PASSOVER SEDER – CREATING HISTORICAL MEMORY IN THE SHADOW OF THE SHOAH

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“In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt.”

Passover Haggadah.

 

This sentence hits me hard.  When I reach down to a place to connect with this obligation, I inevitably hear Sam’s voice telling of his escape from Treblinka as his personal Exodus and his near drowning in the Bug River as his own crossing of the Red Sea.  I feel that through knowing him and retelling his story, I find a way to feel that I too left Egypt.

The Passover Seder is the most celebrated ritual among the Jews.  Most people, even if they are a bit more distant from Jewish observance, attend or host a Passover Seder.  Knowing how Sam connected his Holocaust experiences to the Exodus from Egypt, I believe that incorporating Holocaust stories into our Seders may be the best option for creating intergenerational historical memory related to the Holocaust, as we now live in the shadow of the Shoah.

Passover begins this coming Friday night.   As you prepare, take a few moments and think about creating some historical memory of our most recent tragedy at your Seder.   I would be honored if you find a passage from My Soul is Filled with Joy that resonates with you and read it aloud at your Seder.  For additional material, I include (below) some first-person testimonies I found on the Yad Vashem website.  This will give you much from which to choose.

If you choose to include a Holocaust reading at your Seder, please follow with a message of hope – perhaps something from your own family’s story that brings hope and happiness.  While we must recount and retell of the persecution in Egypt and Europe, we must include hope for the Jewish future.   At the Seder we begin with the negative and end with praise.

In every generation they rise up to destroy us – but we persevere.  The Jewish people is still here, telling the stories of our history, living with the memory of it all.  There is hope – the nine Goldberg grandchildren and one great grandchild will gather together for the Seder and Hitler will be defeated yet again.

I with you all a meaningful and delicious Seder.

 

From the Testimony of Stefanie S. Sucher about the Poisonous Effects of Anti-Jewish Propaganda

…Very close to our building was the main building of the Stuermer, the notorious Nazi newspaper. I often had to pass this building on my way to some private lessons. Since I couldn’t go to school, I had private lessons. Once, while I glanced at their windows, I could see the front page of the Stuermer, with a caricature of the Jews. I call it caricatures because they were. It was so bad and I saw them so often, that I later on almost felt that this must be what we are, that must be how we look, and it took me a long time to get rid of this image. Propaganda is a very terrible situation and very poisonous… Quite some time before Kristallnacht, all our friends disappeared, our Christian friends disappeared from us. We were really just a Jewish group now. I had no contact, hardly any contact with former girlfriends or other people I knew. I remained mostly in Jewish circles and also afterwards worked in the Jewish hospital, and then worked for a Jewish doctor. But nothing was permanent at this time because the people I worked for usually left the country eventually, those who could leave the country. Those who didn’t, sometimes moved away. It was very difficult to immigrate into Israel since the White Paper [British policy restricting immigration to Palestine in 1939] unless you…married somebody who had an Israeli permit, then you were able to get out… My sister did not go back to school. She stayed at home and didn’t want to go out because she had stones thrown at her. Ever since the Kristallnacht, which I call the overture to the extermination of the Jews,… things worsened from day to day and became almost unliveable. I became very friendly with one of the [Jewish studies] seminary students. We were under curfew, by the way. We could not go out at night. So in the evening he came over to my place or he had a little room where he studied and I went over to him and he started to make me Jewishly conscious. He taught me Hebrew…he taught me to be a Jew. He instilled in me a pride in being Jewish. He taught me various things and also the joy of Judaism…. He instilled in me a whole new thing, to really appreciate being a Jew, not just because a Nazi tells you that you are no good, that you are terrible. And this was the most important part, because this came at a time when I was mowed down. I had no feeling for myself. I actually ended up thinking that they were right, that I must look like … the caricatures in the Stuermer. I thought that was my image, thought we were no good, that we didn’t contribute to anything, that we were inferior.

