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Born in Auschwitz
A woman's miraculous birth in the death camp of Auschwitz.
by Jeff Heinrich
Polgar's mother, Vera Bein, nee Otvos, was 25 years old at the time and almost two months pregnant.
On the infamous railway platform where "selections" were made, Bein, as Polgar respectfully calls her, was not sent to the gas chambers. Instead, she was assigned to a variety of gruelling work details before becoming a guinea pig for sterilization experiments by a camp doctor.
By the horrific standards of the Holocaust, it's an ordinary story, perhaps -- except for one thing. The patient survived, and so did her child.
On Dec. 21 Bein felt labour pains. She climbed to the top bunk in her barrack, and there, aided by two other inmates, gave birth in secret to a baby girl.
The infant was tiny, weighing only one kilogram; she was too weak to cry but strong enough to drink the meagre offering from her mother's breast, and somehow survived the next few weeks in hiding.
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The only other infant survivor, according to Auschwitz museum records, was a Hungarian boy, Gyorgy Faludi, born the day of liberation with the help of a Russian doctor.Soviet Red Army troops liberated the camp on Jan. 27, 1945. Baby and mother were among the survivors, and they were an unusual sight -- indeed, almost unique.
The only other infant survivor, according to Auschwitz museum records, was a Hungarian boy, Gyorgy Faludi, born the day of liberation with the help of a Russian doctor.
Angela Polgar has decided now is the right time to tell Canadians her family's remarkable story.
She isn't doing it to shine light on herself; she even refuses to have her picture taken, for fear people would accuse her of self-aggrandizement.
Rather, she wants to honor her mother, a woman who never liked to talk about her experience because she thought it would be a burden to her daughter.
"She was a very, very special lady," said Polgar, a former clothing store owner who lives in Montreal with her husband, Joseph.
"My mother felt so terrible for all the people who had lost their children. They lost their babies, and she brought one back," Polgar said.
"And at the same time she didn't want me to have the memories she had. So she didn't talk about it."
Telling it now is a release -- and a duty. "It has nothing to do with me, this story. She did it. She's the one who went through all this."
And so Angela Polgar begins her story.
That both mother and daughter survived at all is a miracle in itself. About 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were exterminated at Auschwitz between the start of the organized killing in March 1942 and its end in November 1944. The death machine was at its busiest the summer that Polgar's parents and other Hungarian Jews arrived en masse to be liquidated -- more than 132,000 a month, according to Canadian scholar Robert Jan van Pelt's exhaustive study, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present.
"By the end of June, in just two months, half of Hungary's Jewry -- 381,661 souls -- had arrived at Auschwitz," van Pelt wrote in the 1996 book he co-authored with U.S. scholar Deborah Dwork. "At no other time was Auschwitz more efficient as a killing center."
They quote one survivor, Alexander Ehrmann, who arrived at Birkenau at night and was aghast at what he saw and heard -- especially the piles of burning bracken and rubble he saw and smelled through the barbed wire.
From the pyres came the sounds of children. "I heard a baby crying. The baby was crying somewhere in the distance and I couldn't stop and look. We moved, and it smelled, a horrible stench. I knew that things in the fire were moving; there were babies in the fire."
At selection on the platform, most visibly pregnant women were sent to die; so were babies, children, the obviously sick and the elderly. Others were spared for use as slave labour or fodder for medical experimentation.
Some of the inmates in Camp C, Auschwitz's barrack for Hungarian Jewish women and girls, were able to bring their pregnancies to term, but their babies were almost invariably taken from them right after and killed -- "mercifully" strangled to death by Jewish inmate doctors forced to work for the Nazis.
Most pregnancies never got that far; the usual clandestine practice was to abort fetuses before they could be born -- a life-saving measure for the mother, who was an easy target for liquidation if her pregnancy became too obvious.
One of the Jewish physicians who routinely performed this "service" at Auschwitz, a Hungarian gynecologist named Gisella Perl, described that and worse in her 1948 memoir I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz.
Walking by one of the crematoriums one day, she witnessed what happened to one group of women who, promised better treatment, had revealed to their Nazi overlords that they were pregnant. "They were surrounded by a group of SS men and women, who amused themselves by giving these helpless creatures a taste of hell, after which death was a welcome friend," Perl recalled in her book.
"They were beaten with clubs and whips, torn by dogs, dragged around by their hair and kicked in the stomach with heavy German boots. Then, when they collapsed, they were thrown into the crematory -- alive."
Vera Bein escaped that fate. For the longest while, she kept her pregnancy secret, and was lucky her delivery came within weeks of liberation by the Soviets, unannounced, and not "helped" by any camp doctor.
Her survival -- and that of her daughter -- is a footnote of the Holocaust, but an important one.
"This does seem to be an unusual story," said Estee Yaari, foreign media liaison for the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. "Although there are others," she said, including one survivor born in Buchenwald in 1944, "it is a rather rare occurrence."
Surviving Auschwitz was one thing. Little "Angi", as her mother called her, was also lucky to have survived the war's chaotic aftermath, overcoming a bad start from poor nutrition that made her bones weak.
She was even lucky to get official proof of her arrival in this world: a birth certificate that her adoptive father got for her before the family left Poland.
Prepared in 1945 in Oswiecim, the Polish name for Auschwitz, the certificate gave her name as "Angela Bein." The surname was that of her biological father, Tibor Bein, a lawyer, who died of maltreatment in the camp.
