In a remarkable World War II story that was nearly buried together with Edmonds, this devoutly Christian US army sergeant from Tennessee refused to turn over hundreds of his Jewish soldiers even as a gun was placed to head. He was finally recognized for his bravery more than three decades after his passing in 1985, when the story of those few fateful life-and-death minutes was discovered and publicized by his son, Pastor Chris Edmonds — and has fueled a worldwide chain reaction toward acts of kindness and morally elevated choices. This Veterans’ Day, Pastor Edmonds has a lot to be proud of.

Roderick W. (“Roddie”) Edmonds was a master sergeant with the 422nd Infantry Regiment, which was shipped out to Europe in the fall of 1944. In December the troops were sent to the Ardennes forest on the Belgian-German border, where the German army launched a surprise, ruthless offensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Though outmanned, the Americans managed to hold off the Germans long enough to allow General George Patton’s troops to finally come to the rescue, but that rescue came too late for the 422nd and 423rd regiments. Those who weren’t killed in the onslaught were taken to the POW camp Stalag IX-B, where they were practically starved to death: Once a day they were fed some rancid broth with a tiny piece of black bread made with sawdust.

As bad as it was for the POWs across the board, the Jewish American captives had it the worst. The Wehrmacht treated captured Jewish soldiers the same way they treated all Jews — they either murdered them or dispatched them to brutal slave labor camps, such as Berga, where the odds of survival were slim. Because of this policy, the US military warned its Jewish soldiers that, if captured, they should destroy any evidence of their religion, such as dog tags that were stamped with an “H” (for “Hebrew”), identifying documents, siddurim, or other ritual objects some soldiers carried.

After a month in Stalag IX-B, Roddie — the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer among close to 1,300 fellow American POWs — was transferred with the rest of the Americans to the larger Stalag IX-A camp near Ziegenhain, Germany, which held thousands of Allied soldiers of various nationalities. The POWs, having been starved for weeks, were marched through the deep snow with cracked, blistered feet, wearing the same lice-infested clothes in which they had been captured a month before.

Inside the gate, the soldiers were met by a pack of growling German attack dogs. The camp commandant then brought a young Russian POW forward. “You are free to go,” the commandant told him encouragingly. The Russian didn’t believe him — he knew it had to be a trick, but the Germans had actually opened the camp gates for him. After standing there puzzled for several minutes, the prisoner ran toward what he thought was his freedom. Suddenly the Germans let the dogs loose. The young Russian was ripped to shreds, as the newcomer American POWs were forced to watch. Anyone who closed his eyes or looked away was rifle-butted in the head.

“Remember this!” the commandant shouted. “This will be your fate if you don’t do exactly as we say!”

The next night, with the grisly vision of the murdered Russian fresh in the minds of the Americans, there was an announcement over the loudspeaker — only the Jewish POWs were to fall out the following morning to be counted, and any Jewish soldier who did not appear would be shot on the spot. There were about 200 Jewish soldiers in the group and each one of them knew what that “selection” meant. So did Master Sergeant Edmonds — he’d seen the Jewish soldiers separated back in Stalag IX-B when they were first captured. That night, he told the entire group of Americans under his charge, “We are not doing that. Tomorrow we all fall out.’ ”

The morning of January 27, the Americans stood together outside their barracks — all 1,292 of them. Commandant Siegmann saw that all the Americans had fallen out and was furious with Edmonds. “I am ordering you to tell only the Jewish men to line up! These men cannot all be Jews!”

Edmonds looked Commandant Siegmann straight in the eye and said, “We are all Jews here.”

Enraged, Commandant Siegmann took out his Luger and pressed the barrel to Edmonds’ forehead, right between the eyes and fingered the trigger. “You are under orders to separate all the Jews right now!” he shouted. “You will order the Jews to step out or I’ll shoot you on the spot!”

Edmonds, a staunch Methodist who had little or no contact with Jews growing up in Knoxville, calmly responded, “Sir, according to the Geneva Convention, we are only required to give our name, rank, and serial number. If you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us because we’re all witnesses, and when we win this war, you will be tried for war crimes.”

The commander was livid, but Edmonds stood his ground. Finally, Siegmann put the gun back in its holster and stormed away. And 200 Jewish lives were saved.

Too Sick to March

Returning to civilian life, Roddie Edmonds never mentioned the incident. But then again, nor did he ever talk about how he saved the entire American group of POWs soon afterward, once the Allied forces were closing in. With the Allies on their heels, the Germans ordered the whole camp to evacuate — thousands of soldiers were to be marched out, but Edmonds knew the march through snow-covered terrain would mean the end for his starved, emaciated soldiers. The POWs could hear the fighting in the distance, someone had a radio and heard BBC reports, and they realized the Allies were close by — and Edmonds knew their only chance of survival was to wait it out until the Allies arrived.

“We’re not going,” he told his troops. “I need all you men to get sick tonight — eat dirt, grass, vermin, anything to make you sick. Tomorrow when we fall out, we go back to our barracks and tell the Germans we’re too sick to move.”

The next day, that’s exactly what happened. The German guards screamed, barked, and threatened, but in the end, they let the Americans stay by themselves as everyone else was marched out of the camp. Nearly all the POWs forced out died on the march — yet every one of the Americans who stayed put made it back home alive, after being liberated by General Patton’s troops.

After the war, Roddie Edmonds returned to Knoxville, was again shipped overseas to fight in the Korean War, and then upon his permanent return, married and eventually settled into a career in sales related to mobile homes and cable television. He passed away in 1985 as a humble, church-going man of faith, loving father, and die-hard patriot, yet never having received any official recognition, citation, or medal for his defense of the Jewish POWs. His heroism would have been buried with him, if not for some providential detective work by his son, Pastor Chris Edmonds of Maryville, Tennessee.

“We Were Humiliated” More than 20 years after Roddie Edmonds passed away, Chris Edmonds’ daughter Lauren told her father she had to do a project on a family story for her college history class. She knew her grandfather was a POW in World War II, but not a lot more than that — no one in the family knew much more than that.

“I thought it was a great idea,” Pastor Edmonds tells Mishpacha, describing the events that led to a surprising revelation, new cherished relationships, and finally, Yad Vashem’s “Righteous Among the Nations” award, Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust — the first such award for an American soldier, and the first such award for rescuing American Jews.

“We knew that Dad had served as a master sergeant in the army, and my mom still had the diaries he’d kept as a POW in Germany,” Pastor Edmonds says. “I was just as excited as Lauren was to go through the diaries, so we read them together. But what we found was that many things seemed to be encrypted. Dad’s descriptions were brief and to the point — just a few sentences about how they were captured and the conditions in the POW camp. He also listed the names and addresses of the men in his barracks. But many of the horrible events seemed to be written in a kind of shorthand. In fact, from the time I was a kid and asked Dad about the war, he’d just say, ‘Chris, we were humiliated. Things that are too bad to share.’ So I stopped asking.”

Lauren wrapped up her project, but for Pastor Edmonds, it was just the beginning. He wanted to know what really happened during the war, and what all the vague, shorthand references in the diary were really about. In time, he would learn the truth.

“I Googled Dad’s name and rank,” Pastor Edmonds says, “and the first result that popped up was a New York Times article about a lawyer named Lester Tanner, who had sold his Manhattan townhouse to former US president Richard Nixon after he’d resigned and left the White House back in 1973. No one wanted the disgraced president to live in their building, but when Tanner heard about Nixon’s predicament, although he was a lifelong Democrat and didn’t share Nixon’s political views, he was appalled by the blackballing and sold Nixon the property.

“In the course of that interview, Tanner told the Times reporter that he’d served in the military in World War II, was a POW in Ziegenhain, and that the German commandant would have had him and all the other Jewish POWs killed if not for their brave officer, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds. Wow, I thought. Dad must have done something huge — but what?”

Pastor Edmonds flipped back to January 1945 in the diaries, but all he found that might be an explanation was a mysterious entry: “Before the commander.” What was that referring to? The heroism Tanner had mentioned? Edmonds actually found Lester Tanner’s name in his father’s handwritten list of his men, and searched online for a current address.

“This was in 2012. I discovered that he was a prominent attorney in New York, still practicing at age 89. I e-mailed him and asked if I could visit him. Lester replied that same afternoon. ‘I would love to meet with you,’ he wrote. ‘I owe everything to your father.’ ”

Pastor Edmonds traveled to New York and met the man his father had saved 67 years before. Lester Tanner, who has subsequently become a dear friend (“he’s 95 today and still incredibly active”), told Pastor Edmonds that he’d originally met his father in 1943, when Lester was a new recruit and Roddie Edmonds was his sergeant. They were both captured in the Battle of the Bulge and met up again in Stalag IX-A. That fateful day in January 1945, Tanner was standing right next to Edmonds when the commandant put the gun to his head.

“From the moment your father told the commandant, ‘We are all Jews here,’ I decided that for the rest of my life, I would always do the right thing, even if it was dangerous,” Lester told Chris Edmonds. “Not a day goes by that I don’t thank G-d for him.”

Never a Bad Day

Pastor Edmonds’s reunion with Lester Tanner was not only the key to revealing his father’s heroism, it also brought him in touch with three other veterans his father had saved who were still living. “Lester lost track of Dad and never saw him again, but he kept in touch with some of the others, and we became like instant family in the last few years,” says Edmonds.

One of those men was Sidney “Skip” Friedman from Cleveland, who passed away in 2015. “Skip told me, ‘Chris, we were as good as dead in that camp. And the day we were liberated, we were reborn. Since then, I’ve never, ever, had a bad day.’

“You know, when Skip told me that, I finally figured out something about the way Dad lived,” Edmonds continues. “When he came into a room, he lit it up, and when he left, you wished he were still around. He was so encouraging, so supportive, never critical. He loved everyone, from little kids to elderly seniors, and now I understand it — back in the war, these men didn’t expect to survive, and the fact that they did gave them a new lease on life. Because of the crucible Dad had been through, every new day for him was a gift.”

Another Jewish veteran who became part of this old-new family was Paul Stern, who passed away last year. When Stern, who served as a combat medic, was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, his group was forced to march for four days straight in subzero temperatures, surviving on snow as there was no food or water. At the POW camp Bad Orb Stalag, he was first segregated together with the other young Jewish prisoners in an inner camp, where they were given lice-infested mattresses made from putrid straw and where six men shared a slice of bread and a small bowl of soup made from rotten potatoes and other scraps. Stern, however, was removed from the Jewish group and had the good fortune to be sent to Ziegenhain with the other noncommissioned officers — avoiding the fate of the other Jewish privates who were shipped off to work in Berga, the underground slave-labor munitions factory in East Germany where many didn’t survive. That’s because just weeks before his capture, he saved the lives of three enlisted men and an officer on the battlefield, earning the promotion to corporal.

“While Lester was on Dad’s left when the commandant put the gun to his head, Paul was on his right, so he was able to corroborate the exact details of what happened,” says Edmonds. Tanner and Stern became good friends in that prison camp, and after the war, even became brothers-in-law. Lester told him back in Ziegenhain, “Paul, if we ever get out of here, you gotta come to my house in the Bronx and have some of my mom’s Jewish cooking.” Paul took him up on the offer, came over for dinner, and met Lester’s sister Corrine — they were married soon after.

The other living veteran saved by Roddy Edmonds is Irwin “Sonny” Fox — the youngest of Chris Edmonds’ four new friends, who’s a sprightly 93 today. In the 1960s, Sonny Fox was a television host of the popular children’s program Wonderama, served as a game-show host during the ’60s and ’70s, and has been a longtime broadcasting consultant. Tanner had lost touch with him after the war, but the two reconnected in 2000 when Fox came back to New York to write his memoirs.

Once Chris Edmonds connected with Tanner, Fox, Friedman, and Stern, this well-heeled group felt Roddy Edmonds was deserving of the national Medal of Honor, and after learning of the story, many congressional leaders have since been behind the move for the prestigious U.S. government honor. The initial U.S. Army position, however, has been that since Roddy Edmonds was a captive and his actions were not in combat, he would not be eligible for the award. And so, congressmen from the elder Edmonds’ home state of Tennessee have introduced a bill to have Edmonds honored with the Congressional Gold Medal instead, and are waiting for it to pass the congressional committees.

Meanwhile, Yad Vashem recognized Edmonds as a “Righteous Among the Nations” exactly 71 years after his heroic action — in a ceremony held on January 27, 2016, at the Israeli embassy in Washington — in the company of Tanner, Stern, Fox, and then-president Barack Obama.

They Were All Heroes

Pastor Edmonds believes that life circumstances as well as faith-based instruction helped carve out his father’s strong moral core.

“Thomas Edmonds, my grandpa, was a strong man of faith,” he says. “Grandma died when Dad was just three — she had a goiter and there was nothing they could do for the massive swelling in her neck. Grandpa never remarried, but moved in with his sister instead, and she was the one who raised Dad. Dad, remember, was born in 1919, and was part of the generation that grew up in the hardships of the Depression. They knew how to appreciate everything in life without talking about it.”

The irony that no one knew of his dad’s heroism until he’d been gone 30 years isn’t lost on Chris Edmonds. Today, though, he’s making sure the world knows about it, although the one niggling question people always ask is: How come Roddy never told anyone?

“Well, there was certainly the factor of Dad’s characteristic humility,” the younger Edmonds explains, “but I think it was also about the nature of that generation. Today you digitally report to everyone what you ate for breakfast, but back then, those who served in the war tended not to talk about it until many years later — not until their grandchildren started peppering them with questions.
“People ask me, were they reticent because of the trauma, because they felt they were just doing their duty, or because of an innate sense of honor and humility? What I can tell you,” Pastor Edmonds continues, “is that what they experienced was traumatic and life-altering. I believe Dad specifically didn’t elaborate in his writing and left things encrypted because many of the events were too painful to talk about, although he left in enough details to realize they went through horrible times. For example, one page is just dash marks with the words ‘Jewish friends moved out’ — that happened in the first camp. He was referring to how they separated the Jews and sent them to an inner prison behind more barbed wire before they were transferred to Berga where many of them were killed or worked to death.”

Another example was the one-word entry: “Dogs.” That was a reference to the horrifying scene of the Russian being torn apart by the attack dogs.

“And it was quite amazing,” says Edmonds, “that right after watching that gruesome scene, all the Americans agreed to defy orders and fall out together with their Jewish comrades. True, Dad led the way, but he wasn’t the only hero. They were all heroes.”

But there was another piece in the diary that could shed light on the reticence of these men. “In the back of his diary,” says Edmonds, “Dad talks about his attending some kind of security briefing after their release, where the men were to make a commitment not to talk about what happened while they were overseas. At the time, the army felt any information could compromise US security and it was important to maintain a policy of secrecy. Remember, the war wasn’t over yet and the army was planning on sending those soldiers back overseas.

