MEMORIES OF PARENTS SUSTAINED HIM
Elaine Kalman Naves
Montreal Gazette, March 24, 2012
The following is a review of Chief Rabbi (Tel Aviv) Israel Meir Lau’s
Out of the Depths: The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last.
(Schmidt Sterling, 380 pages, $29.95.)‘Out of the depths have I called Thee, O Lord,” laments the Psalmist, and his cry is echoed in the title of the reminiscences of Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, formerly Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel and currently chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and chairman of [the] Yad Vashem [Holocaust Museum]. Whoever the Psalmist may have been and whatever depths he had plumbed, they couldn’t have been deeper or darker than those from which little Lulek Lau emerged in 1945, at the age of 8.
Lulek’s first memory was of his father, the rabbi of the Polish town of Piotrków, being whipped by a captain of the Gestapo because the Jew had resisted an order to shave his beard. The child was then 5 and about to part from his parent forever. “When a young boy sees his father—kicked with nailed boots, threatened by dogs, falter from the force of the blow and suffer public shaming, he carries that terrible scene with him for the rest of his life.”
Other terrifying events followed. At the age of 6, to prove his “right to live,” Lulek performed a back-breaking job in the town’s ghetto. Yet the hardships he endured were mitigated by the fierce protectiveness of his indomitable mother. And then, when the ghetto was being liquidated, that mother made a calculated decision on the spur of the moment. Sizing up a scene where women and children were being directed to one side of a platform and men to the other, she shoved the little boy toward the men.
Among those men stood Naphtali, Lulek’s 17-year-old brother. Together they were herded onto a train, the child fighting to get back to his mother, Naphtali restraining him. “To separate from your mother is inconceivable; it hurts your whole being for all the years of your life. It took me a long time to understand that when Mother pushed me toward Naphtali, she saved my life.”
The maws of the Nazi machine fed on children. That Lulek escaped is remarkable in itself. But that, instead of stunting him, his tragic experiences spurred him on to become a sage and a leader is a tribute not only to his own qualities but to the exceptional people with whom his life was bound up.
This book is many things: survivor story, autobiography, wisdom literature and an unabashed love letter to Israel, the home to which its subtitle alludes. When the two brothers finally arrived there, the state did not yet exist.
The hero of the story is Naphtali, who had made a solemn vow to their father to protect Lulek and convey him to the Promised Land where—so the father had decreed—the child was to perpetuate a dynasty. On both sides of the family the brothers could trace an unbroken rabbinic chain for 37 generations: one thousand years. It’s not clear until much later in the narrative why Rabbi Lau Senior had decreed that the one to carry the rabbinic mantle would be the younger son. But in the words “Look out for the boy,” Naphtali found his own calling. He stayed alive—barely—when his own will to live flagged, in order to keep Lulek safe. This in Buchenwald, one of the most dreadful places on Earth.
Without the help of two righteous Gentiles, Naphtali’s mission would have failed. Israel Lau pays fulsome tribute to the Russian prisoner and the Czech doctor who befriended him after he was smuggled into the Aryan section of the camp, and separated from Naphtali who was on the Jewish side, where the child wouldn’t have lasted a day.
Between 1993 and 2003, Lau served as Chief Rabbi of Israel and hobnobbed with world leaders that included Nelson Mandela, Queen Elizabeth…two popes [and] Fidel Castro in 1994.…
Rabbi Lau’s…father had foreseen that because Lulek was so young at the outbreak of the war, if he survived, he would be more able to put the war behind him than his much older brother, whose formative years were already over. (In the event, Naphtali proved no slouch. First an eminent journalist, he later became Israel’s consul-general in New York.) As well, Rabbi Lau gave credit to his many mentors.
But he deemed that his most important influences of all were his memories of the parents he had so cruelly lost. “Although I was without parents, my father and mother were with me continuously. They never left me, not even for one minute.”
LIFE INSIDE THE CAMPS
Jordan Michael Smith
Tablet, March 28, 2012
David Koker’s fate was in many ways no different from that of the nearly 6 million other Jews who died in the Holocaust. The eldest son of an Amsterdam jeweler, he was arrested by Dutch police in February 1943 and transported to Vught, a concentration camp built by the Nazis in the southern Netherlands. After being shuffled between other camps, he died on the way to Dachau in early 1945, where he was buried in a mass grave at the age of 23.