"Auschwitz" was listed as her place of birth -- a place that has ceased to exist by the German name, except as an expression synonymous with mechanized murder. Auschwitz today exists only as a museum, and Angela Polgar has never been back.
She has a copy of her birth certificate, issued in 1989 by the Communist authorities in her hometown, Sarospatak, in eastern Hungary.
As further proof, she has her original 1966 Hungarian teacher's diploma, which also lists Auschwitz as her birthplace.
After the liberation in 1945, Polgar's mother trekked across parts of Poland, Romania and Byelorussia in a circuitous route leading back to safety in Hungary. There, Vera remarried, and it was that second husband -- Sandor Polgar, also an Auschwitz survivor, owner of a textile shop and a generation older than Vera -- who adopted Polgar and become her "real" father, the only one she ever knew.
Twelve years later, however, he, too, died, and mother and child were once again set adrift. Coming on the heels of the crushing of their country's revolution by the Soviets in 1956, and with a relative now in Canada to sponsor them, they started plotting their flight from Hungary. Vera left in 1966, Angela followed in 1973 with her own daughter, Katy. They settled in Toronto, where Vera worked as a kindergarten teacher and bookkeeper. Katy moved to Montreal and started a family, and in 1996 Vera moved here to be with them.
For the longest time, the family saga -- especially the Auschwitz part -- was kept private. The only public recounting came in the form of a short memoir, written in Angela Polgar's voice by her sister-in-law, a retired Montreal high schoolteacher named Marianne Polgar. It was published in a small Zionist journal in New York in 2000.
Then, last January, after a barrage of coverage in the media about the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Polgar decided the time had come to let the whole story be told. Polgar also unearthed a precious resource: an old audio tape of her mother recounting her time at Auschwitz. It was an "interview" Vera gave her granddaughter, Katy, in 1984 for a high-school project. The tape -- her final word on the subject -- will soon be registered as part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum's archives in Poland.
As testimonies go, it's a poignant one: words spoken over the telephone more than 25 years ago, a 30-minute inter-generational dialogue in which the subject sounds like she'd rather not be telling the innocent teenager just how horrible history can be.
"It's so painful to talk about this," Vera says at one point, as Katy prods her for details. "I was so curious to hear what she had to say," Katy, now doing her doctorate in cancer research at McGill University, recalled last week.
"My mother was so protective; she wouldn't let me read any Holocaust books, so this was my one-time shot to see what my grandmother could give me. The amazing thing was that she was never bitter about what happened to her. She just went on with life."
On the tape, Vera begins by describing the confusion of her arrival at Auschwitz in May, 1944. She remembers the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele sending her to the left after inspection on the platform while others were sent to the right, to their deaths. Worried she was being separated from the others and unaware of her good fortune to be spared, she remembers telling Mengele she was pregnant, hoping he'd be compassionate and let her stay with the others.
"You stupid goose!" she recalled Mengele snapping at her, ordering her to do as she was told. Healthy and strong, Vera was good stock for the camp's labor force. Mengele wasn't going to send her to her death, not yet.
She was sent to have her left arm tattooed with a registration number: A-6075. Then she was assigned the night shift in the ample storeroom in Camp A that contained mounds of confiscated belongings of other Auschwitz victims and inmates.
Because it was so rich in stock, the depot was dubbed "Kanada," like the land of plenty. Vera's job was to sort clothing, shoes, bedding -- anything the Germans wanted to keep for themselves.
Later, she was assigned kitchen duty, where she ate potato peels, a slight but vital source of nutrition for her and the child inside her. The rest of her daily diet consisted of ersatz coffee in the morning, "something warm, a soup made of grass" for lunch, and for supper a slice of bread with a smear of jam or margarine on it.
Then came hard labour outside the camp, building a road and working in a field. Vera was transferred to Camp B2, then Camp C, where she got to know children, especially twins, who were used for medical experiments by Mengele and fellow doctors before being liquidated.
In October, now seven months pregnant, she was selected by Prof. Carl Clauberg's medical team for sterilization experiments. It was only a matter of time before she became a guinea pig herself.
In October, now seven months pregnant, she was selected by Prof. Carl Clauberg's medical team for sterilization experiments. They injected some kind of burning, caustic substance into her cervix.
Right behind, in the uterus, was the fetus.
"That was me in there," Polgar now marvels. "The needles went in, I went to the right side, then the left side. Who knows what he gave her?"
Somehow the fetus survived. After the experiment was over, the patient went back to her barracks -- and then disappeared from the doctors' radar.
"Somehow Mengele forgot her," Polgar said. "I was so small, the pregnancy didn't really show. That was her luck. Otherwise, they would have finished her off, and me, too."
A month later, Vera was approached in her barracks by "a Jewish woman doctor"-- possibly the gynecologist Gisella Perl.
The doctor had a warning and an offer. She told her that new mothers usually "disappeared" along with their offspring after the birth -- sent to the gas chambers. She offered to give Vera an abortion.
"I promised her to think it over, because she really insisted on it," Vera recalled on the tape. "She said I was too young to be gassed, and she wanted to save me." But that night, Vera dreamt of her mother. "She told me, 'Veruska, you are eight months pregnant, and you don't do this, because (the fetus is) alive already and ready to leave. Believe in God and Hashem will be with you. Maybe a miracle will happen. But don't do it.'
