim after my father. The
word “chaim” means “life” in Hebrew.
Violet’s mother was with her and her father arrived in the next few days
for the bris, the circumcision ceremony.
Despite this affirmation
of life, we continued to experience the
bleak effects of a war-torn country. One
day while I was taking a walk, I came upon a child about nine years old laying
in the road. I said, “Get up!” A car could come and kill you!” “I don’t
care. I want to die,” he replied. I was shocked to hear such a statement from a
child this age. Later, because of a
rabies problem, a representative from the health department in Jerusalem came
and told us to destroy all the dogs.
This same child owned a dog. When
he was in school, his dog was put to sleep, along with all the others. When he found out his dog was dead and
learned that I had helped put it to sleep, he threatened to kill our baby. We were very nervous and watched Chaim like a
hawk, never letting him out of our sight.
We also lived in fear
of the Fedayeen, the suicidal Arab terrorists who would enter civilian areas of
Israel at night and toss grenades into houses.
In addition to my duties as camp secretary, I was also in charge of the
night guards. One night one of the usual
guards was off duty and we had a substitute.
The guards were under strict orders not to open fire unless they were
certain there was an intruder, but at about one in the morning underneath the
window of our house, we heard a shot. We grabbed the baby, who was three months
old, and put him in a corner. Luckily,
he was very quiet and didn’t make a sound.
After a while, I looked out the window and saw the young substitute
guard. I asked him what was going on,
and he said that he had been scared by something running which turned out to be
a dog that he had shot.
At its inception, Israel
had many political parties and a coalition of parties was needed to get a
majority to run the government.
Brotherhood among all Jews was emphasized, because we knew that if we
did not stand together, Israel would fall. The political parties I knew about
included: the Agudat Israel, the Eastern
Group, the Freedom Party, The Progressive Party, and the Labor Party.
Because these political
parties hold different religious beliefs, they do not readily compromise with
each other. This is a source of tension
in Israel today. For example, the Agudat
Israel is a very small group whose members adhere to all orthodox Jewish laws.
The Eastern Group is also orthodox, but does permit some deviance from Jewish
laws, such as not requiring men to have beards or wear garments with
fringes. Quite different is the Freedom
Party which is secular and works to protect property rights. Also secular is the Progressive Party, which broke from the Freedom Party, and tries to
reconcile the interests of business and labor.
The Labor Party is socialist and created a system of universal health care while it was in power,
which was for quite a long time.
I was a member of the
Labor Party, so when the Progressive Party came into power, I was laid off.[8] Although Violet was not laid off, we chose to
leave because we could not both be employed in that area. We moved to Beersheba, the principal city of
the Negev, a desert area where teachers were in high demand. Violet accepted a non-licensed position as a
special education teacher. (Non-licensed teachers did the same work but were
paid much less than licensed teachers.)
She was praised by the principal of the school every year at the
graduation ceremonies. She has a unique
ability to understand and help troubled children learn. Meanwhile I became a bookkeeper at a nearby
farmer’s cooperative. I began work at
3:30 a.m. I received the products from
the farms, organized the fruits and vegetables in preparation for the auction
to merchants and kept track of the accounts.
Later I progressed to managing the dairy, an 8 to 5 job.
At this time we made day
care arrangements for Chaim and placed him in a nursery. He started having frequent colds and ear
infections and unexplainable health problems.
We tried to feed him every night but he refused to eat. I took him to the doctor one evening after
work. The only doctor available then was
overworked and simply gave Chaim an antibiotic prescription. In 1956 many Polish physicians immigrated to
Israel because of rising anti-Semitism in Poland. This was lucky for us because before this
there weren’t enough doctors in Beersheba.
As Chaim continued to be sickly, I decided to take a day off from work
and take him to one of the new physicians.
The doctor undressed him and took one look at his big belly and told me
this was a sign of malnutrition. I
visited the nursery and learned that the children were only fed farina, because
of the food shortage. We withdrew Chaim
immediately from the nursery and hired a nanny to care for him at home. We made certain there was enough food at home
to feed him properly.
On September 29, 1957,
we were blessed with another child, this time a daughter. We named her “Orna,” which means pine tree,
after a famous actress, Orna Porat, whose performances my wife and I both
admired.
I left the dairy when I
found a better paying job as a bank teller.
I never thought that I would have to deal with my feelings about Germans
again, but in 1963 I was forced to face the issue when Israel began allowing
tourists from Germany to enter Israel.