“Lester told me, ‘All us POWs were scared to death we’d have to go back and fight the Japanese. We were thrilled when Truman dropped the bomb, because being captured by the Japs meant you were as good as dead. When it came to warfare techniques and torture, they were the worst.’ ”

Extraordinary Choices

Pastor Edmonds has spent the last three years promoting what he calls “Roddie’s Code,” a sort of contagious movement to create awareness that it’s possible to make moral choices in everyday life, that people can choose to live differently.

“Even in those moments of danger between life and death, Dad made the lightning-quick decision to stand up for his men and confront evil,” says Edmonds. “But when people hear Dad’s story, they’re thinking he must have been a cross between John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, but Dad was an ordinary man who made extraordinary choices in extraordinary times.”

Pastor Edmonds believes that the “Roddie’s Code” initiative has succeeded in taking that inborn moral energy and pushing it forward into this weak, self-centered generation. “It crosses over all religions and faith models,” he says. “Everyone gets it. There’s a hunger out there for heroic living and real heroes — real people who do the right thing. Young people say to me, ‘Your dad really did that?’ It’s so foreign to them! So I tell them, you can be the same way, you can do it for others — it just means standing on your convictions and doing what’s right.

“Look, I know I’m just one person and can’t change the world on my own, but I believe people are receptive to this message: that whenever you’re confronted with the need to step up and do the right thing, think about Dad, and choose to defend life and decency. Tell yourself, ‘I can treat people better. I can make good choices.’ Choose to esteem others over yourself — and not just when a gun is pointed at your head. It means letting someone go ahead of you in line, opening the door for someone to go in first, taking responsibility for others. I’m praying for a movement, for people across the planet to decide to live heroic in all their choices.”

 

S

ome people turn to religion to escape from reality.

Father Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest from France, isn’t one of them. For the past 16 years, he has been doggedly documenting a reality that many would like to forget or deny: the Holocaust. His goal is to document every single incident that occurred in what he calls the “Holocaust by Bullets,” the killing of Jews and Roma (Gypsies) by Nazi death squads.

To date, he has visited more than 2,000 cities and villages in Eastern Europe and interviewed some 5,800 non-Jews who witnessed the slaughter. Along the way, he has founded a nonprofit research organization dedicated to preserving and disseminating his findings, Yahad In-Unum — the Hebrew and Latin phrase means “Together, in One”; written an award-winning book; been featured on television news programs such as 60 Minutes; and been honored with a slew of humanitarian awards.

But even though he is approaching the age when many people retire, he shows no signs of slowing down or resting on his laurels. He is too haunted by yet another fear: death. Most of the people who witnessed the crimes have either already passed away or are now in their nineties. With more than a million killings still waiting to be documented, he is, literally, in a race against time.

The summer of 2018 therefore found him once again on the road, as he continued his search for the last witnesses — the frail nonagenarians who still remember, the only ones left who are able to testify about the tragic events they saw with their own eyes.

Father Desbois usually travels with a team of professional researchers, translators, and cameramen, who help him record the lengthy interviews he conducts in the field. These filmed interviews form the basis of Yahad’s Archives and Research Center (CERRESE), which can be accessed by academics conducting Holocaust-related research. But for two days in July he joined a tour to Ukraine and Poland organized by Heritage Retreats, a kiruv organization founded 19 years ago by Rabbi Mordechai Kreitenberg, which Mishpacha was invited to join as well.

While the goal of Heritage Retreats is to introduce assimilated young Jews to intensive Torah learning and open their eyes to their rich Jewish heritage, Rabbi Kreitenberg saw in Father Desbois’s work yet another way to wake up the pintele Yid in their slumbering souls.

“Our current privileged status in North America has weakened our collective memory, but Father Desbois’s work has a message that’s compelling for all sorts of Jews,” says Rabbi Kreitenberg. “If a Catholic priest has dedicated his life to uncovering truths about the Holocaust, shouldn’t we care about our Jewish heritage and history too?”

Unquiet in the Ukraine

“I knew people were being killed. I heard shooting. But I didn’t see it. It was happening behind the wall. I did see three young men who were hanging from a balcony”

—Lydia, Lviv

T

he first witness we meet is Lydia. (Yahad doesn’t publicize the last names of the people who agree to be interviewed.) Still vivacious at 90, Lydia doesn’t live in Lviv anymore. But she lived near the city’s Jewish ghetto during the war, and she agreed to return to Lviv to share her memories. A Ukrainian member of the Yahad team, Olga, translates for us.

Lydia tells us that before the war there were many Jews who lived on her street — craftsmen, doctors, and lawyers. That changed when the Germans arrived in the summer of 1941 and the ghetto was established. Because she and her family lived near the ghetto, the teenager had a front-row seat, so to speak, to the new reality imposed upon her former neighbors.

“I saw Jews leave the ghetto to go to the workshops where they made shoes and clothes. The Jews wore stars. They were young and middle-aged men. People could hear them from far away, because they wore wooden shoes, which clattered on the cobblestones.”

I try to imagine the sound of those clattering shoes in the early-morning hours. It isn’t easy. Lviv, at least in its historic center, is a picture-perfect city. The buildings, painted in delicate hues of cream, pink, and yellow, exude an old-world charm, as do the quaint cobblestone streets. The immaculate city squares are filled with people enjoying a midday meal in an outdoor café or simply soaking up the sun.

“Pictures about the Holocaust are in black and white, but I always say the Jews were killed in color,” comments Father Desbois, putting into words the dissonance that at least some of us are feeling on this first day of our trip. How do we reconcile this sunny, colorful city with the black-and-white photographs from the summer of 1941, when Lviv was the scene of several horrific pogroms where more than 4,000 Jews were savagely humiliated and killed? And how do we respond to Lydia, who saw but… did what?

Father Desbois mentions that unlike the Soviets, who usually did their dirty work at night, the Germans committed genocide in broad daylight. They wanted the local populace to see. This tactic was used to intimidate some people into silence and obedience, but in Lviv some of the inhabitants welcomed the Nazis with open arms. To understand why, we need to review the history of this area.

Lviv had been a center of Torah and Jewish commerce since medieval times. Along with periods of stability and prosperity, there were times of persecution and economic hardship. But the first decades of the 20th century were especially tumultuous and grim.

In 1914 the city, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and called Lemberg, was conquered by the Russian Army, only to be retaken by the Austrians in 1915, and then captured by the Poles in 1918. Under the Poles, the city was called Lvov. However, Ukrainian nationalists claimed the city as well. Tensions between the Poles and Ukrainians grew and, as usual, the Jews were caught in the crossfire. When pogroms erupted in 1917 and 1918, more than 100 Jews were killed and hundreds more were wounded.

During the interwar years, Lvov became one of Poland’s most important Jewish centers, but more bad times were on the way. The city became part of Soviet Ukraine in 1939, and the Ukrainians living in Lviv (the Ukrainian name) were no fans of the Soviets. They were particularly bitter about the Great Famine of 1932–33, the Holodomor, when millions of their fellow Ukrainians, who had come under Soviet rule after World War I, died of starvation.

According to some historians, the Great Famine was deliberately caused by Soviet economic policy, which explains why Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis when the Germans occupied Lviv in 1941; believing they were victims of a Soviet attempt at genocide, they saw the Germans as liberators from the Soviets. When Germans accused Lviv’s Jews of having collaborated with the Soviets, some Ukrainians expressed their fury in the pogroms that killed thousands of Jews.

And what of Lydia and her family? Did they see the brutal beatings and other atrocities? What did they say when the Jews were herded into the hastily erected ghetto? Did they do anything to help their former neighbors? How did they feel about the Nazis?