"The next day, Vera gave the doctor her answer: she was going ahead with the birth. It happened on Dec. 21, in the barracks of Camp C. "I felt the pain and told the Block altester (the barrack's inmate supervisor) that I feel cramps and pain. She asked me to climb on the top of the bunk, and she came with me and she helped me to give birth to your mummy," Vera tells her granddaughter on the tape. "She knew how to do it, because she was the daughter of a doctor, so she had an idea about cleanliness and how to help a woman in labor. She brought hot water and clean sheets. She cooked a pair of scissors in hot water to sterilize them" before cutting the umbilical cord, she said. "So everything went quite easily." The infant weighed one kilogram, a little over two pounds "Mummy was so weak and so tiny, she didn't cry. So nobody knew she was born."
Three hours after giving birth, Vera had to leave her baby in the bunk and go outside in the cold for roll call. Three hours after giving birth, Vera had to leave her baby in the bunk and go outside in the cold for roll call -- what the Germans called the Appell.
Her daughter is still amazed she was able to do it. "What courage, what incredible strength she had to do that," Polgar said. "Remember, it was December. It was freezing, and they didn't have any coats or proper shoes, just wooden clogs that made them slip on the ice."
Just before the liberation, a final scare. Yelling "Schnell! Schnell!"(Quick! Quick!) the German guards herded surviving inmates like Vera into a tunnel beneath the camp and told them they would be exterminated. (It didn't happen, but to her dying day Vera retained a mortal fear of tunnels; once, trapped between stations in a stalled Toronto subway car, she lost her senses, screaming to be let out.)
After the scare, there was another miracle.
On the day of liberation another child was born at Auschwitz, Gyorgy Faludi.
His mother had helped Vera with her delivery; now Vera returned the favor.
The woman didn't have enough milk to suckle her son, so Vera did it. It was the beginning of a long friendship. The two families -- Faludi with her son, Bein with her daughter -- stuck together for the next few months of wandering back to Hungary. Vera nursed the two children and helped Faludi find her husband and return to their hometown, Miskolc. The war was over. Now the recovery began. After the liberation, no-one except Vera held up much hope that little Angela would live long.
In Budapest, Vera's mother's advice was to let the baby die. So, too, said the local doctors they consulted -- until one of them did a closer examination."(He) held me up like a chicken, by the legs with my head down. He wanted to see if I'd try to pull my head up. And I did. And then he said 'We can let that baby live.'" Her biggest problem in those first few years were her bones. "They were very weak, and I wasn't allowed to walk. So they put me in a carriage, and my father took me back and forth to school that way," she said.
In the street, strangers used to stare." Everybody looked at me ... and said 'That's a doll, not a baby.' They called my mother the crazy lady, because they thought she was only pretending to have a baby." Over time, though, with better nutrition and care, the child's bones got stronger, and at six she could finally walk unaided. The legacy of Angela's early years never disappeared completely. She's still tiny of stature, under five feet tall, and walks with a shuffling gait. But that doesn't seem to faze her. These days, she bustles back and forth to a computer class she takes in Montreal and doesn't seem handicapped by her physique -- or her past.
Sixty years after her birth she's been thinking a lot about her mother. She remembers her on her death bed, 13 years ago in a Toronto hospital. It was a sad, cruel end to a remarkable life. Vera's body was ridden with cancer of the spine and lung. While she lay dying, paralyzed, she had visions of Auschwitz. "She would say 'Mengele is at the door,' " Polgar said. "It was horrible. There was not enough morphine to take the nightmare away even from her dying minutes."
Vera Polgar, previously Vera Bein, born Veronika Otvos, died at age 73 on Jan. 28, 1992 -- a day after the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. "She did not want to die on Jan. 27," Polgar said. "She pulled the suffering through to the next day to die."
She remembers her mother for many things: the odds she overcame, the perseverance she embodied, the pain she concealed for so many years under a mask of optimism and a survivor's dream of renewal.
"She was very charming, never depressed," Polgar said. "But deep down, it was always there."
Like the ink in the number tattooed on her arm, the mark that Auschwitz left on Vera's psyche was indelible. Now, thanks to her daughter, so is her story.
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http://www.aish.com/ho/p/Murdered_at_Auschwitz.html
Murdered at Auschwitz
My name is Yechiel Michoel Friedman. I was murdered in Auschwitz and don't you ever forget me.
by Benjamin Brafman
This speech was delivered by Benjamin Brafman, Esq. on Yom HaShoah.
I did not survive – I was murdered at Auschwitz.
My name is Yechiel Michoel Friedman. I was "murdered" at Auschwitz. I did not die at Auschwitz. I was "murdered" at Auschwitz.
None of you know me. None of the people in this room have ever met me; not even my own grandson, Ben Brafman, who many of you know, has ever met me. I have authorized my grandson to speak for me tonight, but this is not his speech. It is my speech. My grandson speaks for me, because although I was murdered, I was not silenced. You must be reminded of my life and of my murder - not my death - my murder. The murder of my family - of your family - of so many families...
This is my story - a true story. A sad, horrific story.
My story, like so many of your stories, has a wonderful beginning, a very terrible middle and a tragic, horrible end that Baruch Hashem was not really the end, because although I and part of my family were brutalized and murdered, a part of my family miraculously survived - and because some did survive, my grandson is here to speak for me, to tell you "my" story, his grandfather's story, my life story and my death story. The story of a life that was brutally taken from me, from my beautiful wife, Malka, my beautiful, sweet daughter, Sima, her young, handsome husband, Yaakov and their baby, my granddaughter, my "first" granddaughter, Chaya Sarah, my little Chaya Sarah, who at two years old was ripped screaming from her mother's arms and thrown into an oven at Auschwitz as if she did not matter.