One of my duties was to exchange foreign money. A young man came up to me to exchange his
native currency. As part of the
transaction, he was required to present his passport and I saw that he was
German. This stirred up some horrible
memories. As I had to leave my station
to go to a drawer to get the money, I had time to think. I thought, “He’s young; he personally had
nothing to do with what happened. If I
treat him like an enemy, I will only spread hatred. I don’t want to have any part in spreading
hatred.” So I did my best to treat him
courteously and in the same manner that I would treat any other bank customer.
There were a number of
upsetting issues raised in Israel regarding its relation to Germany. I recall that an Israeli company contracted
with the German government to sew military uniforms. When the general public learned about this,
it caused quite a stir because some concentration camp survivors had been
forced to sew German military uniforms while in the camps, which brought back
painful memories. There was also a big
hullabaloo when the philharmonic wanted to play some Wagner pieces. Many Israelis were violently opposed to this
because Wagner was known to be an anti-Semite.
Then a series of events disturbed me so much that I decided I couldn’t
live in Israel anymore.
First, I read in a
reliable Israeli newspaper a story about a family from Morocco with eight
children, who immigrated to Israel and lived in Ramala. The husband was hospitalized in an insane asylum. The wife was totally uneducated and she and
the children had no means of support.
She asked for help at the Social Services Office. The Director of Social Services was a member
of the religious party Agudat Israel.
The custom at that time was that parties participating in the government
coalition were rewarded by having party leaders appointed as directors of
various governmental departments. Each would-be-recipient of assistance from a
specific department was required to register as a member of the director’s
party. This poor woman didn’t understand
the system and was denied assistance.
She became so desolate that one Sabbath evening she hanged herself.
The second event which
deeply affected me was the killing of a butcher by his fellow union members
because he refused to pay his Labor Party dues.
The third incident
involved our daughter, Orna. We were
sending Chaim to a good Israeli pre-school and we hired a new nanny to watch
Orna. Violet was feeling very pressured
at work and didn’t notice anything wrong.
But I noticed that the baby seemed very weak and listless. One night when I got home, Violet told me the
nanny had broken her wrist-watch. The
next night Violet told me the nanny had used one of her skirts to wipe the
floor. I told Violet she must fire this
nanny and find another. I am so glad we
did, because after we hired a new nanny and carefully watched her, Orna’s
health dramatically improved. Later, a
neighbor confessed to us that she had been aware that the first nanny was not
taking proper care of Orna. She said
that she had seen the nanny leave Orna on a plastic sheet and not change
her. She also saw the nanny take the
food meant for Orna and feed her male callers.
I was very angry with the neighbor for not telling us about this much
sooner.
The fourth incident
occurred when Orna was old enough to attend school. The condominium in which we lived was located
one block from a very devastated area where the people had very little
education and were very poor. The school
serving that area was totally neglected by the Board of Education. For political reasons the school district was
changed and all the people from the newly-created district, which included us,
were ordered to enroll our children in this neglected school. (This did not affect Chaim, who was already
enrolled at a better school.) The
intent was to force the Board of Education to improve the school by having the
children of more affluent families attend the school. However, most of the affluent families found
ways to avoid sending their children to the neglected school.
Because my wife was a
teacher in a different part of the city, we tried to take our daughter to the
school where her mother taught. The
principal of her school told her she couldn’t do this. We decided to leave our condo empty and rent
from a bachelor who owned a condo in the neighborhood where my wife
taught. In addition to a good school Orna
would also have access to a ballet school in that neighborhood. Unfortunately, before the year ended the
owner of the condo told us he was getting married and needed to have his condo
back.
Another disillusioning
incident involved a neighbor who owned and operated a tractor used in building
new roads. He had hired an Arab helper
and bragged to me about mistreating him.
I confronted him, “Why do you treat him that way?” He justified his behavior by telling me that
when he was a child growing up in the Galilee, his family had had frequent
trouble with Arab neighbors regarding property rights. I was very disturbed by his attitude because
I had been trying to convince our Gentile neighbors not to stereotype and
mistreat Jews, and here was a Jew stereotyping and mistreating Arabs!
The final incident and
last straw involved my wife’s trying to get a teaching license. Like many teachers in Israel at the time,
Violet did not have a teaching license.