Before he died, however, Koker authored what may be the most extraordinary diary ever written inside a concentration camp. “In my opinion, it’s considerably more interesting than Anne Frank’s diary,” said Michiel Horn, a historian at Toronto’s York University and the book’s translator. At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944, was first published in Dutch in 1977 as Diary Written in Vught. Despite immediately being recognized as a classic in the Netherlands, it has never seen publication in English, until now.…
Koker began his diary on Feb. 12, 1943, the day after he was arrested along with his parents and his younger brother. A published poet and budding intellectual at the time of his capture, he insisted on diarizing for nearly an entire year. As the teacher of the many children interned in Vught, he ingratiated himself with the chief camp clerk and his wife, which provided him with a relatively privileged position. In addition to keeping a diary, he was also able to write and receive letters, some of which are excerpted in the book.
In January of 1944, one of the civilian employees of a corporation that operated a workshop in Vught smuggled Koker’s diary out of the camp and gave it to his best friend, Karel van het Reve, who then gave it to David’s younger brother Max, who survived Auschwitz and received it upon his return to Amsterdam after the war. It was passed on to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, where an employee transcribed it.
Max was reluctant to publish the diary for fear of its impact on his mother, who also survived Auschwitz but never emotionally recovered from the death of her husband and son. Still, David’s former high-school teacher, Prof. Jacob Presser, saw its value and quoted from it extensively in his history of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, published in 1965. Finally, Reve, who had become a famous Dutch intellectual by the mid-1960s, published the diary with just a few notes and an introduction.
Diary Written in Vught was instantly appraised as being of enormous value.… The book went through two printings within its first year of publication, appeared in magazine format for high-school students in 1985, and in an expanded edition with an epilogue by Max, in 1993. Determined to see an English translation of the book, Max approached a contact at the Anne Frank House, who put him in touch with Jan van Pelt, who in turn approached Northwestern University Press.
Three things mark At the Edge of the Abyss as an utterly distinctive and unique work of Holocaust literature that must be read now that an English-language translation exists. First, the insider account of a camp; second, Koker’s literary and analytic abilities; and third, the only first-person report of an encounter between a Jew and Heinrich Himmler, head Nazi and overseer of all the camps. On Feb. 4, 1944, Koker records that on the previous day he had looked directly at the man responsible for the Final Solution. The haunting entry reads as follows:
“A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don’t stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. They look everywhere without finding anything to focus on.”
What makes this passage remarkable is not just the fact of the encounter but Koker’s careful, emotionally attuned attention to detail. Koker notices not just Himmler but the deference of his supplicants. He observes with nonchalance, as if he were encountering not a genocidal murderer—and the person who keeps Koker in a concentration camp—but an ordinary man on the street.…
In addition, Koker provides a glimpse of life in the camps rarely seen before. He reveals aspects of ordinary life that take place beneath the surface of uniforms and barbed wire. Koker had a girlfriend, Nettie, a German-Jewish refugee, who had been living in hiding in Amsterdam since 1943. But he also met a girl in Vught, Hannelore (Hannie) Hess, with whom he had a relationship.… “I have the strength to be very open with her, about ‘personal’ matters and about everything that inspires my thoughts and feelings. And she always knows exactly the right moment to give me the stimulus to keep on speaking, by means of some pleasant words, a sweet anticipatory or assenting gesture, or a friendly question.… In love with her? It’s because of that unknown, almost uncomprehending something that exists between us. That newness, not yet habitual. And also the wonderment each time we reveal something of ourselves to each other.…”
If there are lovely moments of affection and poetic sentiment in At the Edge of the Abyss, however, it is very far from a Life Is Beautiful-style attempt to put a positive spin on the worst of human depravity.… The results often make for brutal reading. Koker can be tender, but he is also ambitious and cold.… From a May 3, 1943 entry: “You become selfish, even towards your own family.… Sometimes I treat the children with bitterness, yet the friendliest treatment hides a bit of sadism and lust for power.… I don’t feel bad when I deny them something or give them an order. A kind of feeling of being in charge.” Nov. 7, 1943: “Sometimes when I see the mass of people here, a strange thought passes through my head: we don’t deserve it [i.e., liberation]. Not true, because who deserves to be in a camp, but as an image it’s instructive.”