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Well, I speak tonight to tell you that my little Chayala did matter, we all mattered.
Nazi killers murdered my Chayala and 1.5 million other Jewish children.Chaya Sarah was the only grandchild I ever knew and I loved her as only a grandfather can love a grandchild and Nazi killers murdered her, my Chayala and 1.5 million other Jewish children. They took our nachas - our life and our joy and our hope. They took our babies and turned them into ashes.
Today, I speak to you as a neshama, as a soul from heaven, where I and millions of my brothers and sisters sit in a special place of honor reserved for us, for those you call Kedoshim - holy ones - whose lives were taken only because we were Jews, brutally taken less than 70 years ago, when a whole country became dominated by savages, while a civilized world stood by and through its silence, said that it was "okay to smash the head of a two year old child and then, while she was still alive, throw her screaming in terror into a burning oven, that it was okay to gas and cremate - to murder her parents and grandparents." A civilized, cultured nation did this and a civilized world watched it happening and did nothing to stop our slaughter.
The world heard our screams but did not care, the world smelled our burning flesh but turned away - the world heard my Chayala screaming for her mother and did nothing, because Chayala was a Jewish child and at that time - the systematic murder of Jewish children - undertaken in an efficient, organized manner by monsters in government-issued uniforms -was okay. Indeed, it was encouraged, applauded. The murderers were honored with medals, applauded as heroes for killing our children - for killing my grandchild.
How did this happen to us? When did our world turn so bitter and dark?
I remember our life before Auschwitz, a good life, a quiet, pious life, centered around my family, my wife, Malka, our daughters, Sima, Ruchele, Hencha, Hnda, my sweet little boy, Meir, Sima's husband, Yaakov, and their baby, my zeis little Chayala.
We lived in a small town in Czechoslovakia, Kiviash, right near the Hungarian border. I was a learned man, a Hebrew teacher. Our family was a good family. We were poor, but respected. We were honest, kind, sweet people who lived among other respected, soft-spoken, wonderful families. We had no enemies.
I never even raised my voice in anger, never, until that day in Auschwitz, when they murdered my grandchild, then the world heard me, but did not listen, when they tried so hard to destroy my family. I screamed so loud, I cried so hard and long, but the murder continued. The smoke and gas roared and now I am still angry. Now, I raise my voice again, not to complain, but so that you will remember - so that you can wake up, because what happened to my family can happen again, it is happening again!
Today, less than 70 years later, monsters are again threatening and murdering Jewish families, murdering our beautiful children - just last month in Israel, in Itamar, the Fogel family was massacred and again, beautiful, little, innocent children were butchered because they were Jews.
Udi and Ruth Fogel murdered because they were Jews! Their children, Yoav, age 11, Elad, age 4 and Hadas, age 3 months - slaughtered!! Their throats slit while they slept in their own beds.
You must know the terror, not only to make you sad and angry, but to make you vigilant.So I need to tell you about my own murder. I need to relive for you my horror, my terrible loss, so that you will understand and remember, so that you will feel the Shoah - what the world refers to as the Holocaust. It needs to be real for those of you who were not there. It is more than a word - Shoah. You must know the terror, not only to make you sad and angry, but to make you vigilant.
_____If I upset you tonight, good! If my frankness and the terrifying description of brutal murder gives you nightmares tonight - good. I want you to be afraid and sad and angry and bitter and aware - but I also want you to be proud, because the end of my own story, although sad, was not the end.
Be comforted in the knowledge that "they did not win." The Nazi murderers killed me and millions of Jews like me, but they did not win. They did not murder my whole family, or your whole family. The murderers and their army of monsters did not murder the Jewish people, they did not end Klal Yisrael - they made us stronger.
Jews are alive today. Israel is strong today, my family, your families, are here today, and we must keep reminding the world about our parents, grandparents, great grandparents and the children, who were gassed and cremated.
My family is alive today to help you understand the quality of hate that can allow a country to burn and gas and bludgeon newborns, infants and toddlers; to machine gun them and throw them into mass graves or onto trucks and then while still alive, toss them into large ovens, or used while conscious and awake - for vicious, cruel medical experiments.
So many children, small Kinderlach screaming for their Mommy and Tattie, for Bobbie and Zayde - can you hear them? Their screaming is so loud - I can still hear my Chayala, 70 years later. Can you hear them? Can you hear your family members? The families you never got to meet or know. Can you hear their screams?
When you are in bed waiting to fall asleep, listen hard. If you try, you will hear them in your head and in your heart.
Listen and you will also hear 12 year old Tamar Fogel who, returning to her home in Itamar, after an Oneg Shabbat Friday night, only a few weeks ago, found her parents murdered, her three month old baby sister, Hadas, with her throat slit. Can you hear Tamar screaming? All of us, all the way up here in Heaven heard her screams; you should be able to hear her just across the ocean, her screams for her family, for every Jew whose child - whose life has been viciously taken just because they were Jewish.
It is almost impossible to imagine so much murder and torture and starvation, but you must.The difficulty in speaking about such horror and about so much grief is that it is so hard. It is almost impossible for the mind to process so much terrible information, it is almost impossible to make someone understand something so bad, it is hard to even imagine so much murder and torture and starvation, but you must.
I will help you. I am going to be graphic and brutal, because it is the only way to make you get it, for you to really understand what it means when we say Holocaust - or Shoah - or talk about six million Kedoshim.