Although completely satisfied with her job otherwise, she pursued a
license to command a higher salary. She
had successfully completed all requirements for the license except for the oral
exam. When she went to take the test ---
which was given to one applicant at a time --- the examiners could see that she
is a Sephardic (middle Eastern) Jew. The
Jews in political power in Israel were all European Jews. They asked her a question about European
literature. Having been raised in the
Middle East, she was familiar with Middle Eastern history and literature. She was also thoroughly familiar with Jewish
history and literature. But she had not
had any courses in European history or literature and there was no requirement
that she know this for a teaching license.
She did not pass the oral examination because of this one question and
was devastated. I reassured her that she
was indeed an excellent teacher and deserved the license. Hadn’t she received annual commendations from
the principal of her school? I was
absolutely furious because I was certain that she was the victim of
discrimination. European Jews were
mistreating and exploiting non-European Jews.
Hope arrived with Cousin
Isaiah who lived in Brooklyn, New York, but was visiting at the time. He told us that teachers were in high demand
in the United States and that Violet could easily get a green card. We had to decide if we wanted to abandon
Israel. We were totally disillusioned
with the current state of affairs and too exhausted to make any further
contribution. As the head of the family,
I decided to return to our religious roots, which meant going to America where
some of our surviving family members now lived.
Violet and I felt our hearts ache and we both suffered stomach aches the
day we left Israel in 1964.
After arriving in New
York we went to live with my Uncle Naftoly’s family in Brooklyn, who were
living the Hasidic lifestyle. Chaim was
nine years old and Orna was six. Violet
needed a recommendation from the rabbi (from Szatmar) in order to get a
teaching position. I went to see him and
asked for his blessing. He asked me why
I had left Israel. I told him that I had
left for spiritual reasons. Then he took
my hand, blessed me, and wished me and my family the best of luck.
Our situation with my
uncle’s family in Brooklyn was very demeaning.
I realized how bad things were after a series of incidents involving the
ritual bath. In the United States people
still used the ritual baths but no one was especially eager to clean them. When my relatives asked me to help clean the
ritual bath, I willingly did so. Eventually, I was no longer helping to clean
it, I was cleaning it all by myself.
Then my relatives asked my children to help clean the synagogue. My seven-year-old daughter asked me one day,
“Dad, are we their servants?” Shortly
thereafter I overheard an aunt declare in a dinner conversation, “Only stupid
people will clean the ritual bath.” I
knew then that we had to move. We left
our relatives’ upstairs apartment and rented our own apartment in East Flatbush
in the summer of 1966. I also left my job
in my relatives’ print shop and found another job as a trainee in a knitting
factory.
Even though we lived
separately from our Hasidic relatives, my children still attended the religious
school. Chaim was very bored because he
knew Hebrew and the other children didn’t.
They read and recited very slowly and Chaim used to doze off and get
into trouble with his teacher. Violet
also was having difficulty as a teacher
in the religious school. One day she
read the students a story which took place in a small Ukrainian village where
Jews were in the majority and one Jew had been beaten up by a Gentile. She wondered aloud why the other Jews let
this happen. One of her students replied,
“We Jews are being punished for our sins. We have to wait for the Messiah and
accept the punishment in the meantime.”
Violet could not agree with such a statement and this got her into
trouble at the school.
Other things led me to
consider abandoning our Hasidic lifestyle altogether. I saw that my relatives emphasized giving to
charity and eating kosher food. But they
paid little attention to what I felt was most important in our Jewish heritage
-- The Ethics of the Fathers (a book
of concentrated wisdom from classical rabbinical sources about how to lead
one’s life), which has been handed down to us from generation to
generation. Indeed, it was the
recitation from memory of passages from The Ethics of the Fathers that helped me
and some others in the concentration camps to survive spiritually.
I also decided that I wanted
to put the children in public school.
Violet resisted and kept making excuses for not enrolling them. Finally, I took time off from work and did it
myself. I was quite relieved and pleased
that my children -- unlike me -- would get a secular education, including world
history, mathematics and science, and that they would be prepared for life in
the modern world. Violet was forced to
quit teaching at the religious school because our children were not attending
anymore. She was unhappy at first, but
later admitted that the children were much happier in public school and were
making excellent academic progress.
Not long afterwards I
found it necessary to further abandon my strict religious lifestyle in order to
provide better opportunities for my family.
