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After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring
Winner
2015 National Jewish Book Award; Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir
This memoir is a fascinating portrait of mother and child who miraculously survive two concentration camps, then, after the war, battle demons of the past, societal rejection, disbelief, and invalidation as they struggle to reenter the world of the living. It is the tale of how one newly takes on the world, having lived in the midst of corpses strewn about in the scores of thousands, and how one can possibly resume life in the aftermath of such experiences. It is the story of the child who decides, upon growing up, that the only career that makes sense for him in light of these years of horror is to become someone sensitive to the deepest flaws of humanity, a teacher of God’s role in history amidst the traditions that attempt to understand it—and to become a rabbi. Readers will not emerge unscathed from this searing work, written by a distinguished, Boston-based rabbi and academic.
2015 National Jewish Book Award; Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir
This memoir is a fascinating portrait of mother and child who miraculously survive two concentration camps, then, after the war, battle demons of the past, societal rejection, disbelief, and invalidation as they struggle to reenter the world of the living. It is the tale of how one newly takes on the world, having lived in the midst of corpses strewn about in the scores of thousands, and how one can possibly resume life in the aftermath of such experiences. It is the story of the child who decides, upon growing up, that the only career that makes sense for him in light of these years of horror is to become someone sensitive to the deepest flaws of humanity, a teacher of God’s role in history amidst the traditions that attempt to understand it—and to become a rabbi. Readers will not emerge unscathed from this searing work, written by a distinguished, Boston-based rabbi and academic.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2014
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December 6, 2015
Joseph Polak is from the same nation as Anne Frank, The Netherlands. As Jewish children, they are taken captive by Nazi Germany, deported to Westerbork and then to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne dies from typhus. