A Lesson from the Pages of Jewish Action
In honor of our 40th anniversary, noted author Rabbi Hanoch Teller shares how a single Jewish Action article left a lasting imprint on his thinking and his work.
As a senior docent at Yad Vashem, I stand in the delicate space between memory and oblivion, entrusted with the formidable task of distilling more than four decades of study into two-and-a-quarter hours. I endeavor to impart to visitors what I continue to wrestle with yet have absorbed into the marrow of my being.
Part of my presentation addresses haunting questions regarding the depths of moral bewilderment and depravity, such as How could a nation that prided itself on honor and culture descend into barbarity of such scale and cruelty? Antisemitism may explain the animus, but it does not explain satisfactorily the moral duplicity and the cold-blooded capacity to drape savagery in the garments of rectitude.
It was an article published in Jewish Action in 1989 (“A Nazi’s Word of Honor: A True Story Told by R. Chaim Ben Meir, zt”l, to His Son” translated from Hebrew by Lisa J Fishhaut and Rabbi Matis Greenblatt) that crystallized this for me, revealing the foundation of verbal camouflage and perverted honor that was the inner architecture of Nazi ethos. In it, Rabbi Chaim Ben Meir recounted how he was selected from the ghetto to repair windshields of Wehrmacht vehicles damaged in an air raid—a task for which he (a glazier) had neither the training nor the tools. Mending windshields was a craft wholly different from his own, but refusal, he understood, meant instant execution. In unheard-of audaciousness, he dared to set a condition: if he succeeded, he would be returned to his wife in the ghetto by nightfall.
The senior German officer, invoking the solemn intonation of military honor, assured him, “You have the word of a German officer that if you do your job, your condition will be met.” Against the biting wind and the treacherous ice, Ben Meir accomplished the impossible. Yet when the hour came to return him, the officer, reluctant to leave his warm quarters, balked at facing the biting cold. Ben Meir pressed the matter, impudently reminding the officer of his pledge. At this, the officer reluctantly rose, hitched horses to a sleigh, threw Ben Meir in the back and returned to the ghetto, an act that, prima facie, appeared to affirm the vaunted German code.
Alas, the charade lasted only an instant. Upon arrival, the officer saw two starving Jewish children staring wide-eyed at the sleigh in innocent wonder. Without hesitation, he drew his pistol, and the innocent souls were no more. The promise had been kept—yet its fulfillment was stained and sealed with gratuitous murder, revealing the perfidious moral calculus beneath the façade of honor.
The Jewish Action article illuminated for me—and, I hope, for those I guide—the chilling truth that Nazi “honor” was never about integrity, but about control, intimidation and the manipulation of appearances—even when cloaked in the trappings of duty.
Rabbi Hanoch Teller is the author of Heroic Children (Feldheim Publishers, 2015), the stories of nine children who survived the Holocaust. Heroic Children is the recipient of two national awards.