I was working nights as a trainee in a knitting factory in a very bad
neighborhood in Brooklyn. A German
immigrant also worked there. He was a
mechanic and was very knowledgeable about machines. He also spoke three languages, German,
Spanish, and English, and liked to read all the newspapers, so I made a deal
with him. If he would teach me how to fix the machines, I
would run both of our machines and he could read the newspapers. When I became
more skilled at my job, I asked my boss for a raise, but he refused. I found another job at factory where they
paid 50% more, but I would have to work on the Sabbath. I decided to take it. Working twelve hour nights, I would be able
to provide for the family without Violet’s having to work.
The East Flatbush
neighborhood where we lived had become progressively more dangerous, so after
Chaim came home one day with a black eye, we decided to move to a nicer
neighborhood in Queens in the summer of 1968.
Violet found a job in Long Island teaching Hebrew School. She wisely insisted that we celebrate
religious holidays to keep the children aware of their heritage. At the time I thought it was unnecessary, but
now I realize she was right and that the children benefited from her
efforts.
In order to reestablish
a connection to our roots, we joined a synagogue where I enjoyed sharing
experiences with more modern religious Jews.
My daughter Orna who was in high school at the time, suddenly started
attending synagogue regularly, even though she was not very religious. I discovered she had a boyfriend with a
biblical, Hebrew name. Unlike typical
American boys, he never took her out on the Sabbath. I suspected that he might be a member of the
Jewish Defense League, a group who used illegal means, including firearms and
bombs, to harass Arabs and fight Arab propaganda in New York. I investigated and found out that he was a
recruiter for the Jewish Defense League.
I had a heart-to-heart talk with Orna and assured her that I was not
anti-Israel, and that if she felt strongly about going to Israel, that was
fine. If she wished, I would even buy
her a ticket to move to Israel. But I
did not want her doing anything illegal in New York and ending up in jail. Orna understood and told me she would stop
seeing the boy. I was quite relieved.
Although we both loved
our children very much, Violet and I did have some marital difficulties over
the years. As I look back on it, I
realize that we were extremely idealistic when we met. We each respected the sacrifices that the
other had made to help bring about the establishment of Israel as a sanctuary
for Jews. However, Violet was annoyed by
some of my European cultural habits and attitudes and I was irritated by some
of her Middle Eastern cultural habits and attitudes. Despite the fact that these were often minor
differences, they occurred daily and caused continual friction and
tension. For example, I know that it is
an Arabic custom to exaggerate in conversation, but I found this constant
stretching of the truth quite irritating.
It also disturbed me that our home was cluttered with too many rugs,
furniture and knick-knacks. I believe
Middle Eastern culture encourages the display of one’s prosperity, measured in
part by the number of things you own.
Although I do not know which specific European customs and habits of
mine annoyed her, it was obvious to me that Violet felt just as uncomfortable
at times as I did. She did not enjoy
spending time with my European friends and I was uncomfortable with her friends. Despite this, we worked hard to make the best of it for the
sake of the children. We both sensed,
however, that we would eventually break up.
(In the 1950’s and early 1960’s almost ninety percent of Israeli
marriages between Levantine and European Jews ended in divorce.)
After Chaim graduated
from college he moved to Denver, Colorado where he had a job with a computer
company. Violet suggested that I fly out
there and spend some time with him. He
and I vacationed together in the Southwest, traveling by car through Ouray and
then on to the Grand Canyon. I was
overwhelmed by the majestic beauty of the southwestern United States. We continued on to San Francisco and went
sightseeing in Chinatown. We had a long
talk about the future. I wanted him to
know that I was proud of him. I told him
that if he was content and felt good about himself, it didn’t matter to me if
he was a CEO or a laborer. The most
important thing in life is to challenge yourself and do the most that you can
do without burning yourself out or becoming bitter or regretful. I am grateful to Violet for suggesting that
I spend time with my son. I believe
Chaim and I both benefited from this.
Returning to New York, I
realized that the rapid growth of textile imports in 1979 was causing a decline
in New York’s textile industry. The loss
of jobs and the increasing taxes were causing financial stress for Violet and
me. I thought we should relocate to Colorado. Not only was Chaim there, but Orna also had
gone there to see if she might want to attend the University of Colorado. Violet told me that she did not want to move
to Denver. After twenty-seven years she
finally admitted to me, “Yes, life with you has been too interesting.” I asked her if she wanted a divorce and she
said “Yes.”
I moved to Denver in the
fall of 1980. It took several months
before I found a job as a bookkeeper with a restaurant equipment company. I had difficulty making new friends and felt
extremely lonely and isolated. I tried
attending a synagogue. The first thing I
saw in the hallway was a big sign saying, “Remember the six million Jews.” This pained me deeply.