Source: Yad Vashem Archive O.3 / 5132

 

From the Testimony of Yaacov Schwartzberger about Getting Caught While Stealing Bread, Vilna Ghetto 

…There was orphans there also. I went stealing bread with the orphans. I wanted to be one of the boys. I was a thin little boy, so they had me one time climb up, they had a rain drainpipe, and I climbed up on it up to the first floor. Also in that area where the “Jotkevergasse” was, they had a warehouse there for bread. I climbed up and my head went through those bars, between the bars I was so thin. I went through the bars and I started throwing down bread to them and then the Jewish police, the “Yiddische politzanten”, the Jewish police caught me and with the other two or three children, we were caught. The bigger children ran away, they just took off, but me they caught and they caught three or four more. And they took us to the “Kommissariat” they called it…[w]e were four boys – we were caught, we put in a corner on a little stage, wooden stage, interrogation stage, and the person in charge, the policeman in charge, the “Yiddishe Politzei”, he decided to give us, each one, ten whips with a rubber hose. He said each person should whip the other. I was the third one in the row, or the second one. I was the second one in the row. And the first one got whipped, he cried and he left. He got his ten. Q: So who whipped the first one? A: Not me. I don’t know. The other boy. I didn’t. Then my turn came. When my turn came another boy whipped me and the policeman said, “Harder!” “Starker!” “Harder!” And he whipped me and then he asked me, “Did it hurt?” I said, “No.” I didn’t cry. When I said no, he said, “Give him some more.” Then I started crying. Understand? I was stupid, you know, a little bit. I was proud. At that time afterwards I felt maybe I was stupid, not proud. It was my personality like this. I said it didn’t hurt. And then he said, “Give him some more.” Anyway, I got more and then I started crying and they let us go and it’s lucky they let us go because if they wouldn’t let us go, the Gestapo would come and take us and we would have been sent to the headquarters Gestapo and from there we would have been killed for sure. That’s what happened to people who got caught in the ghetto doing some kind of a crime, which happened to a lot of people in the ghetto. If the Germans found out that you did some kind of a thing like that, steal, they would find an excuse to execute, to kill, to murder.

Source: Yad Vashem Archives O.3-10906

 

From the Testimony of Olga Albogen about a Gas Chamber Being Blown Up at Auschwitz-Birkenau

We’re now back to Auschwitz. You were there a month, yes? A: A month. Q: And what happened there during this month? A: Well, actually, the food was horrible. Bitter, grass, whatever, and there was some medication in the (?) because all the girls, everybody, stopped menstruating. Q: So there was bitter something in it. A: But I said to my sister, “We must eat it, otherwise how are we going to survive?” I said, “My parents are going to go home and we shouldn’t?” So every day selections, Mengele selected us. They took us…there was one instant….They said we’re going to take a shower, to the baths. And the bath was near the gas chamber. And many times they took groups and they never came back. We figured they took them to work, whatever. We didn’t, we didn’t think that it’s the end of them. So once our group, we had to completely undress, leave, that one dress we had on, leave it in a pile and standing outside, naked, waiting to get into the showers. Standing hours, hours. Evening came, dark night. We’re still standing there and then they said there’s an empty barrack, big, tremendous building with nothing in it, just the walls, and they herded us into it, naked, the way we were, for the night. It was August and the nights were so cold – Auschwitz was mountainous around – and the nights were so cold and we were standing there naked all night and the next day. Nothing, nothing happens, no shower. But the showers actually were with gas, it was with gas and they gave gas – that’s how they killed the people before they got into the gas chamber. But they didn’t do anything. We were standing there at least twenty-four hours or more. Q: You thought you are going to be gassed? A: To take a shower, they said, and we believed it, but everybody said that, I mean the Polish people who were working around there, they said that that’s the gas chamber and whatever. And then after twenty-four hours they let us out, without food, without a drop of water or anything, and then they started to talk about, there were rumours that we were waiting near the gas chamber and the gas chamber broke down. And that’s why they sent us back to the barracks. We were waiting, they couldn’t fix it, it broke down. I didn’t believe it. Q: This you will never know actually. A: Wait a minute. What happened, last year it was Yom HaShoah and the woman was on the television talking, on the radio – radio or television I don’t even know because I don’t remember her face. She said she was working, she was in Auschwitz and she was working outside of the camps, in the city of Auschwitz in an ammunition factory. And once she smuggled in ammunition and she gave it to the guys who were working in the gas chamber and they blewup the gas chamber and she said it was the middle of August. So that’s…I just couldn’t believe it that it was really true. Q: But you know that many times there were rumours that it was the gas that time. A: Yes, rumours – we let it go. But last year, Yom HaShoah, when this woman was talking that she smuggled in ammunition and gave it to the guys who were working there and they blew it up and the gas chamber wasn’t working for days until they fixed it, until then, till last year I didn’t believe it. Q: And now you believe. A: Well, there is no two ways about it. Q: But still, I mean if, they would not send there if it did not work at all, would they? A: No, but it blew up while we were waiting outside. Q: And you did not hear that it was blowing up? A: We heard, but there was always noise and smoke and….we just…You know, till the last minute we never believed, but after the liberation even, I didn’t want to believe that the gas chamber took so many people.