I am standing in the gas chamber naked with hundreds of innocent Jews. My wife, Malka, whose terrified eyes were already dead, is next door holding our daughter, Sima. Sima's husband, Yaakov, is with me. We have already watched our Chayala cremated. We are already dead - the gas will just kill us again.
We know we are not in a shower. We know we are in a gas chamber. We know we are going to die and we all know that we did nothing wrong and we also know that a civilized world did this to us, that a civilized world abandoned us.
We are afraid to die, of the brutal, choking, burning death that is upon us, but we are so much more afraid that nobody will ever know that we lived, that nobody will ever know that we were a good family; that we had beautiful, good children and that we had a beautiful grandchild. I was so afraid that nobody would ever know; that nobody in my family or in anyone else's family would survive; that the "final solution" was really going to be final. Let me tell you something....
You think you know about prayer - you think you know about faith because you are religious or because you pray every day?
Let me tell you about real prayer, about real belief - in my gas chamber, as gas filled our lungs, as flames burned off our skin, we screamed "Ani Maamin,” we believe in you Hashem.
With our dying breath we screamed, "Shma Yisroel Hashem Elokenu Hashem Echad" - my last words screamed through gas filled lungs, as I died, so afraid that my entire family had been, or soon would be, murdered.
What wrenching sadness, what anger rose in my heart and raged through my mind - I pleaded to Hashem, not to be spared, but for nekama, for revenge! How, when, who would ever make this right, or get even for us, who would be alive to say Kaddish for us - to light a candle on our Yahrzeit - no graves, no headstones - no one alive to mourn our death - to even know of our life.
Well, I am not here tonight in person. Yechiel Michoel Friedman was murdered at Auschwitz, but we were not all murdered that day, or the next day and some of my children, some of your children did survive and today, our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren and now even our great-great-grandchildren are alive. We live in the United States and all over the world as proud Jews, and we have Eretz Yisrael - do you hear that you Nazi murderers? We have Israel, a nation built by survivors. We have a Jewish army and a Jewish state. Our people are strong. We have powerful, eloquent voices demanding to be heard.
My daughters, Hencha and Hinda, who were tortured for years, did not die and my daughter, Ruchele, who at age 15 escaped to America, married Shlomo Brafman, who also escaped - they did not die and their children and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren are growing up as Shomer Shabbos Jews and tonight, my grandson is speaking for me in a shul with 1,000 proud, strong Jews who came to remember all of us tonight.
_____I do not have my life, but I have my revenge.So I do not have my life, but I have my revenge. In fact, my little boy, Meir, who they tried so hard to murder, he lived too. At age 16, he weighed 45 lbs. when found alive in a pile of corpses at Auschwitz.
When liberated, he went to Israel, to Israel, where for 50 years he was a soldier in Tzahal - Israel's army. A Jewish hero, he fought for 50 years in Israel's army. My son, my Kaddish, he did not die in Auschwitz either. How proud I was to watch as he put on the uniform of an Israeli soldier to fight for our country, a Jewish community.
I am very sad and very angry and bitter that I did not get to enjoy the world of nachas that was mine, a world of nachas and pride and Yddishkeit that I had a right to live through and enjoy.
The Nazis hurt me beyond words, but they did not win.
Ladies and gentlemen, they only win if you forget - or now, if you allow the world to deny. They only win if we do not cry real tears when we hear about the slaughter of the Fogel family in Itamar.
They only win if you cannot hear my Chayala screaming or feel the terror of Tamar Fogel, or her grandparents who must now face a quality of grief so savage that it is hard for you to grasp.
Trust me - I know about the murder of a child and a grandchild and how that impacts on everything else. How everything else is forever shrouded in death and overwhelming sadness. The Fogel family will never recover but they cannot be forgotten.
Here we are in a beautiful shul, with so many Jews. Good Jews. Strong, proud people who have not forgotten us, me, my family, your families - the parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, the children, the grandchildren - the babies who were murdered and gassed and buried alive.
It is okay to cry for what we lost, for what was taken from you, for the lives lost, the nachas of family we were deprived of.
Cry for us. We cry for you too, for what you lost, for the family you never met, for the millions of good, sweet Jews who did not live - for the students who never finished their studies, for the scientists and artists and musicians and teachers and Rebbes who never got the chance to excel, to perform, to teach, to cure, to live.
It's okay to cry for the children who never got to play, or sing, or laugh, who were put to death with such violence, with so much hatred that I cannot describe it in words as for certain levels of grief, there are no words. It is so bad that it cannot even be imagined by any decent human being, impossible to process rationally.
But you must, because today, people are already questioning whether the Holocaust really happened. World leaders and scholars are already denying the Holocaust; they are challenging even the integrity of a handful of survivors, the eyewitnesses who are still alive, those who saw the horror with their own eyes. Even these heroic survivors are being doubted and am so afraid that in coming years, vicious, anti-Semitic revisionists will tamper with history and the truth and we cannot - you cannot allow that to happen ever - never...
If our memory is really to be for a blessing, then you must remember.I had a granddaughter, a charming, beautiful little baby girl named Chaya Sarah and she was murdered in front of my eyes and although her neshama, her soul, is in heaven with me, her memory must be emblazoned in your hearts forever.
If our memory is really to be for a blessing, for our neshamos to really have the aliyah you ask for, an aliyah we have earned and paid so dearly for, then you must remember.
You must make certain that your children and their children understand what happened to their family, to your family, to all of our families, or it will happen again.