Forsaking the synagogue,
I sought a way out of my isolation through membership in a wonderful
organization, the Colorado Mountain Club.
Although the club’s main purpose is to promote appreciation of the
mountains, it also helps newcomers to Colorado, like me, make new friends. While hiking, they often engage in
intellectual and personal discussions. I
have never experienced a place where people are so open and friendly. Also, the membership is so large that it is
unlikely you will hike with any of the same people on your next hike unless you
specifically arrange it. Such anonymity
removes inhibitions from discussions. It
took years, but I found myself being healed by my hiking experiences in the
Colorado Mountain Club.
Chaim lived in Colorado for six years but Orna
only stayed for six months. She worked
as a waitress briefly and did not go to the University of Colorado. She returned home to her mother in New York
City and enrolled at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz.
In 1983 I decided to
take a vacation trip to Europe and Israel.
I wanted Chaim to go with me because he was born in Jerusalem and did
not understand my European background.
We visited Tasnad, the city where I was born, then toured Europe for two
weeks, after which we went to Israel.
While waiting at a bus stop in Bet San one Sunday, I noticed a young
Israeli man with a back pack and asked him where he was going. He replied that he was going to Egypt. I was surprised that an Israeli would dare to
go to Egypt as a tourist. He told me
that anyone could go to the Egyptian consulate in Tel Aviv and find a tourist
organization arranging a tour of Egypt.
I was very curious about Egypt and decided that I wanted to go.
Chaim did not share my
interest in seeing Egypt, so he stayed with friends. A couple of days later I was on a bus with a
group of thirty people from different countries on my way to Cairo. We traveled through the Gaza strip. The view
of the sea from the desert was incredibly beautiful.
I was fascinated by the
Egyptians against whom I had fought while a soldier in the Israeli army. I wanted to find out more about their culture
and social structure and to understand why they gave up so easily in their
battles with us. The tour group planned
to stay in Cairo for three days and see the museum, the pyramids, the bazaar,
etc. The first night in the hotel I
couldn’t sleep from excitement. At
sunrise I got up and took a walk on Embassy Row along the shore of the
Nile. I noticed two young children with a
donkey and a small wagon collecting garbage.
Later the same evening, I saw other children also collecting
garbage. During the day I saw
impoverished-looking people living on rickety boats on the Nile. The second evening as our group strolled
along the Nile, a uniformed soldier armed with a machine gun approached us and
begged for money. A European soldier, no
matter how badly off, would probably have too much pride in his country to beg
in his military uniform. I suspected
then that Egyptian soldiers entered military service to escape extreme poverty
and probably hated their superior officers who mistreated them. They were not fighting for their beliefs and
most likely that is the reason why they surrendered so readily. .
After this trip I
returned to Denver. I was encouraged by
fellow hikers in the mountain club to take college courses. Since I had always dreamed of obtaining more
secular education I enrolled in college and took classes in psychology and
philosophy. I was so engrossed in these
studies that I temporarily put aside all other activities. I requested a change in my work hours from 8
to 5 to 10:30 to 5, so that I could attend a morning class. The manager of the store where I was working
at the time said that he couldn’t let me change hours. I had to choose between work and study. I chose study. I was able to live on my savings until a year
later when I turned 62 and was eligible for early retirement benefits.
In 1985 Chaim met Amy, a
young woman from Minnesota who was in Colorado temporarily working as a staff
attorney for the ACLU. They became
romantically involved and he decided to move to Minnesota to be with her. They eventually married and had two children,
Sam and Maggie. Chaim started his own computer business which became quite
successful. While Chaim was in the process of moving, I was feeling
restless. Although I enjoyed my classes,
I wondered what I would do in retirement.
Getting a degree seemed pointless at my age and my life lacked meaning. I had no goals, no involvement in a community
and no obligation to anyone or anything.
I realized that the rejection of my religious lifestyle had left a huge
void in my life. I reflected on the
Hasidic lifestyle, whose beauty, certainty, and spirituality I missed. For example, I loved the beauty of the Friday
night Sabbath celebration. Candles are
lit. Beautiful songs are sung. The family eats dinner together. Everyone feels very close, happy and
protected. I missed the rituals such as
the community’s morning and evening prayers.
The morning prayers are ones of praise and appreciation for God and all
that He has created. I used to find that
starting my day out with praise and appreciation invigorated me and channeled
my thoughts as to how I might accomplish good during this new day.