If any hope can be gleaned from At the Edge of the Abyss, it may come from the realization that intellectual life and critical judgment can be maintained under the most horrific of conditions. That, and the fact that David Koker’s gifts did not perish in a concentration camp but lived on after him. But perhaps the temptation to find solace in something as tragic as Koker’s death and as cataclysmic as the Holocaust should be resisted. One cannot imagine the phenomenal author of At the Edge of the Abyss embracing easy answers.
A HOLOCAUST HERO WHO SHOULD BE IN THE HISTORY BOOKS
Moshe Arens
Haaretz, March 27, 2012
Last Tuesday a plaque was placed in Warsaw at the location where Pawel Frenkel, the commander of the Jewish Military Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, fell with his comrades 69 years ago, in a battle against superior German forces.
The impressive military ceremony was attended by the mayor of Warsaw, representatives of the Polish government, Israel’s education minister and the Israeli ambassador. It was a long overdue tribute to a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising: the young man who led the central battle of the uprising at Muranowski Square. In that desperate battle fought for the honor of the Jewish people, the Zionist flag and the Polish flag were unfurled on the roof of the highest building in the square as a symbol of the uprising against the Germans.
Two months after the outbreak of the uprising, Frenkel and his fighters, cornered by German forces, fought the last battle of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, at 11 (now 5a ) Grzybowska Street. Frenkel had been a member of Betar, Jabotinsky’s youth organization in Poland, and had been recruited into Israel’s pre-state underground militia, Etzel, which had established a network of underground cells in prewar Poland.
But who has heard of him, and why has his name been forgotten—or has it been deliberately erased from the pages of history?
In the years before the establishment of the State of Israel, and for almost 20 years thereafter, the Labor Party largely controlled education and influenced the formation of collective memory, and it was not in its interest to glorify those fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising who had been adherents of Jabotinsky. The Labor Party willingly adopted the narrative of the uprising that was brought to Israel by “Antek” Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, survivors of the Mordechai Anielewicz-led Jewish Fighting Organization, a narrative that left little room for the part played by Frenkel and his fighters.
In a May 1945 letter sent by Zuckerman and Adolf Berman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto underground, from German-occupied Warsaw to London through the channels of the Polish underground, the seeds were sewn for the politically correct narrative of the uprising. “The struggle in the Warsaw Ghetto, and in other ghettos and camps, was initiated, organized, and carried out by our organizations, and first and foremost by the workers’ movements and the youth movements of Labor Eretz Yisrael,” they wrote.
Sixteen years later, in their testimony in the Eichmann trial about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Zuckerman and Lubetkin made no mention of the part played by the Jewish Military Organization in the uprising. Their narrative has for years been taught in Israel’s schools, has been embedded in Israel’s collective memory and that of the world at large, and is displayed in the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem.
“He who controls the present controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in his dystopian novel “1984.” Those who controlled the present in Israel for many years manipulated the history of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to suit their ideological goals.
It has recently been suggested that the part played by Marek Edelman in the uprising had not been given full recognition in Israel. Edelman was a member of Anielewicz’s Jewish Fighting Organization who fought valiantly in the brushmakers’ workshop area during the uprising. But he had been a member of the anti-Zionist Bund, which was the senior partner in Anielewicz’s organization, and primary credit for the uprising has naturally been given in Israel to the Zionist groups in that organization.
Edelman, a Bundist to his dying days and a fierce opponent of the Jabotinsky movement, let his ideological leanings get the better of him when it came to speaking about the uprising. Throughout the years, he did not miss an opportunity to deny that Frenkel and his fighters contributed significantly to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. They were no more than “a gang of porters, smugglers and thieves,” he has been quoted as saying. Bundists or Socialist Zionists, it did not matter when it came to effacing Pawel Frenkel’s fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Emanuel Ringelblum, a Marxist Zionist who chronicled life in the Warsaw Ghetto, was impressed by the military precision and bearing he noted during his visit to Frenkel’s headquarters at 7 Muranowska Street, but nevertheless remarked that the movement’s ideology was similar to “Italian-style fascism.”
An animosity based on ideological differences kept the two underground organizations from uniting in the Warsaw Ghetto and continued after the war, in attempts to manipulate the narrative of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to suit political goals. Pawel Frenkel and his fighters were the victims of this attempt to control the past. It is high time to set the record straight.
