Over the past two weeks I’ve shared “Conversations With Bubba,” a report my granddaughter wrote for school concerning my experiences during the Holocaust. I concluded last week’s column with my granddaughter’s depiction of Shabbos in Bergen Belsen and how my saintly father enabled us to survive with our faith intact by imbuing us with a sense of mission and identity.
He would tell us children that we were malachei Shabbos – angels of Shabbos. That strengthened me, and I was able to hold my head high as I stood at roll call dressed in rags and covered by lice. When the Nazis shouted “Jewish pigs,” in my mind I responded, “I am an angel of Shabbos.”
Before I get to the final segment of my granddaughter’s report, I feel it is important that we stop and consider the vacuous education our children are receiving today. Yes, they may know passages by heart. Yes, they may know science and technology. Sadly, however, they do not know who they really are. No one has ever told them they are angels of Shabbos with a mission and purpose in life. How pitiful to have so much and yet so little – to live in such great freedom and yet be so enslaved.
As we come to the great Yom Tov of Pesach, the celebration of our freedom, we have to remember that Moshe Rabbeinu did not simply demand that Pharaoh “let my people go.” Freedom in and of itself is not only meaningless, it can be very destructive. What Moshe said was, “Let my people go to serve G-d.” That is the key – to serve G-d. Because otherwise, freedom can be more enslaving then slavery.
(Please note that the references in my granddaughter’s report to “Zaida” and “Mamma” are to my parents – her great-grandparents.)
Conversations With Bubba When Rosh Hashanah came in Bergen Belsen, Zaida said, “We have to blow the shofar.” Of course, no one had a shofar. The Nazis had made a junk pile of all the klei kodesh – the Jewish sacred items.
Bubba explained that some prisoners had managed to hide cigarettes. Cigarettes in Bergen Belsen were like precious jewels. With cigarettes you could bribe and negotiate with some of the brutes. So at great sacrifice three hundred cigarettes were collected which served as a bribe for one of the guards, who retrieved a shofar from the junk pile.
Zaida blew the shofar in Bergen Belsen and the Nazis beat the people and many were injured. But not before they made the berachah. And that berachah came from their hearts and souls.
Adjacent to the camp where Bubba was, there was another camp made up primarily of Polish Jews. (The Nazis had separated the nationalities so the population in Bubba’s camp was Hungarian and the camp next to it was Polish. ) When Zaida blew the shofar, its piercing sound resounded in the Polish camp. The Polish Jews rushed to the barbed wire and they too cried out the berachah from their hearts. With joy they thanked Hashem for the great zechus of hearing the sound of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah.
But even as their hearts were full of joy their bodies screamed with pain as the Nazis with their whips beat them mercilessly.
(Many years later Bubba was speaking in Eretz Yisrael and she was relating the story of the shofar when all of a sudden a woman jumped up in the audience. “My father was the rav in the Polish camp,” she said, “and the shofar from your camp was smuggled into ours and my father blew that shofar – and I still have it.”