I tried moving back with
my Hasidic relatives, now living in Florida, whom I hadn’t seen for about ten
years. They were very kind and
encouraged me to return to the Hasidic life.
They told me that the community had split into two groups: those who
continued to follow the rabbi from Szatmar’s widow, and those who were led by
the rabbi from Szatmar’s nephew. They
made it clear that the split had not been caused by theological differences,
but by personality conflicts. I arranged
an appointment with the rabbi from Szatmar’s widow. She encouraged me to let go of any ideas
which challenged my Hasidic roots. I
could not do this. After a year of
living with Uncle Naftoly’s family in Florida, I decided to return to my
secular life in Colorado.
I continued to meet new people through the
Colorado Mountain Club. In time I met a
younger woman whom I dated and wanted to marry.
We lived together for a while but eventually decided that it would not
work out. Emotionally vulnerable because
of this disappointment in my love life, I once again sought the comfort of Uncle
Naftoly’s family in Florida. Realizing
that I could not adopt the Hasidic lifestyle, I chose to live in my own
apartment near them. Although not part
of the Hasidic community because I had forsaken traditional rituals and
procedures, I still felt a strong desire to contribute to that .I believe we
helped each other lead better lives by sharing our ideas and experiences. In this way I felt I was fulfilling my duty
to God, Whom I believe has a purpose for each one of us which gives our lives
meaning in our community. Yet, even
though we held the same basic values, they refused to accept me so long as I
failed to follow all the traditions and customs. Feeling like an outsider and unable to make a
meaningful contribution to the community, I returned once again to Colorado
where I still had many friends.
The rabbi from Szatmar,
my adopted father, had died in 1979, but I had been unable to attend the
funeral. More than a decade later I felt
a strong desire to visit his grave. I bought
a plane ticket to New York City and hired a taxi to take me to the
cemetery. When I entered the mausoleum I
felt a rush of emotions as if I were young again and innocent of the ways of
the world. I felt the deep admiration I
had for him and my attraction to the Hasidic life. Feeling as if my non-Hasidic life after World
War Two had been an egregious mistake, I was overcome with remorse. I ran out of the mausoleum, grabbed another
taxi back to the airport and returned to Denver.
In spite of the doubts
that have plagued me in my adult life, I have striven to serve God by helping
others. Perhaps my contribution to
society is humble, yet it might please God who values every servant. An episode narrated by Baal Shem Tov, the
Father of the Hasidic movement 200 years ago, illustrates this point. He realized that scholarly Jews looked down
on average Jews. He wanted all Jews to
treat each other well. He had a vision
in which he was seated in Heaven next to a person who used to carry drinking
water from the well to the village. He
wondered what this person’s contribution had been that he deserved to sit near
him in Heaven. He asked one of his
followers to investigate the life of this person. The follower didn’t find any major
contribution, but he did see that the person went outside the village early in
the morning and stood on one side of a ditch.
He heard him say, “God, I am not a scholar. I cannot study Your laws. I don’t have money to contribute to
charity. The only way I can serve You is
to jump from one side of the ditch to the other.” Because he sincerely meant it, God valued
this person as much as all the other good servants of God (including Baal Shem
Tov, a rabbi and scholar).
I have struggled with the question of why Jews remain faithful
to religion after all we’ve been
through. I recall hearing about a Polish
woman who survived the concentration camps.
A Polish soldier had offered her an opportunity to convert to Christianity
and avoid the camps. Even though she was
not particularly religious, she declined.
She explained that being Jewish, for her, was her identity and
culture. She could not just give it up.
Despite my decision not
to live a Hasidic or Orthodox lifestyle,
I also cannot let go of my identity and culture. Nor can I let go of my faith, which gave me
the strength and courage to endure the worst.
Just as I felt the warm rain drops on that hailing and sleeting day I
was returning to Melk, I still believe God is compassionate and I feel a duty
to serve God by doing what I can to help others. By sharing
ideas and experiences, I believe we help each other lead better
lives. In so doing I feel I am
fulfilling my duty to God, Whom I believe has a purpose for each one of us
which gives our lives meaning.
The Talmud explains that
it is not a choice to be a Jew or not.
When God offered us the Torah, we didn’t want to accept it, but He
forced us and said if we would not accept it, He would destroy us.
In May, 1995, my
children and friends helped me celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of my
liberation from the Nazi concentration camps.