THE POLITICS OF JERUSALEM
Mordechai Nisan
Jerusalem Post, March 28, 2012
A satisfactory and consensual political resolution of the question of Jerusalem has eluded diplomats and statesmen. The British Peel Commission of 1937 recommended a two-state solution in the land that included a Jewish state and an Arab state, with greater Jerusalem to be administered by the British authorities. In 1947 the United Nations Partition Resolution also proposed that Jerusalem be a separate entity under international trusteeship, thus excluded from the sovereign domain of the Jewish and Arab states as proposed. When the Israeli-Jordanian fighting ended in Jerusalem in late 1948, the city was effectively divided between Jewish west Jerusalem and Arab east Jerusalem. This was a result of war and not a prescription for peace.
The division of the city did not prevent the Israeli government from declaring it the capital of the state, nor obstruct Jewish demographic growth which doubled to 200,000 by 1967. Jordan meanwhile proved to be the serial violator of its obligations under the Armistice Agreement, destroying Jewish synagogues and desecrating the Mount of Olives cemetery, denying Jewish access to the Western Wall while sniping at Jewish residents and buildings adjacent to the Old City in western Jerusalem.
The liberation of east Jerusalem in the Six Day War led to the unification of the city under Israeli sovereignty and subject to Israeli law. To solidify Jewish control and presence across the former armistice lines dividing the city, we can detect two periods in construction projects and Jewish demographic expansion.
Mayor Teddy Kollek, fulfilling a vision of prime minister Levi Eshkol, promoted the reconstruction of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City and the development of large new Jewish neighborhoods, like Gilo and Armon HaNatziv at the southern end of the city, Ramat Eshkol and French Hill adjacent to the former frontier boundary, and Neve Ya’akov and Pisgat Ze’ev in the north.…
Under successive mayors—Olmert, Lupolianski and Barkat—an additional and alternative conception guided the Jewish spread throughout the city, through establishing a Jewish presence in Arab-inhabited areas: facilitating Jewish property acquisition or sometimes reacquisition of former Jewish homes in the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City, developing the City of David in Silwan/Hashiloah, as in Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon Hazaddik, with small groups of Jews in A-Tur/Mount of Olives, Abu Tor, Beit Orot/Mt. Scopus, Ras al-Amud/Ma’ale Zeitim, and Beit Nissan Beck/Giorgia quarter opposite the Damascus/ Shechem Gate of the Old City.
These and additional locations were designed to have Jews in east Jerusalem politically hinder the possibility of a future Israeli withdrawal from parts of the eastern city areas. By 2012 the population of Jerusalem approximated three quarters of a million people, some two-thirds of which are Jews and a third Arabs.…
Israel’s multi-faceted policy toward Jerusalem and the geo-demographic processes of the last decades have established the city as a single political and administrative unit. The Arab population chooses not to vote in municipal elections for fear of providing legitimacy to Israeli rule, yet this enables Israel to actually imprint its political monopoly over the entire city. This dialectical development affords insight into the subtle dynamic of things. Israel exercises de facto sovereign rule over the city, no less consistent with the 1980 Jerusalem: Basic Law, yet concedes daily authority to the Muslims over the Temple Mount. The Palestinians for their part enjoy the full range of liberty of movement and expression, though they have succumbed to a numbing state of collective de-politicization.…
The prospect is therefore one of continued Israeli control for the foreseeable future. For Israel to withdraw from any part of Jerusalem and allow a Palestinian capital in the city would be a depletion of the soul of the Jewish people. Palestinian sovereignty in east Jerusalem, no less any official recognition of Islamic control over the Temple Mount, would spark Muslim militancy and bellicosity throughout the country, and beyond. For Israel to withdraw from any part of Jerusalem would expose the Jews of the city to grave security threats and terrorism.… In order to secure west Jerusalem as the focus of vibrant Jewish life, Israel must maintain its control over east Jerusalem as well.…
The Jewish people have come home to their historic and spiritual capital, and Israel is fulfilling its national mandate in governing and developing Greater Jerusalem. This is a blessing which many curse, but a blessing whose splendor spreads its light to all peoples and faiths—inhabitants, tourists, and pilgrims—to enjoy the freedom and security, prosperity and poetry, of the Holy City.
(Mordechai Nisan is a retired lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
His most recent book, Only Israel West of the River (2011) is available at Amazon.com.)