You think it cannot happen again? Why? Because you have good lives - you live in civilized times? We had a good life - we lived in civilized times. We were happy and complacent, but we were not vigilant and we walked right into a Holocaust.
Our neighbors, an entire nation of ordinary men and women of intelligence and breeding and culture turned into monstrous, murderous animals who withdrew from humanity and imposed a level of brutality on us that cannot now be described and could not then, ever have been predicted - but that is exactly what happened.
It was even worse than the worst true story that any survivor can report, because the brain is not capable of capturing so much grief without exploding, so even those who survived, who saw it all, cannot fully capture the full horrific ordeal, the vicious detail.
Only a victim like me, only someone who did not survive, can tell you the whole, bad, ugly, demented, terrible truth about our murder, of six million murders.
That, my friends, is why I chose to speak to you through my grandson from my seat in heaven and although Hashem does not permit me to tell you "why" these terrible things happened, I am commanded to discuss "what" happened.
To tell you "what" happened with clarity and force, so that hopefully some people in this room will never doubt the Shoah and you will take it upon yourself to confront anyone who dares to deny it and make them hear my story - your story, the sad but true stories of our families, whom we too often refer to as the "Six Million," but rarely if ever refer use their names.
We have names. Our lives were taken, but they cannot take our names.
My name is Yechiel Mechoel Friedman. I was murdered at Auschwitz with my wife, Malka and my daughter, Sima, her husband, Yaakov Weiss and my granddaughter, Chaya Sarah.
Can you see them? I see them and I also see Tamar Fogel and the bodies of her family being carried through Itamar for burial; not 70 years ago - last month. People with names and lives taken in the dark - only because they were Jews.
My name is Yechiel Michoel Friedman. I was murdered in Auschwitz and don't you ever forget me.
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Sacrifice and Redemption in Auschwitz
No one survived without a miracle.
by Rabbi Yerachmiel Milstein
There's a synagogue near my office where I often "shoe-horn" Mincha (the daily afternoon prayer service) into my usually over-programmed day. During the winter months, when Mincha is prayed in the late afternoon, corralling a quorum of 10 men for services can be quite difficult as most men -- like me -- are still at their places of work, far from the residential neighborhood in which this particular synagogue and my office are located.
Six weeks ago, New York experienced its umpteenth snow storm this year and on this particular day a thin coating of ice was added for good measure. At precisely 15 minutes before sunset I left my office as usual and made my treacherous two-minute foot journey to the synagogue already praying that somehow nine other men would be similarly inspired.
Braving the ice encrusted steps leading down to the shul, I nearly slid into the open door and stumbled into an almost empty room. The rabbi was there and like a telemarketer selling prime property to the unemployed was working the phone trying to coax one or two reticent Jews into braving the elements and joining us. Another gentleman was there, one of the reliable regulars with whom I would occasionally chat as on more than one occasion, we were waiting for the room to fill. He looked at me and commenting about the weather invited me to sit down and get comfortable for the duration.
"You know I never asked you where you're from," I started, "although I'd recognize a Hungarian accent anywhere."
"Budapest," he replied with a sweep of his hand.
"So you must have come over after '56," I said, judging him to be a man of about 60 who like so many Jewish people I knew growing up in New York had made his way to the United States as a child in the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution.
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"No," he smiled, "I got one of these." With that he rolled up his sleeve and showed me a blue-green tattoo with European style numbers. As if to explain my confusion he added kindly, "I'm a little older than I look: already in the 70's."
His young face still gave me pause. "You must've been among the youngest survivors. How did you make it?"
"Only with miracles. Without miracles nobody survived." A man of uncommon good looks, he pointed to the upper bridge of his nose which had the slightest bump and two small scars on either side."I once made the mistake of being too starved and physically exhausted to stand up quickly enough for a vicious SS officer, so he gave me this present at the end of a particularly vicious beating. He stomped on my face with his perfectly shined, cleated boots. It was plain mazal that he only caused cosmetic damage. Had he blinded me I would have been shot dead on the spot, because there was no room in Auschwitz for anybody who couldn't work. No. Nobody survived without miracles."
I marveled at his easy demeanor in speaking about a topic that had silenced most of the Holocaust survivors I knew and I thought this a rare opportunity to learn more about the man and his experiences. "I hope I'm not causing you too much anxiety by dredging up the past, but what other miracles did you experience?"
When we entered the room next to the gas chamber and were asked to undress, it all sank bitterly in. Smiling broadly he said in a mixture of English and Yiddish, "Too much to count. Even the first moment I set foot in the camp, Mengele -- yimach shmo! (may his name be erased!) -- was making his infamous selection of those he deemed healthy enough to work, herding them off to one side. Those who were too young, too weak or too diseased to work were shoved to the other side, to die. Although I was just 14, God put an idea in my head that when that devil asked my age I straightened my shoulders as high as they would go and loudly shouted '16!'. Only later did I learn that this was the exact minimum age of survival."
It was quiet for about a minute as he seemed to lose himself in his thoughts and was all but oblivious to my eager stare.
Speaking more slowly and deliberately than before, he said in a voice barely more than a whisper, "In the end we were skeletons. They starved us and worked us so hard that we were just bones. We couldn't lift. We couldn't run. The most we could do was only shlep ourselves off the floor in the morning. And from working the gas chamber detail my bunkmates and I knew that it was only a matter of days before we would be 'sent to the showers' to be disposed of as well. On the day the Nazis decided to execute us we left the barracks without so much as a whimper. But when we entered the room next to the gas chamber and were asked to undress, it all sank bitterly in. We were a bunch of young men, children really, who were worked to death and when that didn't come soon enough for the Nazis, we had to be grotesquely killed by gas."