Our group of about 20 frum Jews from the United States and Israel — most are children of Holocaust survivors — are eager to ask Lydia these questions and more. But Father Desbois quickly silences us.

“Either you want to investigate and find out the truth about the crime, or you want to tell her she is a bad person,” he tells us, explaining that if you make a witness feel bad, they won’t talk.

“And you cannot ask someone who lived under the Soviet Union how they feel,” he adds, referring to the fact that Ukraine only gained its independence in 1991, after the dissolution of the USSR. “You can ask only factual questions. Where were you? What did you see? It’s like you are a policeman at the scene of the crime. You don’t ask the witness, ‘How did you feel when you saw the person being shot?’ You ask only about facts.”

We therefore hold our tongues and listen to the rest of Lydia’s story. Her memories of going to Belzec to buy food: “The train station wasn’t far from the Belzec concentration camp. I could smell the odor of burning bodies.” The glimpse she got of the last day of the Lviv ghetto, when she heard shooting and saw three bodies hanging from a balcony.

We thank her, and Lydia leaves.

I don’t think it’s my imagination, a certain sense of letdown in the group. Despite Father Desbois’s admonishment, and even though we realize it’s no small thing for a 90-year-old woman to travel to speak with us, I think we were expecting something more — tears, perhaps, maybe even the words “I’m sorry.”

“My question is not, is someone guilty or not guilty,” Father Desbois insists. “Violence was already a way of life for the Ukrainians. Stalin killed a lot of people. The problem is to save the memory of the dead. There were 2.4 million Jews living in Ukraine when the Nazis invaded. More than 220,000 people were killed in just this region. There are mass graves everywhere. But no one comes to say Kaddish. In Ukraine, I would say that 75 percent of the graves have been reopened — people are looking for gold teeth, jewelry. The people know the Jews aren’t coming back.”

A Walk in the Forest

“I saw trucks arrive. I saw soldiers dig here. They were here a week, maybe more. I was five or six years old. A child could go everywhere”

—Iossyp, Lysynychi Forest

S

ome of Lviv’s Jews died in the ghetto. Others were murdered at Belzec or sent to the nearby Janowska slave labor camp to die there from hunger, disease, or exhaustion. Or they were transported by truck to the Lysynychi Forest, our next destination, where they were shot.

After we leave the comfort of our air-conditioned bus and enter the wooded area on foot, we are greeted by a blast of hot and humid air and a swarm of mosquitoes. Along the way we pass by an elderly man, who doesn’t greet us. He just stares as we continue deeper into the forest.

When we reach a certain point, Father Desbois tells us to stop. We have arrived. But where are we? There is no monument, no signpost to give us a clue.

He points to a clearing, a small area where the ground is a bit higher. It is a mass grave, he tells us — one of about 29 that he and his team have located since they began coming to this place around ten years ago. According to German and Soviet archives, between 46,000 and 92,000 people were shot and buried here. Most of them are Jews, but there are some Italian soldiers, prisoners of war, who are buried here too.

It’s up to Father Desbois to tell us the story of this place, because the witnesses he was able to locate and interview have since died. One of them, Adolf, was a teenager at the time. From a perch in a tree, he saw the graves being dug. Afterward, he saw trucks filled with Jews arrive.

Pointing to the top of a hill, where a narrow path leading downward can still be seen, Father Desbois relates what he heard from Adolf. “Most of the Jews came from the Janowska labor camp or the ghetto, and so they weren’t very healthy. There were wooden boxes so people could undress and put their clothes in the boxes. Then the Jews were forced to run down the hill to the mass graves, where they were shot.”

The shooting was done by the Einsatzgruppen, German killing squads. It’s estimated that in Ukraine alone there were some 2,000 mass shootings. The most infamous occurred at Babi Yar, where practically all of Kiev’s Jewish population — some 33,000 souls — were shot and killed over a two-day period in September 1941.

But the mass shootings were only half the story. When the Germans realized they were losing the war and would probably be tried by an international court for their crimes, they rushed to destroy the evidence, using Jewish slave laborers to open the burial pits and burn the bodies. The code name for the large-scale campaign, which lasted from June 1942 until late 1944, was Aktion 1005.

“It was terrible for the Jews who had to burn the bodies,” says Father Desbois, who located three Jews who were forced to do the work in this forest. One was Leon Weliczker Wells, who moved to New Jersey after the war and wrote an account of his experiences, The Janowska Road. Father Desbois, recalling what Wells told him in their interview, says, “The commander would say to them every day, ‘Are you happy?’ And they had to say they were happy and joke and sing. Anytime someone was tired or not happy, he was shot. Afterward, most of the Jews who did the burnings were killed.”

After the Soviets arrived, they went to the various sites and opened the mass graves. They documented their findings — there is a copy at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and another copy at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem — but the report is millions of pages long and some of it is handwritten. One of the things Father Desbois would like to do is have the entire report, as well as the German archives, translated into English, to make the archives more widely available to future Holocaust historians. They would also like to translate into English the thousands of eyewitness testimonies that Yahad has filmed. He estimates this translation work would cost about $500,000. Although the organization has received funding from dozens of American and European foundations, including the Azrieli, Cummings, and Rothschild Foundations, and has an “American Friends” fundraising arm, to date the focus has been on funding Yahad’s work in the field as they document the testimony of the witnesses. Translation of the material archived in their Research Center is the important and necessary next step.

Part of the reason why no one knows exactly how many people were buried in this forest — or other places — is because the German and Russian archives don’t always agree, or they’re incomplete. Yahad doesn’t open the graves they find, out of respect for Jewish law. They also don’t use ground-penetrating radar, which is not against halachah, but is very expensive. They do record the location of the graves, so other historians will be able to find them, and an interactive map of their findings is on the Yahad website. But the main work of the Yahad team is to try to fill in the gaps by interviewing the locals. Of course, not everyone is willing to talk, and no one witness can provide a complete picture of what happened.

“You must crisscross from the testimony to the archives,” Father Desbois explains. “You cannot ask a survivor what happened in a Gestapo meeting, because he was not there.” He adds that they use a lot of material from survivors, in addition to the testimony of non-Jews, to document what happened. But it is the testimony from non-Jewish witnesses that he feels is the stronger ammunition in his fight against Holocaust deniers. “If it is only Jews who talk about the Holocaust, people will say it is Jewish propaganda.”

And when he says “people,” he isn’t talking about just a few cranks.

According to a survey conducted last April for the Claims Conference, which negotiates reparations on behalf of survivors and provides them with social services, 41 percent of millennials (young Americans in their twenties and thirties) believe that only two million or fewer Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Approximately 66 percent of these young people couldn’t name a single concentration camp or ghetto. Not even Auschwitz.

And it gets worse.

A 2014 study conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, which interviewed more than 53,000 people in 100 countries, discovered that only a third of the people interviewed believe the Holocaust has been described accurately in historical accounts, with some of the doubters believing the number of deaths has been greatly exaggerated and others claiming the Holocaust is a myth. The study also found that people under 65, regardless of their religious affiliation, were more likely to believe that facts about the Holocaust have been distorted.

The decline in knowledge about the Holocaust can be attributed, at least in part, to the passage of time. For most young people, World War II is the story of their “great-grandpa,” in the words of Father Desbois; it isn’t relevant to their lives.

The increase in the number of people casting doubt on the historical record, on the other hand, can be traced to the work of Holocaust deniers, who have successfully used the Internet and social media to disseminate false information.

