First Memories: Devastation, Autumn 1942
At the beginning of the book, Rabbi Lau discusses his experiences when the Nazis invaded Poland. He speaks of the deep impression made upon him by his father, Rabbi Moshe Chaim, chief rabbi of the Polish town of Piotrkow. In this scene, the esteemed community leader maintains his dignity in the face of humiliation by the Gestapo.
The nightmare had begun to affect us in Piotrkow as well.
It is the autumn of 1942. I, Lulek, am a boy of five years and four months, short in stature, terrified. I stretch my neck as far as it will go in order to catch a glimpse of my father. He is standing in the Umschlagplatz, the assembly point for deportation, which is next to the Great Synagogue of our town, Piotrkow, Poland. Father, with his impressive beard and black rabbi’s suit, stands in the center, surrounded by Jews.
We felt enormous tension that day as we stood in the assembly square in front of the synagogue. A threatening silence surrounded us. The captain of the Piotrkow Gestapo approached my father, a deadly look in his eye. He stopped, and pulling out his maikeh—a rubber club about three feet long—he began to beat my father on the back with all his might. When the first blow struck my father from behind, the force of it made him stagger forward. His body bent over as if about to fall. And then, in a fraction of a second, he straightened up to his full height, stepped back and returned to where he had been standing. There he stood erect, making a supreme effort to hide the physical pain as well as the intense humiliation. I could see Father mustering all his strength to keep his balance and avoid falling at the German officer’s feet. Father knew that if he fell, the spirit of the Jews in our town would break, and he was trying desperately to prevent that.
Everyone there knew why the German had beaten him. When the Nazis had ordered the Jews to shave off their beards, many of the Jews of Piotrkow had come to ask Father whether they should follow the order. His answer was firm: do it in order to save yourselves from punishment. But he was stricter with himself; he kept his beard and sidelocks, his peyot, not only to safeguard ancient tradition but also to preserve the honor of the town rabbinate. His defiance of this order resulted in the maikeh on his back.
But the beating was for other reasons as well. The captain had singled out my father for abuse because he was the chief rabbi of the town. Father was the representative of the Jews to the Germans. Furthermore, much of the Gestapo’s contact with the Jews of Piotrkow took place through him because he was fluent in German. He was a highly respected figure in the Jewish community. Beating him, and especially humiliating him, meant more to the Germans than beating just another Jew; it was an act of enormous symbolic meaning, one that had a powerful effect on morale.
We cannot fight the enemy Amalek, the nation or the phenomenon, with weapons or with ammunition. Rather, we are obligated to fight this battle in every generation, each generation passing on our heritage to the next.
Many years later, I heard the following from Dr. Abraham Greenberg, who had been standing next to my father in the synagogue square. He heard Father remark to the Jews next to him, “I don’t know why we’re standing here with our arms crossed. Even if we don’t have weapons, we should attack them with our fingernails. I don’t think standing around can save any of us. We have nothing to lose by trying to fight them.” He had just finished his sentence when the maikeh of the Gestapo captain struck him on his back. As a child, I did not understand the issue of the beard so well or the significance of the order to shave it, but I did understand that they were beating my father.
I knew my father was the town’s chief rabbi, and was admired and loved by all. I could not bear to see the beating or the degradation. Today, looking back on the six years of that war, I realize that the worst thing I endured in the Holocaust was not the hunger, the cold or the beatings. It was the humiliation. It is almost impossible to bear the helplessness. Throughout the war years, a Polish word went through my head—lachago, meaning “why?” What did we do to you to make you stomp on our souls in this way? How great was our crime that this is our punishment? There was no answer. Only this: we were Jews, and they, the Nazis, saw us as the source of all evil in the world.
When a child sees his father being kicked with a Nazi’s boot, publicly humiliated, he carries that terrible picture with him for the rest of his life. Yet, on the other hand, I carry in my mind another memory as well—that instant in which Father, with astonishing spiritual strength, braced himself from falling and, refusing to beg for his life, stood tall once again before the Gestapo captain. For me, that image of his inner spiritual strength completely eradicates the helplessness that accompanied the humiliation.