Tears welled up in my friend's eyes and began to build in mine as well. "My friends, who seemed lifeless moments before started to scream hysterically and to throw temper tantrums on the floor. Another went insane. But me, I had this feeling that I didn't want to die like that. I thought about my religious training and remembered my beloved Rebbe who had taught me the first letters of the Hebrew alphabet and remained my Rebbe until after my Bar Mitzvah. I wondered what he would have said to me at this moment."
The Zohar records that the recitation of Abraham's and Isaac's readiness to put love of God ahead of life itself is a source of heavenly mercy whenever Jewish lives are threatened. (The Complete Artscroll Siddur)His tears had overrun their banks and were now gracefully gliding down his chiseled cheekbones. "'You are not the worthless scum you are being made to be, but precious Jewish children who are being killed because of their special historic connection to God. This makes you as holy as any sacrifice brought on the altar of the Holy Temple.' I could hear my Rebbe's voice talking to me. 'You are as holy as any human can get. Although Jews do not believe in making human sacrifices, still, God has decided that today you are a human sacrifice.' So I thought, what would be a fitting prayer for a human sacrifice? I called out to anyone who would listen, 'Hey, has anybody got a Siddur (prayer book)?' Oddly enough a tattered book appeared. Sensing the end might be very near, I opened it quickly to the Akeidah, the part of the Torah many recite daily where God commands Abraham to take the life of his son Isaac as a human sacrifice. And with more feeling than ever, I began to recite the last prayer of my short life."
I don't remember at which point the rabbi gave up and got off the phone to become drawn into our conversation. But the rabbi's eyes were as wide as mine as my friend began to recite the words of the Akeidah by heart and with his beautiful voice and melodious Hungarian accent the words became a powerfully moving song.
"And they came to the place of which God had spoken to him, and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood, and he bound Isaac his son and placed him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife, to slaughter his son. And an angel of God called to him from heaven and said, "Abraham! Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." And he said, "Do not stretch forth your hand to the lad, nor do the slightest thing to him, for now I know that you are a God fearing man, and you did not withhold your son, your only one, from Me."
Narrowing his eyes to no more than a sliver he said, "As soon as I said these words, a commotion broke out with SS officers rushing into the room yelling, 'Get dressed quickly' and we were ushered out of the room with great haste. They told us the Americans were coming and the Nazi cowards had enough trouble disposing of all the bodies that were already dead. They couldn't afford to create any more bodies and as such we were better off alive to them."
He sighed deeply, "No my friend, without a miracle nobody survived.
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Hitler's Aides
How Christian teachings about Jews helped pave the road to the Holocaust.
by Gabriel Wilensky
How Christian teachings about Jews helped pave the road to the Holocaust.
by Gabriel Wilensky
After celebrating their liberation from the ancient Egyptian yoke, Jews mark Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date was chosen to commemorate the revolt at the Warsaw Ghetto, an event in which a handful of Jews dared confront the all-powerful pharaoh. But the story of our brothers in the ghetto did not have a happy ending; the Red Sea did not open so that the pursued could escape, nor were their enemies smitten by divine hand. Instead, the few survivors from the hell that was the ghetto ended their lives in the vortex of death that was Treblinka.
The Warsaw Ghetto was one of the many ghettos the Germans established in various European cities. The ghettos were created with the sole purpose of keeping the Jewish population locked in to prevent them from having contact with their Christian neighbors. The Germans forced hundreds of hundreds of thousands of Jews to live packed in these places that would have normally held a tenth of the population.
The Jews from the ghetto, as well as those that still lived “free” in other cities, were forced to sew a yellow Star of David on their clothes so that the Christians could clearly identify them. The draconian anti-Jewish laws the Germans promulgated in 1935, followed by similar ones in Italy in 1938 and then in France, Slovakia, Hungary and other countries, prevented the Jews from socializing with Christians, holding public office or academic positions, working in professions such as law or medicine, as well as many other restrictions, including loss of citizenship. These laws constituted grave human rights violations and were the first steps in a gradual process of dehumanization of the Jews that made the subsequent genocide possible.
Where did the Germans get all these ideas? Which Machiavellian functionary thought of this? When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they discovered they did not need to invent almost anything in their persecution of the Jews, because the Catholic Church had invented practically everything hundreds of years before.
When Hitler came to power, he found that the population already deeply hated Jews.The yellow badge in the garments, the prohibition to hold public office, the prohibition to have Christian employees, the burning of the Talmud, the prohibition of living next to Christians, the prohibition from belonging to guilds or work in industry, the ghettos, all these violations to basic human rights of Jews that we associate with the legislation of the Nazi tyranny was promulgated by the Catholic Church between 400 and 700 years before the Nazis. During almost two millennia Christians were taught that Christianity had replaced Judaism, and that Jews were evil, bent on the destruction of Christianity and that they were killers of Jesus.
So we should not be very surprised that when Hitler came to power, he found that the population already deeply hated Jews. That hatred had been planted and cultivated by Christianity since practically the beginning of the Christian movement in the first century of the Common Era. A verbal hatred that began as an intra-Jewish fraternal fight, with time and the distancing of the Early Christians from mainstream Judaism (as Christianity gained traction among the pagan peoples of the Roman Empire) it transformed itself in violent, visceral and irrational hatred.