To help combat this growing trend of Holocaust denial and distortion, and create a new generation of Holocaust scholars, Father Desbois teaches a course at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization about the forensic study of the Holocaust. Forensics is a discipline that collects and identifies physical remnants to draw conclusions about the “who, what, when, and where” of a crime. He and the Yahad staff also offer field courses where American and European students can meet with witnesses, as we are doing on our trip, and see some of the killing sites with their own eyes.

We retrace our steps and return to the entrance of the forest. The elderly man is still there. Apparently, he has been waiting for us. He begins to speak, in Ukrainian. Fortunately, Olga is still with us to translate.

Iossyp tells us that his family arrived at a nearby village after the war, when there was a population exchange between the Poles and Ukrainians. He saw the Soviet soldiers come in their trucks and open the graves. He was only five or six years old at the time.

He seems relieved to have shared this memory of long ago. We don’t ask how often he comes to the forest, or what he thinks about when he is there. We are beginning to think like Father Desbois and his team of forensic detectives — this is one more small piece of evidence to add to the gigantic jigsaw puzzle called the Holocaust, one more voice declaring the crimes really did happen.

Remember =The Children

“The trucks were opened, and the children started to fall down. They were falling on heads. They were falling on arms. They were all shouting and crying”

 —Zygmunt, Zbylitowska Gora

O

n the second day of the trip, we meet with two witnesses at the mass grave site near Zbylitowska Gora, a Polish village near Tarnow; Tarnow was home to 25,000 Jews before the war. Michal Chojak, Yahad’s deputy research director, serves as our translator.

Jan, the first witness, says he was forced to become part of the Baudienst labor force when he was 20. According to Father Desbois, the Nazi policy of forcing the locals to work for them is one reason the Poles don’t feel guilt. They feel they were just a tool, not the perpetrators of war crimes.

Jan spent only one day working at this killing site. Along with the other members of his team, he had to drag already dead bodies to a mass grave and assist with the killing of a truck full of Jews who were still alive. He didn’t personally witness the slaughter of Tarnow’s children. But a friend saw it and described to him how the Germans grabbed the children and smashed them against trees, before throwing their now lifeless bodies into the pit.

At the age of 95, Jan is frail and walks with a cane. But as he speaks, his face becomes animated and his words, even in translation, become more urgent. It’s clear there is something more he wants to say, something more he wants us to hear.

He describes a scene he witnessed when the Jews of Tarnow were being deported. His job was to search the now-deserted homes for valuables. Anything of value had to be given to the Germans, who shipped the items back to Germany. The locals got what the Germans didn’t want. While he was transferring the valuables to a warehouse, he passed a building where he heard some Jews screaming.

“I heard people asking for water,” he tells us. “They were suffocating inside. There was a well nearby. I decided to bring a bucket of water to the people. At that moment there was an SS officer who saw me. He kicked me, and he told me that if I do it one more time he will shoot me.”

After Jan leaves, Father Desbois explains, “You must know that in Ukraine every German commander was free to do as he pleased. He had a general order to kill Jews, but he could shoot them, suffocate them, or kill them with knives. He didn’t have to explain how he did it. That is why we have filmed 5,800 witnesses. Because after these witnesses are gone, there will be no trace of the crimes.”

The second witness, Zygmunt, was seven years old when he saw a truck filled with Jewish children pull up to this field, which was near his family’s farm. After telling us about the way most of the children tumbled out of the truck, he adds, “I don’t know what happened with one child, but he couldn’t walk. A German took him by the leg and started to drag him in the direction of the pit. At that time there was a kind of barrier that led to the field, and this German took this child and smashed his head on the barrier. The child was maybe nine or ten.”

Ever dispassionate, Father Desbois comments, “What was not resolved for me as an investigator, when I first heard testimony about this site, was how you could make children stand still and not move. You cannot put children near a mass grave and say, ‘Stand still, while I shoot you.’ The children will try to run away.”

The testimonies we have just heard resolve that question. But it raises another: How can he remain so unmoved by the stories he hears?

As it turns out, his unemotional “just the facts” veneer is not the entire story. His commitment to locating Jewish mass graves — not a usual occupation for a Catholic priest — has its source in the very strong emotional connection he still has to his now deceased grandfather, Claudius Desbois, who was a French prisoner of war during World War II. The elder Desbois was incarcerated in a prison in Rava Ruska, a Ukrainian town located near the border with Poland.

“I knew nothing about the Holocaust until I was 13,” Father Desbois explains. “No one talked. My grandfather only said that although conditions in his camp were bad, it was worse outside.”

As a youngster, Father Desbois would wonder what could be worse than being a prisoner, with little to eat or drink. Later he realized his grandfather must have been referring to the Jews. “I am certain he saw what was going on — outside the camp they shot 15,000 Jews.”

In 2002 he traveled to Rava Ruska to see the place where his grandfather had been imprisoned. When he realized there was nothing to commemorate the spot where the Jews had been murdered, he was determined to rectify the situation. How did that turn into a 16-year odyssey that has taken him all over Eastern Europe?

“I don’t know,” he says. Then he adds, “I still feel the presence of my grandpa.”

From Generation to Generation Father Desbois’s work has won him many accolades and honors, including the Légion d’Honneur (France’s highest honor), the Humanitarian Award by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the National Jewish Book Award for his 2008 book Holocaust by Bullets, an account of his search for the mass graves of Eastern Europe.

Naturally, he has his critics as well. Historian Omer Bartov, for example, a professor of European history and German studies at Brown University who is considered an expert on genocide, has criticized Father Desbois for being too accepting of his witnesses’ testimony, especially when it comes to absolving them of guilt. In reply, others make the same point that Father Desbois made to us: Once you start blaming people, they shut up.

Indeed, the Catholic priest’s recurring criticism about the Jewish People’s lack of interest in visiting and setting up memorials at Ukraine’s mass grave sites has made more than a few members of our group uneasy.

In truth, his criticism isn’t 100 percent accurate. Ohalei Tzadikim, Lo Tishkach European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, and the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities (VAAD) Ukraine are three examples of Jewish organizations working to find and preserve Jewish cemeteries and mass graves.

Yet there is no escaping the fact that of the many Jews who come to Ukraine to daven at the kevarim of tzaddikim such as the Baal Shem Tov or Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, very few will hike out to the fields where the mass graves are located and say Kaddish. As for the hundreds of mass graves filled with ordinary and nameless Jews scattered across Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, they are mainly untended and forgotten, unless a family with a connection to the site has put up a marker.

To learn why more Jews don’t visit Ukraine, I turn to Rabbi Aubrey Hersh, a protégé of renowned British historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who has been invited by Heritage Retreats to provide a Torah and historical perspective to our group. In addition to being senior lecturer and projects director at London’s JLE, a social and educational center for young Jews, Rabbi Hersh has taken 150 heritage tours to Europe.

“If people are traveling to Eastern Europe with the intention of seeing firsthand the places where the Holocaust happened, it is very important to incorporate Ukraine into the itinerary,” Rabbi Hersh comments. “The difference between Ukraine and Poland is that for most people Poland is about the larger, more mechanized, more impersonal factories of death, where the numbers are staggering but the process was somewhat at arm’s length. In Ukraine, as in Lithuania and Latvia, the killings were face-to-face. The Jews found their end in the very places where they had lived. But there are a number of difficulties that exist — technical and historical.”

