Survivor: A Meditation on Remembering the Shoah,David Mandel

On Sunday, April 9, 1944, the second day of Pesach, the Hungarian police came for my grandfather, Reb Dovid Hersh, a"h.

My mother's family lived in Fekete Ordo, a village of 200 families, 70 of them Jewish, less than 20 miles from Munkachevo, Czechoslovakia, which today is part of Ukraine. Reb Dovid, my namesake as well as my grandfather, was the village shochet, dayan, and baal tefilah. He was considered the leader of this small community. The Nazi strategy was to first remove the leaders.

Later that same evening on the second day of Pesach, my mother and two sisters, along with my grandmother Tzivia, a"h, made a seder. I've often asked my mother how she could possibly have made a seder after what transpired that same morning with her father. My mother's answer: "What else should we do? It was the second night of Pesach."

Where were we - those of us living safely and comfortably in the year 2006 - on the second night of Pesach several months ago? No doubt with our families, at home or perhaps in Florida, Israel, or other locales.

Vehigadita l'bincha bayom hahu (And you shall tell your children on that day). We all spoke of Yetzias Mitzrayim - the exodus from Egypt. But how many of us related stories of the Shoah at our seder table?

My grandfather returned home several days after his arrest. His beard had been cut off and the middle of his head shaved. And then, on the last day of Pesach 1944, my mother and her family were taken to a ghetto.

It has become all too easy to say we will never forget. And no doubt we won't. But will our grandchildren?

Every year, in the period between Rosh Chodesh Sivan and Shavuos, tens of thousands of Jews of Hungarian and Czechoslovakian descent commemorate the yahrzeit of their family members who perished in the Holocaust. This was the time in 1944 when these families entered Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, and other concentration camps. If you davened in any shul with Hungarian mispallalim in their late seventies and eighties, you probably noticed how many men had an aliyah l'Torah or said kaddish.

How long before there are no such mispallalim left to remind us of what happened to them and their families - to our families?

We children of survivors of the Shoah bear a special responsibility to share and to present a picture for all children today. We have a responsibility to remember because they - our enemies - want us to forget.

In 1998, David Smith, a history teacher and football coach at Whitwell Middle School in Whitwell, Tennessee, and Linda Hooper, the school's principal, decided to use the lesson of the Holocaust to teach their students tolerance. The students - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants raised in a town with no Jews - decided to collect six million paper clips to symbolize the six million murdered Jews.

As part of this project they set out to find an original rail car used to transport Jews to concentration camps. They sent letters to rail companies and museums in Germany, France, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, and other European nations. Some of the replies they received essentially complained about the proliferation of Holocaust memorials - it's time to forget what happened 60 years ago, the children were told.

There are more people than we would like to imagine in those countries who are just waiting for the first generation of survivors to die. They're counting on the rest of the world forgetting ten, twenty, and fifty years from now.

Could the Shoah happen again? In 1942, the Munkatcher Rebbe, son-in-law of the Minchas Elazar, returned from a trip to Poland. He implored the people of Munkatch to leave, describing the atrocities he heard and witnessed. "It's coming here," he said. No one listened.

The family of my uncle Shalom Romanovski, a"h, had a large supermarket. Credit was extended to all - Jews and non-Jews. His father said, "Why should we leave? Ma'ne goyim vet mir nish kein shlecht - my goyim won't do bad things to me."

Have you visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington? Did you note the words in the grand entrance hall? "The Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." George Washington said that on August 17, 1790. If only those words were true in the days of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when his government was begged to intervene and did so little.

Hitler cultivated German children to hate Jews. He taught them in schools, displayed pictures of hatred on the streets, embedded anti-Semitism throughout German society - in the newspapers, the banks, the theaters, the universities. Jews lived with a yellow symbol of hatred.

Given the opportunity, Hitler would have killed nearly everyone reading this newspaper.

We have an obligation to cultivate our children to remember these very Jews Hitler worked so hard to destroy.

The Nazis killed every Jew at least twice. They humiliated and degraded them, shaved their heads, made them stand naked, gave them numbers to replace their names. Hamavayesh et chaveiro b'rabim, k'ilu hargo. That was one death. And then they cremated them - a second death.

Others were taken to the forest and shot. That was their first death. Then their bodies were burned - a second death.

Those non-Jewish schoolchildren in Tennessee understood this. After collecting six million paper clips (by 2005 the total had swelled to more than 30 million; among those who sent in clips were President Bush, director Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Hanks), they wondered wat they could do with them. One suggestion was to smelt the paper clips into an iron memorial. The children said they couldn't, "because every paper clip represents a person and it would be like killing them, cremating them all over."

My mother, and her entire Hersh family arrived in Auschwitz on May 20, 1944. Two signs greeted them: Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes Free) and Arbeit Macht Das Leiben Suss (Work Makes Life Sweet). An all-girls orchestra in gray striped uniforms was playing beautiful music.

My mother and her parents, sisters, nieces, and nephews all went though The Selection. Twins run in my family and my mother's sister Hindee had five children including six-month-old twin girls. My Aunt Yides remembers facing the infamous Dr. Mengele standing with his dog and making those simple hand gestures - left, death; right, life; left, right, left, right, left, right. To this day my aunt wonders about those twin girls in Dr. Mengele's hands.