Source: Yad Vashem Archives O.3-10335

 

From the Testimony of Shmuel Krakowski about the Liberation from Theresienstadt

I woke up that day, just as on the day before, and all the previous days – very, very hungry. We lay on the bare floor, prisoners closed in a prison within a larger prison. We had arrived here a fortnight earlier with the death march from Rehmsdorf, a subcamp of Buchenwald. We were more than 4,000 Jewish concentration camp prisoners when they took us out of Rehmsdorf in the early days of April. Only 500 of us reached the Czech town of Terezin, which had been transformed by the Nazis into a Jewish ghetto, known by the German name Theresienstadt. All the others were killed or died on the way. Among those who perished were some of my closest friends from our underground youth organization in the Lodz ghetto: Rysiek Podlaski, Abramek Kociolek and Sruled Krajkowski. They locked us into the huge building called Hamburger Kaserne. Those outside the gate, the resident prisoners of Theresienstadt, were more lucky. They at least had some freedom to move through the few streets of the ghetto. We knew the Third Reich had collapsed, and that our liberation was a matter of days or even hours. Unfortunately, for people exhausted after the suffering of the death march and years of starvation, those hours of waiting for the liberators to come seemed very long. Each hour stretched to eternity. Many of us were in agony, as was one of my best friends Lutek Nachtstern. There was no longer any doubt that for these people the liberation would come too late. For the rest of us it was a tragic race; which would happen first – the liberation or death from starvation? I don’t remember who was the first that morning to look out of the window. I well remember his cry of joy: “Boys, the Russians are here”. Thus, we were liberated.

With many others, I decided to run out immediately and welcome the liberators. Many of us were not able to do so. They were too weak to move, but had no choice but to lie and wait for the liberators to come and bring them food, and to arrange medical treatment.