While there are a few Ukrainian cities where Yiddishkeit is thriving, such as Kiev, Odessa, and Zhitomir, in general, the tourism infrastructure isn’t as well developed in Ukraine as in Poland. This means the logistics of a kosher tour are harder to organize, and a trip can cost significantly more. An even larger problem is what Rabbi Hersh calls “the absence of a narrative.” The mass graves are scattered across the countryside. Even if a group were to make the effort to visit some of the sites, in most places there is nothing to see, other than an empty field or forest clearing.

“You often don’t know in any great depth the particular narrative of the village where the killings took place,” he says. “Unlike the sifrei zikaron that exist for large towns, you won’t find anything specific for the smaller ones. Father Desbois’s work gives a broader picture, but not all of it is available in English. All this makes it much more demanding to create a trip.”

Later in our trip, when we are having dinner in Krakow, at the site of Sarah Schenirer’s Bais Yaakov Seminary, Rabbi Hersh will address an even larger question: Whether it’s Poland or Ukraine, why are we visiting places where our people suffered and were destroyed? Why come here?

“I came to Poland once with Rav Moshe Shapira ztz”l, whose grandparents were killed in Lithuania in a mass grave,” says Rabbi Hersh, who explains that Rav Shapira was visibly distressed when they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau and was unable to bring himself to enter the camps. Later, when he was asked to give a shiur, Rav Shapira said he wasn’t in a frame of mind where he felt he could teach. “But he did give us one thought. Basically, he posed the question I just asked: What are we doing here? What do we hope to achieve?

“He said there is a pasuk in Sefer Devarim that tells us about how we merit the Geulah — how we merit Eretz Yisrael and the Beis Hamikdash. It says that it’s not as a result of your righteousness and your straight path that HaKadosh Baruch Hu is disinheriting the non-Jews of Eretz Canaan and giving it to you. It’s because of what they have done to you.

“So we have to be ‘mishtayech’ — we have to be linked to what has occurred to our people — in order for us to say to HaKadosh Baruch Hu, ‘Higi’a zeman. Bring us the Geulah.’ That is a reason to come to these places, to understand how deep the galus is, how much suffering we have been through, whether that galus happened to our direct ancestors or whether it happened thousands of years ago. We have an individual destiny and a national destiny. The route can be circuitous, depending on the choices we make as a nation, but our national destiny gets us from A to B to Mashiach.”

Gathering the Missing Links

A

t a roundtable discussion, Father Desbois brings up a few topics that are on his mind: the new Holocaust law in Poland (“It will have a bad effect. We see that more people who don’t like the Jews feel freer to say it.”); the situation in Europe, where Jews are once again being killed because they’re Jews (“The enemies of the Jews don’t sleep. I would say that 80 percent of the planet has a positive memory of Hitler.”); the mass grave sites of the one million Jews that still need to be investigated.

“I’m the old guy, but my team is young,” he says, cracking a rare smile. Then he quickly becomes serious again. “A third of my students at Georgetown University are secular Jews and even they are beginning to doubt the scale of the Holocaust,” he says. “Because they know nothing.

“We need to prepare the new generation — teach a new generation how to investigate for themselves. The new generation won’t meet survivors or witnesses. There will only be memory and history.”

Yahad has several educational initiatives in the United States and Europe, including college and teacher-training courses, traveling exhibitions, and a website with an interactive map showing the sites of mass graves. There are, of course, many other Holocaust studies programs. But the nagging question remains: Who will be the guardians of Holocaust memory and history?

While we’d like to think it will be serious scholars in search of the truth, Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, emeritus chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, wrote back in 2007 about the ways Holocaust memory is being distorted. He listed 11 of them, including: Holocaust Equivalence, which today we are seeing in countries like Ukraine, where some have made an equivalence between the Nazi brutality toward the Jews and the Soviet brutality toward Ukrainians; Holocaust Deflection, like the right-wing nationalists in Poland who insist Poles were also the victims of Nazi aggression and therefore shouldn’t be blamed for the crimes they themselves committed; Holocaust Trivialization, where the word “Nazi” is used to describe any politician or authority figure you don’t like and “genocide” becomes a catch-all description of any act of aggression; and Holocaust Inversion, which has been taken up by a small but noisy group of American Millennials belonging to student groups like If Not Now, who claim that Israelis are the new Nazis and they are committing genocide against the Palestinians.

“We should have hakaras hatov for the work Father Desbois is doing,” comments Rabbi Mordechai Kreitenberg, who has seen with his own eyes the toll that ignorance and apathy has taken on young Jews. “But preserving the memory of the Holocaust is only one aspect of the war we Jews are presently fighting. We have broader concerns. We have to ensure the future of Klal Yisrael as well.”

Rabbi Kreitenberg is himself the child of Holocaust survivors. Pictures of some members of his father’s family arriving at Birkenau — only his father and one uncle survived — are hanging on the walls of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum. They also hang in Rabbi Kreitenberg’s office.

“I grew up in Los Angeles,” he says. “About 95 percent of the kids in my high school were Jewish. When I went back for my tenth-year reunion, I looked around the room and saw that no one cared that they were born Jewish or realized what a gift they had been given. My response, as an observant Jew and the son of Holocaust survivors, has been to be involved in Jewish education, specifically focusing on the unaffiliated. We have to save this generation of assimilated Jews from self-imposed obliteration.”

Heritage Retreats, the organization founded by Rabbi Kreitenberg in 2000, combines an outdoor camping and hiking experience at one of America’s gorgeous national parks with an intensive Torah learning program led by leading rabbanim. While the retreats may be only one week, Rabbi Kreitenberg says the impact is very often long-lasting. Many of the young people go on to learn in yeshivos in Eretz Yisrael and the United States.

“One young man was recently offered a six-figure job at Amazon, but he deferred it to learn in yeshivah for a year,” says Rabbi Kreitenberg, who adds that many of the earlier participants of the program are today very involved in their respective frum communities.

Five years ago, he added a trip to Poland.

“I’m always searching for tools to engage young people to explore their identity,” he says. “Possibly, as a result, they will let Hashem and Torah into their lives. I saw Poland as one of those tools.”

Many of the young professionals who sign up for the Poland trip have already done a Birthright trip to Eretz Yisrael. What does a trip to Poland add?

Rabbi Kreitenberg explains that unlike our tour with Father Desbois, which focused on the historical aspects of the Holocaust, the tour for these young people is geared toward seeing the heroic nature and perseverance of the Jewish People and the vibrancy of Jewish life in prewar Europe.

“Many have told me afterward that the trip to Poland awakened their Jewish pride — they saw how we have prevailed as a people, getting from the Holocaust to where we are today. Because of the political situation in Eretz Yisrael, the picture has become blurred and doesn’t have the same impact.

“We live in a world that is so out of focus,” he adds. “This generation has pretty much grown up with a silver spoon in their mouth. When there is so much material comfort and almost no adversity, they can lose perspective. So when you take people to a concentration camp or a mass grave, it makes them stop and think about what’s important. It creates a call to action. I’ve had a number of people say they never valued having a Jewish family, or even having kids, but after being in Poland they have a new appreciation of the value of life. It’s the same with keeping mitzvos. When they learn about how our people kept the mitzvos while under such duress, it makes them realize, ‘I should keep them too.’ ”

When asked how he would respond to Father Desbois’s charges that the Jewish People aren’t doing enough to preserve the memory of the mass graves, Rabbi Kreitenberg replies, “Father Desbois’s message that we must not forget the dead is meaningful, but his way of remembering is different from ours. His idea is about the sanctity of the place, what transpired.

“But the education I received from my rebbeim has to do with the sanctity of the person and the growth that is supposed to take place. Our response is that our remembrance of how these people died has to translate into how we are going to live our life differently.