On that same day, my mother and her two sisters had their heads shaved, their possessions removed, their arms tattooed:

My mother: A8936

Aunt Yides: A8937

Aunt Malka: A8938

Fifty-two Hersh family members perished on that day, Rosh Chodesh Sivan. That is my immediate and extended family's yahrzeit. A day when my mother says Yizkor but now can't remember the names of her 52 immediate family members or her 120 extended family members who perished in the Holocaust.

It is incumbent upon parents to take their children to visit the children's exhibit in Yad Vashem in memory of Uriel Spiegel. One and a half million Jewish children perished at the hands of the Nazis and their eager collaborators. It is a haunting yet beautiful place to visit: one stands there, listening to the names of the children in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, and of course one cries.

Of the 52 Hersh family members who died, 35 were children.

Some people, well-intentioned and otherwise, say we should forgive and forget, if only for our own sanity. How long must we dwell on such unspeakable tragedy?

Rav Dovid Weinberger of Congregation Shaarei Tefilah in Lawrence, New York, recounts that when the Ponovezher Rav, Rabbi Yosef Kahaneman, zt"l, was asked how long we should remember the Shoah, he responded: "How long should we remember the Shoah? FOREVER."

Elie Wiesel in his classic memoir Night defines forever: "Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

How many of us pay special attention to the Tisha b'Av kinus written by the Bobover Rebbe, zt"l, on the Shoah? I wonder.

How many of us would respond positively to the idea of adding a fifth child to the Arba Banim, the Four Sons we describe on Pesach? The chacham, the rasha, the tam, and the she'aino yodea l'shol joined by the ben haShoa - the child of the Holocaust.

What was it like growing up as a ben haShoa? My brother and I would sleep in the room next to our parents in Crown Heights and hear our father, a"h, screaming most nights that German soldiers were chasing him. My mother would awaken him and say, "Isidore, kainer is nish du - there's no one here."

My mother-in-law often laments those people who walk around today in 60-degree weather without a jacket and complain of a sniffle. Back then, our parents and grandparents marched in freezing snow for hours in uniforms and plastic slippers - and survived.

On May 15, 1944, a Wednesday, my mother, her family, and the Jews of Fekete Ordo began their journey in a cattle car. The story my mother has repeated most often is of the beautiful melodic Birchas Rosh Chodesh her father, Reb Dovid, davened that Shabbos in the cattle car. Three hundred people in a space meant for 100 were davening and following him with full kavanah. What a kiddush Hashem.

On Monday, May 20, Rosh Chodesh Sivan, after five days in the cattle car amidst unimaginably intolerable conditions and packed together with the bodies of those who died on the journey, they arrived in Auschwitz. As they were separated, my grandfather said to his family, "Children, try to keep kosher." My mother and her sisters could not have known that these would be the last words they would hear their father speak.

The image I want to leave with readers is that of a potato. A common, everyday potato. Everyone has heard countless times how people in concentration camps were fed bread and water, soup with rocks you removed, potato peels you scavenged for a meal. Please pause for a second before devouring that delicious potato kugel Friday evening or that succulent chulent with a potato on Shabbos. Stop and look at that potato, and just for a second think about the Shoah. Think about your parents, your grandparents, your uncles, your aunts. Think about your friends' grandparents. Think about my grandparents.

If all of us could view a potato in this way every Shabbos and think of ourselves as a bnei haShoah - as children of the Shoah - the wordsVehigadita l'bincha bayom hahu would not just be something in the Haggadah we recite on Pesach. The story of the Shoah would be embedded in the fabric of our lives, as it should be.

My mother and her two sisters are, Baruch Hashem, collectively living 184 years longer than Hitler had hoped for, with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, including several sets of twins, totaling thousands of years.

This is the greatest revenge on Hitler, yemach shemo.

How will we remember the Shoah? How do we ensure that our children and grandchildren will recall it 50 years from now? Kol adam tzarich lirot et atzmo k'ilu hu yatza min haShoah. Every person should view himself as if he survived the Shoah.

In my family, Rosh Chodesh Sivan is the yahrzeit for 52 family members just on my mother's side. The 28^th of Iyar, Yom Yerushalayim, is the yahrzeit for my wife's mother's family, the Friedmans of Munkatch.

My mother should live and be well to 120. Until then, I am a child of survivors. After my mother is gone, I will be a survivor. Survivors of all types have a special relationship, an invisible connection. And an obligation to reach out, to teach as a way of protecting others. An obligation to ensure that others understand.

To many, the term survivor has negative connotations - connotations of some traumatic event having occurred. This is certainly not an inaccurate or unfair understanding of the word. But survival can also bring people together in a good way - to share and support, and to protect themselves from future trauma.

The Shoah ended more than 60 years ago. Survivors are scattered throughout the world. We know that every year there are fewer and fewer survivors left. We, their children - the bnei haShoah - must now take upon ourselves the mantle of survivor. This is how we gain strength from our parents' experiences. It is our obligation.

David Mandel is chief executive officer of Ohel Children's Home and Family Services, a social services organization in New York City. Ohel helps survivors with mental health issues via a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc. He can be contacted at dm@ohelfamily.org. This essay is based in part on a lecture given at the Young Israel of West Hempstead on Yom HaShoah 2006. Mr. Mandel expresses deep appreciation to his aunt, Mrs. Yides Stein, for sharing information.

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Survivor: A Meditation on Remembering the Shoah , David Mandel