Herded into the Synagogue
Soon after the incident with Lulek’s father, the Nazis rounded up the Jews of Piotrkow and packed them into the town’s main synagogue. There they called out the names of those who were allowed to leave; those remaining inside were to be deported, destined for death. Through his mother’s resourcefulness, young Lulek’s life is saved, but his thirteen-year-old brother, Shmuel, is condemned to a bitter fate.
As order and discipline were second nature to the Germans, one of them shouted, “One of the people whose names I called did not go out!” Then they made an exact count of all those who had left, and checked them against their lists. One person had not left: my mother. Her maternal instinct aroused, she scrutinized the narrow passage between the two guards at the door. She planned our moves quickly and precisely. She grabbed me with one hand, and Shmuel with the other. “Come here,” she ordered. We jumped to her. We didn’t need to be told that we must remain completely silent, and more importantly, keep as close as possible to Mother. The three of us had to meld together as one. She planned to smuggle us both out under the cover of darkness, as if we were part of her body. To keep the Germans from closing the door, she shouted while moving toward the exit, “I’m coming, I’m coming.” Walking sideways as one body, we shuffled out the door. But a group of three could not possibly pass through the narrow opening the Germans had left. I went out first, with Mother close behind me, and Shmuel behind her. But one German noticed that there was a bit more movement than there should be. Facing us, he raised both his arms together, and swung them down with all his might, one to the left and one to the right. Shmuel, who was on the left side, fell to the synagogue floor and had to go back inside. On the right side were my mother and I. The force of the blow hurled us into a puddle in front of the synagogue.
The two of us were saved, but we were separated from Shmuel, and we never saw him again. Later we learned that he was sent to Treblinka that same day.
Into Hiding: 1942
Lulek’s childhood becomes a nightmare of hiding and fear, leaving an indelible mark on his memory and shaping his consciousness. As an adult, Rabbi Lau recalls the taste of the honey cookies mentioned here as symbolic of his Holocaust experience.
Father was not with Mother and me when the two of us hid at 12 Jerozolimska Street, a building near our house, where he had arranged a hiding place for us. This large building had been filled with Jewish residents, who then abandoned it for reasons unknown to me. The floor of one room in the top story was littered with wooden boards; the entry to the attic was through this room. Mother and I crowded into the attic along with about ten other Jews. They were constantly darting frightened looks at me, as if threatening me to keep silent, and at my mother, as if blaming her for bringing me to the hiding place and possibly endangering their lives. At least that is how it seemed to me. I was barely five-and-a-half, and they feared I would cry noisily, or else call out “Mameh, Mameh,” giving them all away to certain death. They were busy thinking of ways to make the child keep silent, but the child never even made a peep. Before leaving our house, my mother had foreseen what was ahead of us, and baked my favorite honey cookies. She knew that when I ate them they would distract me. More importantly, they would fill up my mouth so I would be unable to make a sound.
Even today, many long years after those days of horror, when I close my eyes and yearn for those honey cookies, I can remember their wonderful taste. During trying times, this memory is my consolation; it is the drop of honey with which I sweeten bitter days.
At the same time, I remember clearly that I would look at my mother, my mouth full of cookies, with a penetrating glance that seemed to say, “Mother, this whole business of using the cookies to silence me is unnecessary. I know I mustn’t say a word, and therefore I intend to keep quiet. We have already been through all kinds of ‘selections’ and although I am a child, I understand exactly what’s going on.” Like an animal with an acute survival instinct, I understood that I had to keep quiet until the fury subsided, and I had no intention of behaving like a small child in our hideout.
Buchenwald: January 1945
When Lulek and his nineteen-year-old brother, Naphtali, arrived in Buchenwald, Naphtali feared that he would not be able to save Lulek’s life as he had succeeded in doing so far.