“I once heard a shiur from Rav Moshe Shapira during the intifada about how we all had to do something. I walked up to him after the shiur and asked, ‘What should I do?’ And he said, ‘If I tell you what to do, it’s worthless.’

“You have to figure it out on your own. When I think about the sacrifices my parents and their families made during the Holocaust because they were Jewish, I know I have to do something. So for me, it’s my kiruv organization. For others, it might be making a better Shabbos, or becoming a better parent, or having a stronger commitment to ahavas Yisrael. But the Holocaust requires a response from all of us. It requires us to breathe new life into ourselves.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 727)

 

T

he kiddush on Shabbos morning in the Bobov shul in New York was already underway when the two guests, an older man and his son, entered and quietly took seats in the back.

The Rebbe, Rav Shloime Halberstam ztz”l, presided over the gathering of chassidim, who were Holocaust survivors like himself. Suddenly the Rebbe took note of the late arrivals.

“Shalom aleichem!” said the Rebbe heartily, rising from his seat to honor the guests, to the amazement of everyone. The chassidim glanced around and wondered why the Rebbe was according such respect to this clean-shaven older gentleman.

“Do you know who this is?” the Rebbe asked the chassidim. “This is Reb Shaya Blau. He saved hundreds, maybe thousands of Yidden from the Nazi inferno. Ich bin mekaneh zein Gan Eden — I envy his share in Gan Eden!”

Who was Reb Shaya Blau a”h, and how did he save so many from the Churban in Europe? His son, Reb Lazer — who accompanied his father to that kiddush in the Bobov shul — recounts the tale.

Reb Shaya actually got his first test of bravery not in World War II, but in World War I, as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. Through the hardships of military service, he kept a warm connection to Yiddishkeit by learning from a Kitzur Shulchan Aruch he carried with him at all times.

Once, he came under enemy fire in a battle, and fell to the ground. When the smoke cleared, he saw that he had been hit — but only in the thumb, from which he was bleeding profusely. He lifted himself up, wrapped his thumb in a cloth to stop the bleeding, and decided to end his army career.

It took him two days to make it to his parents’ house, and upon arriving, he found a package addressed to them. Wondering what it was, he opened it to find his Kitzur Shulchan Aruch. Inside the sefer, the Jew who had sent it inscribed, “This is the sefer of your son Shaya. I witnessed him being shot to death.” This Jew had seen Reb Shaya fall, but by the time he was able to make his way over to him, Shaya was gone, leaving behind only the sefer.

As Reb Shaya read and reread those words, he felt overwhelmed with gratitude to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. He kept that sefer as a precious memento his whole life, and bequeathed it to his son Lazer after his passing. (The family first heard this story at the shivah.)

“It’s really the story of my father’s life,” Reb Lazer says. “It was miracle after miracle.”

Although miracles played a part, Reb Shaya wrote a large part of the story with his grit, tenacity, and ingenuity. When, during World War II, Hungary came under the rule of the fascist Arrow Cross party, and the Jews were made to don yellow stars, Reb Shaya Blau refused. With his fluent Hungarian, he managed to mingle with the fascist Nyliaskeresztes members in Budapest. He managed to trick them into making him a member.

In March 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary and ordered Jews to assemble in the town square. Reb Shaya begged his father not to go. His father listened to him, and thus was saved. Many others were much less fortunate. Shaya saw that new tactics were needed at this stage of the war.  

With the help of his fluent German, he was able to finagle a job in the passport office in Budapest. This position afforded him the ability to procure passports and false documents for his Jewish brethren — under the very noses of the Germans.

He also developed a keen sense for being in the right place at the right time, for picking up lifesaving intelligence.

“My father knew where to pick up vital information,” says Lazer. “He would walk miles to be present when plans were discussed. As soon as he heard the name of the town they were planning to raid, he raced there to wake up the Jews and warn them to escape.”

One day Shaya came home to find his father missing. His mother’s clouded face said it all: “The Nazis took him away.”

Shaya learned that his father had been sent to the train station to be carted off to a death camp. Reb Shaya hurried to the train station in his uniform, his boot heels ringing against the pavement as he strode through the milling, despondent crowd, searching for his father. Finally, he spotted his father, grabbed him, and began dragging him away.

“Verfluchtener Jude! Accused Jew!” Shaya spat, as he started to kick and beat him.

Reb Shaya’s father did not recognize this fascist who was accosting him and was shocked, to say the least, to be receiving this “special treatment.”

“Where are you taking him?” demanded a towering SS commander, who stepped into their path.

“Leave this Jude to me!” Shaya guffawed. “I have an account to settle with him and want to have the honor of finishing him off.”

He hustled his father away from the train station and saved his life.

Reb Shaya obtained a three-wheeled motorcycle and immediately set about saving lives with it. He would pick up a dozen loaves of bread daily from the bakery and hide them in the sidecar under mounds of rags and then shuttle them over to the Jewish Ghetto. When the German guards asked what he was carrying, he would reply, “Laundry,” without batting an eyelash.

He worked out an arrangement with his mother whereby he would throw the bundle of bread loaves out of the sidecar, and she would surreptitiously bring them into her house. Then, she meticulously cut the bread and distributed enough slices to sustain 40 to 50 families. Although Shaya’s siblings begged that she save something aside for the family for the next day, she assured them that Hashem would provide what they needed, devar yom b’yomo.

One time Reb Shaya was able to procure a huge sack of beans. His mother lit a massive flame using old book covers from the library to boil those beans. Every person in the ghetto received 15 beans.

After a while, the Nazis caught on to Shaya’s schemes. They saw, for example, that the towns they raided had few or no Jews. Something did not add up. They started suspecting someone in the bureaucracy. After five or six times, their suspicion fell on Reb Shaya Blau in the passport office.

One day they pounced upon Reb Shaya and beat him mercilessly. They interrogated him and then beat him some more. When he felt that he was at his breaking point, a tall, muscular Nazi walked into the office.

“Leave him alone!” he barked. “I’ll finish him off myself!”

The Nazi smacked Shaya in the face and violently threw him out of the office, onto the pavement. Mustering strength he didn’t know he had, Shaya picked himself up and ran for his life. Miraculously he escaped and made his way home — but he suffered from a pronounced limp the rest of his life.

The Blau family chesed still found outlets after the end of the war. Dovid and Rivka Blau, Shaya’s parents, took many orphans under their wings, and tried to give them the most honorable weddings possible under the dire circumstances. They accompanied perhaps 20 couples to the chuppah, and continued to provide love, support, and care even after the wedding. Once an elderly Jew stopped Reb Lazer in the street and told him, “I was a yasom after the war. I had nobody. Reb Dovid and Rivka Blau made my wedding happen and supported me. I’ll never forget it.”

Late in life an extended illness forced Reb Shaya to stay in the hospital. Admiring nurses and doctors learned of his activities during the war and went out of their way to give him the royal treatment. They knew how much he invested to save so many lives and wanted to repay him in kind.

The fruits of his efforts continue to multiply to this day: The four brothers and a sister whom he saved grew up, married, and brought children and grandchildren into the world — more than 200 descendants in all. Thousands of other people alive today throughout the world are davening, learning Torah, and performing mitzvos in his zechus.

His neshamah should have an aliyah and in his zechus we should see the yeshuah bimheirah v’yameinu.

 

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 699)

 

F

or decades the escape tunnel at Ponar Lithuania had largely been the stuff of legend.