The gate of the Hamburger Kaserne was still closed. A Czech policeman stood outside and tried to persuade us to remain within, because, as he said, we were an epidemic danger for those outside. It sounded like nonsense to remain imprisoned after the liberation had finally come. We refused to obey and stormed the gate. The Czech policeman gave up and disappeared. We soon found ourselves on the road outside the ghetto. There we saw several Red Army tanks, a military supply truck and a few Russian soldiers on bicycles escorting a huge column of German prisoners of war. Germany was defeated and we saw it now with our own eyes. This was the day we had been waiting for. We were very hungry, so the first thing we did was to ask the Russians to give us something to eat. The soldiers were extremely friendly to us but didn’t have much to offer. The only thing they had in their supply truck was sugar, a lot of sugar, and salted pork. I preferred to satisfy my hunger with sugar. I remembered how a few days earlier a doctor in the Hamburger Kaserne, who was also a prisoner, warned us to be very careful of what we ate when the day of liberation came, because we had suffered prolonged starvation. I decided that the pork would be too fat for my starved stomach. I ate the sugar. I remembered that in normal times sugar was used only for tea and cakes. Now I ate spoonfuls of sugar. This strengthened me, and maybe even save my life. It was a wonderful feeling which I hadn’t experienced for almost five years. I could now eat as much as I liked. I knew I would never be hungry again. We were told that German soldiers were in hiding in the vicinity. They tried to remain hidden until nightfall and then escaped under the cover of darkness. We were asked to help the Russians comb the area and find the Germans. This we were more than happy to do. We were supposed to move in a scattered line into a wooded area with which we were not familiar. We had no idea whether it was a large forest or just a few acres of trees. I soon lost sight of my friends on the left and right and felt quite lonely in these unfamiliar surroundings. Suddenly, from behind the trees a tall, fat German soldier appeared. I was terribly frightened. I had no arms. What if he decides to shoot me? Shall I die a few hours after being liberated? Fortunately, the German raised his hands and I saw that he was more frightened than I was. His whole body trembled, and he screamed like a madman: “Hitler kaput. Ich was kein Nazi! Hitler kaput. Ich war kein Nazi“ [Hitler is finished. I am not a Nazi]. Encouraged by his behavior, I took him to the road. Some of my fellow exprisoners appeared with “their” Germans. All of them tried to convince us very loudly and very nervously that they had never been Nazis. They had always hated Hitler. “Look, none of them was a Nazi. How, then, was it that the Nazi regime succeeded in holding out to this very day?”, said one of my friends. Those captured Nazi soldiers seemed to be more frightened of us than of the Russians. I thought I knew the reason. The Nazis knew that those who survived would tell the world the story of their barbarity. By afternoon I felt very tire and decided to go back to Theresienstadt, to the Hamburger Kaserne. I had no other place to go, and I also wanted to see how my friends who had remained there were feeling. As I walked along the road two uniformed men on bicycles came up to me. At first I didn’t recognize them. They were not wearing those German uniforms which unhappily we had gotten so familiar with during the past sad six years of war. Neither were they the uniforms of the Red Army soldiers of whom we now saw so many around us. It took me a few minutes to remember. These were the uniforms of the Polish Army which I hadn’t seen since that tragic September in 1939.  “Polish Army?” I asked the men. “Yes” was the answer. The two men introduced themselves. They were Jews, officers of the Polish Armored Corps, which had been fighting until the day before some 30 kilometers distant from this place. They had been told that there was a large concentration camp of Jewish prisoners in the vicinity and they were eager to see their liberated brothers. I told them I was one of them and volunteered to be their guide. We reached Theresienstadt and entered the first barrack. Here were women, mostly from Poland and Hungary, who, like myself, had come with the death marches from other concentration camps. They received the officers with indescribable joy. “Our brothers! Jewish officers! At last, at last, you are with us!” They shook hands, kissed each other and cried with joy. The officers asked many questions. They were eager to know where the women came from and all the details of their suffering in the ghettos and camps. One after the other, the women told their story of their unbelievable experiences under the Nazis. The stories were interrupted with expressions of great happiness: to be able to sit here, secure, with Jewish officers, to tell them their stories, knowing that Nazi Germany had come to an end and would never rise again. Suddenly, one of the women asked the officers, to tell their story in turn, the story of soldiers at war. And then almost immediately, the mood of all of us changed. The joyful atmosphere disappeared, giving way to grief and sorrow. The lieutenant told his story. He was from Vilna. He had been mobilized into the Red Army. He had fought in many battles and was wounded at Stalingrad. After recovering he was transferred to the newly-created Polish Army. Times changed for the better. They defeated the Germans and continually moved westward. To their great sorrow, in all the liberated places they found no Jews. The Germans had murdered an entire nation – our nation. After entering Poland, the lieutenant asked for a few days leave to visit his native Vilna. “There I found only my stones, the familiar buildings and streets with none of the people who used to live there before”, the officer told us. In liberated Lublin the only Jews were the soldiers in the Red and Polish armies, as well as some Jewish partisans who came out of the forest. On the long march through Poland, in the hundreds of towns and villages through which they passed, there were no more Jews. Everywhere there were only extermination sites and mass graves. Theresienstadt was the first place they had met so many Jews, thousands of Jews who had survived the Nazi rule. Thus, we learned that our fate was much worse than we had expected. Although we had seen a lot and experienced the worst, we still had hoped, still had dreamed. All those days we had struggled to survive, hour after hour, day after day, there had been no time to grasp the enormity of our tragedy. Now everything became clear. No longer were our families waiting for us; no homes to go back to. For us, the victory had come too late, much too late.

Source: The Anguish of Liberation- Testimonies from 1945, edited by Y, kleiman and N. Springer- Aharoni (Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1945), pp 13- 16

 

Nadejda Vasileva on the Inhuman Conditions in the Trains Transporting Thracian Jews

Nadejda Vasileva witnessed the Thracian Jews being transported under inhuman conditions from Thrace to Germany, through the port and Southern Station of Lom (Bulgaria), during March 1943. Though not Jewish herself, she sympathized with the Jews, and tried helping them on their terrible journey to the death-camps.

