Stories of the Holocaust

A lifetime after their ancestors had been separated by the Holocaust, a Jewish family in the US and Israel reunites.

Reb Azriel David opened his eyes to the sight of the singing train. In a choked voice, he cried: "I will give half of my portion in the World to Come to whoever can take my song to the Modzitzer Rebbe!"

I quickly came up with a story. I told him I had served as a nurse in the Red Army . . .

Julius sent a trusted courier to his parents with a note: “Give this man the most valuable items.”

The later it got, the crankier my brother became. Then he started whining and crying. He was exhausted, and wanted only to lie down and sleep. Finally the guide told them that it was too risky for him to take them any farther. “If the child’s cries were to be heard, we would all be thrown in a Spanish jail.”

Surrounded by strangers, he was afraid to strike a match or recite a blessing for fear of calling undue attention to himself and his family.

“Listen to me, Mrs. Rosenberg,” her heavy face was flushed with excitement. “Let me take her. Why should she die, the innocent babe? I will care for her as if she was my own. I never had children, you know. Give her to me . . .”

Sara no doubt felt the weight of the world on her shoulders. Her fate, and that of her family, had hung in the balance; now, very hot and tired, she had to make the long trip home with nothing to show for it...

Slowly the shelter came to life. My mother got up and prepared breakfast—a few crackers with some jam we still had left. But neither my two sisters nor my mother touched the food . . .

When the Russian army approached Auschwitz in the beginning of 1945, the Nazis evacuated the death camp. More than 15,000 are estimated to have died on this march . . .

“Young fellow, were you in Dachau during the war? Were you in Camp #4?” “Yes,” I replied to both questions.

“You! Put the nooses around the necks of these Jews!” the Nazi commander barked sharply. Dovid stepped out from the masses of frightened Jews and said, “I cannot do this.” Infuriated, the commander’s wrath now spilled down upon Dovid. “Shoot him!”

Standing stoically in her usual regal manner she continued: "My dear children, when the Gestapo come and get us, I do not know what will be. One thing I ask of you. Please take care of each other."

I first heard of Sammy Rosenbaum in 1965, when a Mrs. Rawicz from Rabka came into my office in Vienna to testify at a War Crimes trial

After years of trying and seeking help from specialists, Anya and Sol confronted the reality of their situation. “Would you want to adopt?” Anya asked one day in a tentative voice.

I learned the best strategy to deal with Bernie: avoid eye contact. Any recognition of his presence was due to invite another frenzied round of lectures, yelling, sobbing, hand-waving, stomping and door-slamming...

I could not walk anymore. The frosty Polish winter, the terrible cold, the exhausting six-week death march, were too much to bear. I felt that I simply could not place one foot in front of the other. All I wanted was to sit down and give up.

In the gas chambers, one boy shouted: "Brothers! Today is the holiday of Simchat Torah. We do not have clothes to cover us, nor a Torah scroll with which to dance. So let us dance with G‑d Himself—who is surely here among us."

We were all looking away; we had not known that he was severely afflicted with Parkinson's disease. Then we heard this big bang on the table: "Gentlemen, look at me, and look at me right now. Who can tell me what the lesson of the Holocaust is?"

"Go find someone else to bother," he shot back at me. "I want nothing to do with you!" My head was spinning; I was hurt inside, yet knew I had done nothing disrespectful. Obviously, what I represent—being a religious Jew, wearing a beard and a kippah on my head— upset him so.

The soldier stared at the boy, fighting back tears. "Over these four terrible years, this is the first live Jewish child I have seen..."

“On one very cold night I was shivering so hard, and I felt that I was freezing to death. All of a sudden, I felt a little bit of warmth . . .”

"Take these and run to Umschlagplatz. Run! Tell the kapos that your daughter is among the captured. This is an unwritten law among us -- no snatching of policemen's children"

“When was the last time you put on tefillin?” I asked. He smiled and proudly said, “72 years ago!” He held out his arm to show me the fading tattooed numbers. “1938. It was the day of Kristallnacht. Do you know what Kristallnacht is?”

Crystallizing slowly over time in the old man’s soul was the singular obligation of telling the story of that child’s last moments.

At first, I was awed by his courage. But the next day I realized, to my horror, that this man was “renting out” the siddur to people in exchange for bread . . .

His parents had been painfully trying to reach him the entire time he was in Shanghai . . . For months upon months, they had not been able to make contact with him. Had he made the right decision to depart from them? What ever happened to them? Would he ever see them again?

Another violent blow landed on my other cheek. “You are still praying?” the Blockelteste asked. Her face was crimson, contorted from fury, her eyes bloodshot. A sudden Jewish pride arose within me, like a pillar of smoke rising from a chimney . . .

On Kristallnacht, the family hid in their apartment with all the lights out and the windows shut. The children peered through the edges of the curtains and watched the Nazis storm into the small synagogue below their apartment and throw the Torah scrolls out into the streets.

As he walked through the long grass, something shiny caught his eye. He bent down and picked up a fragment of china. The most startling thing about the shard was the swastika which formed part of the design.

The year was 1945, just after the war. The place: a refugee camp somewhere in Germany. Jews just out of concentration camps had gathered in a barracks-turned-Synagogue for the Yom Kippur prayers

The woman seemed oblivious to my words. "A knife," she repeated. "I must have a knife. Now. Before it is too late"

My best friend was a girl of my age named Jeanette. One morning when I came to play, I saw her family being forced at gunpoint into a truck. I ran home and told my mother. “Don’t worry,” she said, “Jeanette will be back soon . . .”

How tefillin saved a person's life again and again -- during the Holocaust and in its immediate aftermath.

This tree trunk stood in the backyard of Jana Sudova, a Czech Righteous Among the Nations, who in early 1945 hid four Jewish escapees of the death marches...

On those rare occasions when we could coax my mother to speak about her war experiences, she would always begin with a wistful, nostalgic depiction of her very typical, very normal childhood. "The world was different when I was little," she would croon.

Using every means at his disposal, the 32-year-old succeeded in rescuing over 100,000 Jews within a six-month period. While Oskar Schindler is a household name, due largely to the acclaimed film “Schindler’s List,” Wallenberg—who saved many more people—is virtually unknown. And that’s a tragedy . . .

My grandfather, Dovid Henoch Zaklikowski, or “Reb Henoch” as he was affectionately dubbed, was known in the community for his kind smile and generous heart. This is what I heard from everyone I asked about my namesake, my grandfather.

We felt that a little Hanukkah light would warm our starving souls and inspire us with hope, faith, and courage