In the thick of the Second World War Jewish members of a forced-labor brigade had supposedly dug the tunnel using spoons screwdrivers and even their bare hands. They were members of the so-called Burning Brigade dozens of Jews assigned to the cruel and grisly task of exhuming and burning the bodies of more than 70 000 Jews who had been executed at Ponar outside Vilna by the Nazis.

But did the tunnel really exist? Did the desperate members of the Burning Brigade really elude their Nazi tormentors by crawling to freedom on that last night of Pesach in April 1944?

In 2016 an international team of archeologists came to Ponar to find out. Armed with up-to-date alphabet-soup-sounding equipment such as GPR and ERT they began the laborious process of testing the soil searching for telltale inconsistencies that might signal the tunnel’s presence below the earth.

Suddenly a ghostly figure appeared amidst the trees an elderly woman who seemed to know exactly what these archeologists were looking for.

“I was a partisan in 1944 ” she told them. “I was the one who received the escapees. The Germans had radioed that they were looking for them and they’d give a reward to anyone who found them. So we went out to look for them.

“After three days we found them — they were in two groups — and brought them to the partisan camp. No one could stand next to them because they smelled of death. Until today I can still smell them. The first thing we did was burn their clothes. But even their skin smelled of rotting bodies.”

The Road to Ponar

“Many roads lead to Ponar but no road leads back” wrote Yiddish author Shmerke Kaczerginski in 1943. His lyrics for the song “Shtiler Shtiler” (“Quiet Quiet”) composed by Aleksander Volkoviski was written in memory of the mass murders committed at Ponar and became one of the Holocaust’s best-known songs.

S

o close to greatness yet burned at times by the pain the second generation still lives under a cloud of fear and foreboding:

“I was glad that I was a chubby kid because I knew the skinny kids would die first if the food ran out.”

“When I chose my wife I wanted someone who I felt would be able to run away from the Nazis when the time came someone who was strong physically and emotionally who could shoulder the burden of caring for children in a difficult time.”

“Any change in the political world almost anything in the news will have me frightened and fearing for my children’s safety.”

Chilling words that describe trauma stress perhaps even a certain paranoia about the world. The composers of these sentences are clearly fearful — of the unknown of forces beyond their control. They are it seems constantly living and reliving a horrific episode one that occupies their thoughts and pulls at their hearts.

These expressions could have easily been spoken by Holocaust survivors but they were not. These are the thoughts and fears of children of Holocaust survivors men and women who did not live through the war and may have been born decades after its end. Many of these second-generation survivors as they are called grew up in affluent homes have achieved academic or financial success and lead seemingly normal productive lives.

And yet something gnaws at them. It is the feeling as one second-generation adult explained that things are just on the verge of chaos that in the next moment the world will erupt again in a spasm of war and violence and that they will be on the run — like their fathers and mothers before them.

Who are these children of survivors and what are their particular characteristics? Is it fair to single them out as a group or are they really just like everyone else? Is it possible that in the words of one doctor their parents’ headache has become their own?

Yes and No

Dr. Irit Felsen a licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice in New Jersey has dedicated her life to understanding post-traumatic stress disorder and the effects of the Second World War and the Holocaust on the children of survivors.

The daughter of two survivors Dr. Felsen runs a monthly discussion group for second-generation children in Brooklyn organized by the Bikur Cholim Chesed Organization.

Her experience has led her to conclude that some of the children of survivors have internalized the anxieties of their parents but also have been given an extra push to succeed.

“Some of the offspring of Holocaust survivors have been observed to have lower self-perceptions of independence and self-sufficiency but higher achievement motivation and higher self-criticism than non-Holocaust related peers” says Dr. Felsen who is also an adjunct professor of psychology at Yeshiva University. “Some studies of children of survivors show elevated levels of anxiety and depression however these remain within the ‘normative–high range ’ reflecting an absence of serious psychopathology.” Clinical interviews with children of survivors often include descriptions of nightmares deep-seated anxiety and echoes of their parents’ trauma in their own lives.

On the flip side although “second gens” may be more susceptible to certain psychological difficulties Felsen notes that they also display a generally greater compassion and empathy for humanity. Her data indicates that many second gens have chosen careers in the social services.

Dr. Natan Kellerman an Israel psychologist and one of the founders of Amcha (an Israeli support organization for Holocaust survivors) addresses the difficulty of defining the maladies of the second generation in his book Holocaust Trauma; Psychological effects and Treatment.

“How does transmission of trauma occur? How can trauma be transmitted from one generation to another? At first glance the concept of transmission is difficult to grasp. It is as if saying that someone’s headache is caused by the fact that his father was hit on his head by a stone some 50 years ago.”

Indeed Kellerman confirms the headache is very real. He uses the analogy of a nuclear bomb to make his point.

“Like a nuclear bomb that disperses its radioactive fallout in distant places even after a cruel explosion any major psychological trauma continues to contaminate those who were exposed… in the first second and subsequent generations. Similar to radioactive waste the emotional trauma cannot be seen or detected. It remains hidden in the dark abyss of the unconscious with its toxic and hazardous influence threatening the health of humans for hundreds of years.”

Unlike Kellerman’s hidden influences some markers for trauma can in fact be detected and measured. Researchers now study how external or environmental factors can actually change the cells that send messages to the DNA. “Epigenetics” is the scientific theory that offspring can inherit the altered DNA of parents that was modified by events or trauma that the parent experienced.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 647)

 

E

lie Wiesel once said: “I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. And anyone who does not remember betrays them again.” Wiesel was one of the earliest and most masterful chroniclers of the concentration camp experience having experienced it himself in Auschwitz.

Using his gifts as a storyteller to publicize the horrors the world might otherwise have chosen to forget he assumed the role of a universal conscience calling the nations of the world to task against anti-Semitism and hate; assailing injustices such as the oppression of Soviet Jews South African apartheid and genocide committed in faraway lands such as Cambodia Bosnia Darfur and mostly recently Syria.

With his passing on Shabbos at age 87 accolades and condolences poured in from world leaders and opinion makers who hailed Elie Wiesel for his moral fortitude. Wiesel’s popularity was perhaps due at least in part to his willingness to admit his inability to understand extreme evil and human malevolence. During his lifetime portions of the Orthodox Jewish world had not embraced Wiesel who wrote about his personal spiritual battles stemming from confusion over the “hester panim” — Hashem’s seeming silence — in the face of the overwhelming evil he experienced. It was a topic that Wiesel alluded to in a formal but brief interview we conducted in 2014 at the sleek Madison Avenue office of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

The foundation created after Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 states that its mission is “to combat indifference intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance understanding and equality.” The foundation maintains Beit Tzipora Centers (named for Wiesel’s martyred sister Tzipora) in Ashkelon and Kiryat Malachi that help educate and integrate Ethiopian Jews into Israeli society.

The small waiting room at his Madison Avenue office was adorned with a large framed poster for a film by Elie’s wife Marion (Erster Rose) Wiesel entitled Children of the Night.

The foundation’s offices were staffed by a small cadre of bright young interns busy with paperwork and computer screens. One smiling secretary led me down a hallway lined with melancholy photos of prewar Europe and full yet tidy bookshelves into Wiesel’s spacious but equally bookshelf-laden office. He sat behind an enormous desk but rose to greet me elegantly dressed with the rosette of the French Legion of Honor adorning his suit lapel. His trademark tousled gray locks still full he invited us to the couches in the sitting area.

Having undergone serious heart surgery Wiesel had looked thin and frail. I was told in advance that he only had the strength for a 20-minute interview. His voice wasn’t strong and I often strained to catch all of his words.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 617)