I celebrated primarily that in that horrible time my spirit was
strengthened, not destroyed. Present at
my party in Boulder, Colorado, were my hosts, Susan and David Furtney; my
children and their families; my religion professor from the University of
Colorado; my former employers, the Kaufman Brothers; friends from the Colorado
Mountain Club; some of my daughter and son’s friends and their families; June
Farone; Judy Furtney; Miriam Rosenzweig and Yves deToustain; George Beck; Bill
Kemper; Sheldon Sands; Richard and Linda Loose; and Jim and Lou Speiers.
A band played Klesmer
music. We ate challah bread, cholent,
and capanota, an Italian eggplant dish I like.
This is the poem my
daughter-in-law, Amy, wrote and read to me at the party:
By Amy Silberberg (Rafael’s
late daughter-in-law)
Some
crack like raw eggs under the weight of evil,
Their
pasts oozing from the fissures,
Leaving
cool and sticky pools of themselves behind.
Some
become fragile and sicken,
Waiting
forever to heal,
Not
trusting.
Never
touching or feeling again.
Some
go wild with pain,
Hurting
and hating others reflexively.
Some
ingest the sympathy of others and chew the cud of injustice.
Some
do not remember, or so they say,
Although
they must.
What
are we to do with them?
They
are not here.
They
are not anywhere.
But
not you
My elder/father/friend.
You
let the evil course over your soul like water on rock.
It
shaped you, but the essential you remains.
You
have chosen,
And
somehow you rise to serve as teacher/teller/survivor of evil.
I’m
celebrating the fiftieth year of my liberation from the concentration camp by
the American forces. I thank heaven for
having good and honest children who know right from wrong and truth from
falsehood. However, when I go to the
synagogue, I remember the cries of horror from my family and my people, and
this is more than I can tolerate. I miss
the prayers and the reading of the psalms with their ancient, heavenly,
beautiful melodies.
I
thank the Creator that my soul was saved from the flames of evil, perhaps
because it was covered with the ancient mystic books that I studied from early
morning to late nights, and the values that I never gave up. I thank my friends who have helped me see the
good side of human nature.
Epilogue: My Philosophy
The entire time
I was in the concentration camps, I had a very strong will to survive. I really don’t know why at Melk I blurted
out, in front of the one hundred surviving French resistors, “If only three people survive, I will be one
of them.” And I really don’t know
why some of us were so driven to
survive, and why others, like my brother-in-law Moses, could not endure. Yet, I saw people give up, first emotionally
and then physically. A couple of weeks
before liberation, I was astonished at all I had been through. Yet, we survivors experienced things that
heretofore no one thought a human being could endure. I am firmly convinced that we can withstand
physically a great deal more than we think so long as our spirits are strong.
So how did I keep my
spirit strong and avoid despair when it looked like there was no way out of a
situation? I believe my turning to
prayer calmed me enough to become receptive to solutions.
I experienced despair
after the rabbi from Szatmar refused to allow me to live with the yeshiva students
and insisted I remain isolated. I did
what I could to extricate myself mentally from my situation. I searched for solutions to loneliness in the
writings of moral philosophers, where I found some comfort.
In the camps, faced
daily with life-threatening choices, I asked myself, “What can I do to get out
of this? Is there a solution to this
problem?”
At Auschwitz I listened
and heard about the selection of workers three barracks away and risked my life
running to the area. After being put in
the non-worker group, I sneaked back to the unselected group to be reconsidered
for work. Had I not done this I would
have gone to the crematorium that day.
At Melk I heeded the
advice of a long-time inmate to avoid freezing to death.
I kept alert and heard
the very quiet call for shoes on the night when my life depended on having
shoes the next day. I could quite easily
have panicked and failed to hear the solution to my problem.
In Ebensee I decided to
sweat out a high fever by running with the wheelbarrow as I worked, which saved
my life.
I sought out my
co-sufferer from the sadistic Kapo and used his hat-in-the-hand trick to avoid
further confrontations.
Because I had been
listening carefully to all the talk in Ebensee, I knew the reputation of
Barrack #11 and the confusion there allowed me to save Betzalel by telling him
to join me in my barrack.
On the illegal boat to
Israel when we were in danger of contracting disease from overflowing toilets,
my will to survive and determination to do what needed doing saved us for
another day.