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The Christian movement accused Jews of killing Jesus and of rejecting his messianic mission. As a consequence, the Early Christians developed the concept of supersessionism in which Judaism was relegated to second plane as Christianity was replacing it. Christians believed at this time that God considered Christians the “New Israel” and the new “Chosen People.” They began calling the Christian Bible the “New” Testament and the Hebrew Bible the “Old” Testament, once again suggesting that the Jewish religion had become superfluous.
Despite oppression and hardship, the Jews did not disappear. This tenaciousness to survive and their continued refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah led to an increase of Christian hatred toward Jews. The Church Fathers, whose writings make up the foundation of Christianity as we know it today, wrote about Jews in manner comparable to the Nazis. As St. Ambrose, known as the “Bishop with the Golden Tongue” said in 374 CE,
“The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are lecherous, greedy, rapacious. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. They worship the Devil. Their religion is a sickness. The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christians may never cease vengeance, and the Jew must live in servitude forever. God always hated the Jews. It is essential that all Christians hate them.”1
Saint John Chrysostom, bishop of Antioch, was not that much better just a few years later:
“Where Christ-killers gather, the cross is ridiculed, God blasphemed, the father unacknowledged, the son insulted, the grace of the Spirit rejected. . . .If the Jewish rites are holy and venerable, our way of life must be false. But if our way is true, as indeed it is, theirs is fraudulent. I am not speaking of the Scriptures. Far from it!.. I am speaking of their present impiety and madness.”2
During the Middle Ages Christians began associating Jews with the Devil. This association was a natural one to make for a population already used to reading in the Gospels sentences like, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire.” Christian thinkers asked themselves what kind of creature would reject the truth and kill God, and concluded that only an inhuman agent of Satan could act that way. The descending spiral led many European Christians, most of whom had never even seen a Jew, to form a fantastic conception of them that had no basis in reality.
The Enlightenment transformed the Christian theological anti-Judaism into something modern, secular and pseudo-scientific.The French Revolution brought about the Emancipation of the Jews, who quickly left the ghettos and in large part assimilated to the Christian population of the cities to which they moved. The Enlightenment transformed the Christian theological anti-Judaism into something modern, secular and pseudo-scientific, sine qua non prerequisites for a population that was rapidly adopting a modern worldview detached from the yoke of their religion. It’s in these cultural surroundings that anti-Semitism was transformed into something racial, and it’s in the 19th and 20th centuries that the old accusations of deicide, of poisoning wells, of bringing about the Black Death, of killing Christian boys to extract their blood to make matzah and many other baseless accusations were transformed into modern accusations in which Jews were blamed for Germany losing WWI, of creating and fomenting revolutions, of modernism, of Capitalism, of Communism, of inflation, of unemployment, and many more.
The Nazis inherited this conception of the Jew. Hitler was raised as a Catholic and imbibed the traditional anti-Jewish teachings in Christianity, and he took maximum advantage of them to promote his agenda. As he told two German Catholic bishops in 1933:
“The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them into ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were. . . . I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. . . . I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service for pushing them out of schools and public functions.”3
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A Note from the Author: Antisemitism in Christianity and its role in the Holocaust
Thank you all for your comments. One important point to keep in mind is that this article does not describe modern Christians or Christianity. The focus of the article (and the book) is on the history of Christianity leading up to the Holocaust, particularly as it was in Europe. The Catholic Church convened the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and among other things officially lifted the Christian accusation of deicide. But for those Christian readers who were raised after 1965, you should know that prior to that Christianity taught that Jews were Christ-killers, and that all the Jews of Jesus’ time, and for all time, were guilty of his death: ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’ (Matthew 27: 24-25). This brought untold misery on Jews during centuries of persecution. Christians were incensed by passion plays and Good Friday liturgy and went out on murderous rampages. The negative teachings about Jews were pervasive, starting with the New Testament (just the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles contain 450 antisemitic verses, an average of two per page!) and including the writings of the Church Fathers, Martin Luther and other Christian thinkers and theologians. Priests everywhere in Europe routinely disparaged the Jews through the centuries in their sermons, even during the Nazi era.
In other words, there’s a sad history wich runs deep and for a long time. Many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust saw first hand, or heard from their parents or grandparents about the ghettos the Church had instituted not in the name of Hitler but in the name of Jesus. Think about it: the walls of the Roman ghetto, literally across the Tiber from the Vatican, were destroyed for the last time in 1870!
Most Christians today do not harbor this hatred toward Jews. Many Christians helped Jews during WWII, but as good as that was, unfortunately it was a tiny drop in a giant ocean of violence toward Jews from other Christians. Many Christians today, particularly in the US, are friends of the Jews and of Israel. This is a good thing. It is my hope that through healthy discussion like this one, and through education about history as I tried to convey in my book Six Million Crucifixions, further links will be forged, and pre-existing ones will be strenghtened. Even with the great progress of Vatican II and its subsequent teachings, there’s still work to do to completely eliminate antisemitism from Christianity.
Based on the author's book, “Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Teachings About Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust”.
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1.Quoted in Dagobert David Runes, The Jew and the Cross, p. 61.
2.Quoted in Jeremy Cohen, “Robert Chazan’s ‘Medieval Anti-Semitism’: A Note on the Impact of Theology,” in Berger, ed., History and Hate, p.69.
3.Akten deutscher Bischöfe, vol. 1, pp. 100-102. Quoted in Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, p. 47.