 

I started the distribution with the help of two or three gypsies, and filled the utensils that were handed to me through holes, or through a narrow window. But the smell was nauseating and the dirt awful. I did not have enough water to wash the dirty utensils. The gypsies were helping me and together with Mitko – today, an important Communist – they were stealing and filling their pockets. I saw them together with Mitko take 50 to 100 leva for a glass of water, a lemon or a boiled egg. Their pockets were full of banknotes. A railway worker came with a hose and let the water run so that the people could wash the utensils. I was wading in human excrement. The railway worker brought the hose when he saw, with tears in his eyes, that people were handing the same utensils in which they had left their excrement. “What can I do?” I asked myself. I heard a woman shout: “Please, Madam, give greetings to the local Rabbi from his daughter from Gumurdjina, and tell him that I don’t know where I am going”. Shouts were coming from another carriage – they did not have water or air. “Please. An old man died here three days ago. It is stinking and last night, a woman gave birth to a child, and we haven’t got any clothes to wrap it in!”

Source: Nadejda S. Vasileva, Recollections of the Catastrophe of the Thracian Jews, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 3, Jerusalem, 1959, pp. 298299

 

From the Testimony of Bernard Mayer on the Liquidation of the Ghetto, Poland, 1943

…By January, we had felt that this was probably the end and the symptoms were very simple. They started to come into the ghetto to remove our personal belongings and they would come in from house to house with trucks and they had some Jews helping them, the Jewish police. They would go around and they would remove everything we had. As a matter of fact, once they came to my mother’s house and she put everything in her bed and covered it. She thought that she would save it. And then she took her best coat and she put it on. When they came in and they saw her in the coat standing because she figured this way they will pick away the coat, so they ripped out the lining of the coat because they thought she hides something there, gold or whatever it is, and they left the coat on her, but all the lining was ripped out. Everything that was in the bed, they took everything away. They left only the most essential things like the bed and some pots and some dishes. The rest they would take everything out of the ghetto. And then my mother, on day, I knew…I tried to find a place with some gentiles and I went to a place. We all three sent to a place where the Germans had there their horses. They told us that in January the ghetto is going to be liquidated. The rumours started to go on that the ghetto is going to be liquidated.

Source: Yad Vashem Archives O.3-7605

 

From the Testimony of Alex Feuer about the Arrival and First Selection at Auschwitz

At the ripe old age of fifteen I arrived in Auschwitz, the infamous human extermination camp. We were pushed like cattle into freight train cars. After a five-day, unbelievable hard journey we arrived in Auschwitz. As we were being removed from the train our first view was SS men with guns and guard dogs. The SS guards told us to leave the little belongings we had on the ground and line up. Little did we know that at the time that we were about to be selected for life or for death. As I stood in line a stranger tapped me on the shoulders from behind and told me in Yiddish: “Little boy, stand on your feet. Stand on your toes when you come up to the German SS. Make yourself taller.” I stretched and strained, somehow knowing that my life depended upon the stranger’s advice. I was selected to work in a road gang while my parents and my younger brother were taken to the gas chambers. After they selected me for work we were taken near the showers. There we relinquished all our clothing and what little personal belongings we carried with us. We were all completely disrobed and had our hair shorn off. As I looked about I could see mountains and mountains of personal belongings such as eyeglasses, shoes, clothing of every description, and piles and piles of human hair. Now we were being led to the showers. Apprehension and fear was present among all since we had heard rumours that the showers were gas chambers. We were reluctant to enter and had to be pushed and shoved with force into the showers. To our amazement they were real showers. It was a miracle that our lives had been spared and we had survived this ordeal. We were then disinfected with some kind of chemicals and issued one set of striped work clothes. As we were being led away to the living quarters we could see smoke and flames rising out of the chimneys. The talk among us was disbelief of the horrors that were occurring. Words cannot describe or furnish anyone with any accurate picture of what went on there.