I felt discouraged when
I was living in Israel. After doing everything that came my way to help Israel
survive as a nation -- providing food as a farmer, being a member of the
explosives unit in the Israeli military, being a farming soldier, etc., I saw
political in-fighting and witnessed my wife’s being a victim of discrimination
because of her middle eastern background.
Since Israel was not meeting our expectations and losing hope that
things would change anytime soon, Violet and I changed and made the
gut-wrenching decision to leave Israel and come to the United States.
I cannot emphasize enough how important it is
to refuse to get trapped in despair, which immobilizes you from solving your
problems. Negative labels, such as “I’m
depressed,” or “I’m a victim of circumstances,” merely give you an excuse to
wallow in self pity instead of coping with your problem.
I felt depressed when I
reached retirement, was divorced, and my children no longer lived near me. Yet, I sought solutions. I considered rejoining my Hasidic extended
family. After careful consideration I
knew this was not the solution. I found
kindred spirits in the Colorado Mountain Club and my university classes
introduced me to a new circle of
friends.
I have learned an
important lesson which I want to pass on:
Don’t blame God, life, or others.
It is you! No matter what
happens, you have a brain and can always choose how you will act or react. We are here to serve each other in whatever
way we can. We are not here for the
world to meet our needs. We each have a
duty to contribute to this world.
Recalling Rabbi Baal Shem Tov’s story about the water carrier who
dedicated his ditch-jumping to God, I have known since childhood that God does
not expect everyone to make earth-shattering contributions. But it is important for each one of us to
decide how to contribute and to exercise the willpower to do so. We can avoid despair by focusing on our
desired contribution and on the tasks necessary to achieve our goals.
Prayer makes it easier for me, throughout the
day, to avoid despair and to stay focused on solving daily problems. One particular prayer has special
significance for me, because God literally delivered me from the pestilence at
the camps and kept me whole.
The breath of every living
being shall bless Thy name, O Lord our God, and the spirit of all flesh shall
continually glorify and exalt Thy memorial, O our King; from everlasting to
everlasting Thou art God; and beside Thee we have no King who redeemeth and
saveth, setteth free and delivereth, who supporteth and hath mercy in all times
of trouble and distress; yea, we have no King but Thee. He is God of the first and of the last, the
God of all creatures, the Lord of all generations, who is extolled with many
praises, and guideth His world with loving-kindness and His creatures with
tender mercies....O Lord our God...Thou didst redeem us from Egypt, O Lord our
God, and didst release us from the house of bondage; during famine Thou didst
feed us, and didst sustain us in plenty; from the sword Thou didst rescue us,
from pestilence Thou didst save us, and from sore and lasting diseases Thou
didst deliver us. Hitherto Thy tender
mercies have helped us, and Thy loving-kindnesses have not left us; forsake us
not, O Lord our God, for ever. pp. 315-7
Daily Prayers with English Translation by Dr. A. Th. Phillips (rev. ed. Hebrew
Publishing Co. New York)
[1]The Hasidic movement began in the mid-18th century in Poland with Israel Baal Shem Tov. It is a sect of Jewish mysticism and stresses prayer and studying the Torah as a means of obtaining individual redemption. It discourages sadness and emphasizes the joy of a spiritual life.
[2]After World War I Romania received this region, known as Transylvania, as the spoils of war, from Hungary. However, once the Germans gained control of Europe in 1941, Hungary renewed its claim to the region.
[3]There is a story about a Hasidic woman who came to live in Brooklyn. A mugger tried to grab her handbag, but she struggled to keep it. In the struggle, her kerchief fell off. Shocked to see the bald head, the mugger concluded that she must be an undercover police officer, and fled without the handbag!
[4]Proverbs is a Book of the Torah. The Ethics of the Fathers is a work of collected pieces of wisdom from early Jewish leaders. A chapter of this is read on each Sabbath from the Sabbath after Passover until the Sabbath before Rosh Hashana.
[5]A Persian official who planned to destroy the Jews, he was hanged when Esther told the King about Haman’s plot.
[6]This story has been popularized by a recent musical. It is the story of Joseph’s jealous brothers selling him into slavery and of Joseph’s rise to a position of power in Egypt.
[7]In the Torah it is written in three different places that lamb should not be cooked in its mother’s milk. The Talmudic scholars interpreted this to mean that meat and dairy dishes shouldn’t be served at the same meal.
[8]Israeli politics operated on a spoils system, i.e. the practice of regarding and treating appointive public offices as the booty of the successful party or parties in a coalition government. Job opportunities and other opportunities for profit were distributed to party workers and members.