The rules of the camp were ironclad, and chances were slim that they would allow a child of seven to stay with the men. But as usual, Naphtali1 did not give up. With the help of two friends, he wrapped me up in the feather quilt that Mother had supplied us with, and put me inside the sack he had carried with him ever since we had parted from her. As I was already used to transitions, to entering and exiting labor camps, he had no need to warn me to keep my mouth shut until it was safe to leave the sack. Despite my being so young, the procedure was clear to me. Like a rabbit, I jumped into the sack, curling up as small as possible, and that is how I entered Buchenwald with my brother. The Germans made the newly-arrived Jews stand in formation, arranging them in threes. From inside the sack, I heard the familiar commotion: the shouts of schnell, schnell—hurry, hurry—the maikeh club beatings and the barking of the dogs. I hunched on top of Naphtali’s back, motionless as a block of ice. Then I felt Naphtali removing the sack from his back and putting it down at his feet. A strange, sharp smell reached my nose, one that I did not recognize. Later I learned that this was chlorine, which the Nazis used as a disinfectant.
During trying times, this memory is my consolation; it is the drop of honey with which I sweeten bitter days.
The Germans placed us all into a large hall, where they began separating the inmates into groups. Controlling his growing fear, Naphtali studied what was going on around us. Very quickly he deciphered the method used in categorizing the inmates. The Nazis ordered the Jews to strip. Medical personnel inspected them and administered various inoculations. And then, to his horror, he discovered that the Germans threw all the Jews’ possessions—including the clothes they had removed—into the oven, where they were incinerated. In this manner, the Germans thought, they would prevent contamination by the Jews. Naphtali would also have to dispose of his sack of belongings. I’ll never forget his cry: “Lulek, hutch totai! Lulek, come here!” I peeked out in disbelief, suspecting I had not heard correctly. From the sack at my brother’s feet, I raised my head carefully and looked around. Previously, I had heard the voices and smelled the odors. But now I also saw the sights from which I had been spared.
The Germans waved the maikeh threateningly, their ferocious dogs barking and biting. Veteran Jewish prisoners shaved the new arrivals and disinfected them in a filthy chlorine bath. When I got out of the sack, one of the guards, also apparently a prisoner, noticed me. He approached Naphtali and asked him what a boy like me was doing in this place, which was meant for adult men. Naphtali looked into his eyes and explained that the child had neither a father nor a mother. “What was I to do?” he asked. “Leave him outside in the snow, by himself?”
That guard gave us the first authorized proof of the methods of killing in the camp. In this place, he explained to Naphtali, there are no gas chambers, but there is a crematorium. “From that furnace,” he said, glancing toward it, “smoke billows twenty-four hours a day. All the muselmen, those walking, robot-like skeletons, die there. Everyone who comes to this camp becomes a muselman,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if he’s five or fifteen, seven or thirteen. But,” added the prisoner-guard, “you should know that if this child can get to block number eight, he will be okay.” When he finished what he had to say, he turned his back on us, as if he had not seen a thing.
As he walked away, a German guard caught sight of me. Naphtali was terrified when he saw the German focus on me, and even more so when he asked, as the other guard did, what I was doing there. Accustomed by now to being in mortal danger, Naphtali took off his shoe and folded it in half, removing Father’s gold watch from the sole. It was the last remaining item from the treasures Mother had given us for emergencies. Naphtali threw the expensive watch at the guard, who bent down as if to tie his shoelace, and picked up the watch. Then he continued his patrol, ignoring the two of us.
Other guards took me along with the entire group to block fifty-two. The sight before our eyes was horrifying. Thousands of people inhabited that crowded place, most of them muselmen, suffering from hunger and disease. People relieved themselves inside the block, and the stench was insufferable. Each morning the guards removed about forty corpses, the bodies of those who did not awaken.
Liberation: April 1945
Thanks to Naphtali and to a Russian inmate protector, Lulek survives the horrors of Buchenwald. When Buchenwald is liberated by American army forces, Lulek is discovered by Army Chaplain Rabbi Herschel Schacter.
In full army uniform, Rabbi Schacter got down from his jeep and stood before the pile of bodies. Many of them were still bleeding. Suddenly he thought he saw a pair of eyes, wide open and alive. He panicked, and with a soldier’s instinct, he drew his pistol. Slowly, carefully, he began to circle the pile of bodies. Then—and this I recall clearly—he bumped into me, a little boy, staring at him from behind the mound of corpses, wide-eyed. His face revealed his astonishment: in the midst of the killing fields, from within that sea of blood—suddenly, a child appears! I did not move. But he knew that no child in this place could be anything but Jewish. He holstered his pistol, then grabbed me with both hands and caught me in a fatherly embrace, lifting me in his arms. In Yiddish, with a heavy American accent, he asked me: “Wie alt bist du, mein kindt? How old are you, my boy?”
I saw tears dripping from his eyes. Still, through force of habit, I answered cautiously, like someone perpetually on guard: “What difference does it make? At any rate, I’m older than you.” He smiled at me from behind his tears, and asked, “Why do you think that you’re older than I am?” Without hesitating, I replied, “Because you laugh and cry like a child, and I haven’t laughed for a long time. I can’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?”
Then he introduced himself to me, and the tension subsided. Rabbi Schacter asked who I was. “Lulek from Piotrkow,” I replied.
“And who is your family?” he inquired.
“My father was the rabbi of Piotrkow.”
“And you’re here all alone, without your father?”
“Without my father, without my mother. But I have a brother. He collapsed and is lying sick, here in the camp.”
Rabbi Schacter gained my full trust when he told me he had heard of my father. He had also heard of Father’s cousin, Rabbi Meir Shapira, the rabbi of Lublin, who had initiated the Daf Hayomi daily page program of Talmud study. I was thrilled.
Then the American rabbi took me by the hand, and together, we made the rounds of the bunkers, announcing the liberation. I remember the people lying inside the bunkers, with blank stares. They did not even have the strength to get up from their beds. “Jews, you are liberated!” called out the American rabbi in Yiddish. The inmates gazed at him, incredulous, as if to ask, “Who is this crazy meshiggener standing here in uniform, screaming in Yiddish?”
Our Response to the Holocaust
Rabbi Lau often emphasizes that the “revenge” for the Holocaust is in the rebuilding of Jewish families and Jewish life. He himself sets an example.
My oldest son, Moshe Chaim, became a Bar Mitzvah on the Shabbat when we read the Biblical account of the Israelites’ battle with Amalek. I spoke about the last verse in the chapter: “The Lord maintains a war against Amalek, from generation to generation” (Exodus 17:16). We cannot fight the enemy Amalek, the nation or the phenomenon, with weapons or with ammunition. Rather, we are obligated to fight this battle in every generation, each generation passing on our heritage to the next. The struggle for the continuity of generations is the true battle and the great spiritual-Divine victory of Israel against the adversary Amalek. Our victory in the war against Amalek is that my son, Moshe Chaim Lau, is continuing the heritage of his grandfather, my father, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau, who went up to Heaven in a tempest.
Our son Moshe Chaim is the first candle in the private Chanukah menorah I have been privileged to create. My wife is the base of that menorah, from which the candles, our eight children, went out into the world. And I am the shamash, whose role is to help light those candles so that they will spread their light and proclaim, each in a special way, the miracle of the victory of eternal Israel.
Note
1. The story of the boys’ survival is told from Naphtali’s point of view in his book, Balaam’s Prophecy: Eyewitness to History, 1939–1989 (New Jersey, 1998).
Shira Leibowitz Schmidt co-authored Old Wine, New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition (New York, 1997) with Nobel chemist Roald Hoffmann. At the time of this writing she was affiliated with the Haredi College in Jerusalem and wrote polemical articles on controversial issues for The Jerusalem Post.
Jessica Setbon has lectured on translation challenges at Yad Vashem and the Israel Translators’ Association conference.
At the time of this writing Shira and Jessica ran a translation center in Netanya, Israel, called Mother Tongue.