Source: Yad Vashem Archives O.3-8521

 

From the Testimony of Dora Love on the Conditions at Stutthof Concentration Camp

…then you walked out and they said: “Anziehen.” [get dressed] These were the striped horror clothes. If anybody had put dress with nails on the inside on you, that’s what it would have felt like. They scratched you to pieces. You didn’t have fat on you, at least I didn’t. It scratched and made my skin bleed. That’s what you put on. Over there is a row with what they called shoes. They were wooden soles with flat boots. Nobody cared what size you needed. You put those on and you went. All I kept looking for was where are the others – my sister and mother. That was my total worry. We walked out and obviously the shoes that I had were such that it took a lot of attention after the war, orthopedic gadgets and help to stretch the toes because the shoes had been too small.  We were first in a barrack together. Most of the barracks were a wooden stable. You’ve seen that, three people to a bunk. In the center there were four bunks. The horse blanket, the gray blankets that we called horseblankets were so rough. In any case, you got one to a bunk. You do me a favor and tell me how you share that, three people to a bunk. Nobody knew how to share it. The number of inmates decreased. People died like flies. We were again faced with this lack of water, lack of lavatories. There were latrines right over in the fields. They were just holes in the ground. You couldn’t see in the dark. You were afraid to fall into them. It was slippery especially when the winter came and it all froze over. You got a mug of coffee. I always say this black water that was called coffee and after that you saved some to wash yourself. You have very good intentions at first. You really think you are going to rinse your mouth. Dental hygiene is very important. It wasn’t then because you actually need the fluid in your body. So cleanliness goes to hell. Food you haven’t got that would sustain you. After the first couple of days, you were being lined up to go to work or by that time, some looked worse again and so the number got smaller. It was again right, left, right, left… Interviewer: You knew already about gas at that time?

Dora Love: At Stutthof? Interviewer: Yes. Dora Love: Stutthof was a total extermination camp.

Source: Yad Vashem Archives 0.3-7504

 

From the Testimony of Max Dreimer about Forced Labor at Sachousen Concentration Camp

… Then we were divided. I was lucky, more or less. I was put into a job – it’s called “klinckerwerke”, which we marched out about an hour going and an hour coming. “Klinckerwerke” means, this is where they manufactured bricks. Bricks was their main item of manufacturing. Many other things, smaller stuff, carpentry and things like that. At least I was out from punishment for the daytime from the camp, but on the job itself we had some miserable, what they called “kapos”, which were inmates and either they wanted to get ahead or be released or they initiative..(?) because they had been in the camps for ten, twenty years or jails. They just let it out to others or they just were plain Jews-hater. So anyhow, you were glad to be out of the camp for a full day. And in 1941, I had an accident. I fell off a little mountain and this is a mountain where about thirty kilometers away there was a mine where they collected the clay out of the mines and bring it back into the factory and by trains, and then were put into oven and baked and made bricks out of it. And when it’s rain, came in and brought about twenty or thirty boxcars of this clay and we shovelled it onto a mountain. I fell down the mountain, I broke my leg and I don’t know why I survived that six weeks in the hospital with a broken leg because their policy was, they shouldn’t feed anybody more than a week if he’s not able to produce some kind of a labour. So I survived this accident and in 1942, one morning we were called out, the order came we do not go out to work today, we stay inside. Maybe an hour or two later we were called out of the barracks and we were told that we’re being brought to Poland. Not mentioned the word of Auschwitz. Just to Poland and to working camps. And believe it or not, some of our guys started making a line (?) and we thought the towers which were on each corner, the machine guns are going to start any minute because there was nobody on that place, so-called “appellplatz”, only we. And I think the “lagerfhrer” must have had a soft day this day and he told us, “You know, if I wanted to, I just call up there and there goes the gun, but you better start behaving, otherwise I will do that.” We tried to find out where we’re going to go and there was no answer. They left about…at this time we were maybe, three barracks, maybe a thousand or so. They picked out twenty-some guys which were watchmakers, tool and die makers – they kept them behind. They did not go along with us. Later, after the liberation, I found out that they were making phony American money and foreign moneys – has a name for it, I forgot. So anyhow, we marched out of this camp to a train station and we got pushed into animal boxcars. Still there was no way of knowing where we are going to go, and after everybody was in, we just kept going, the train pulled on, heavily with guards on us. And after several days – there was no bathroom facilities at all – they opened the doors. We could peek out just like an animal. There was a slot you could see through maybe. You did have some little opening way up on the top there with bars, but there was no way of reaching to look at it. We came to Auschwitz.

Source: Yad Vashem Archives 0.3- 9557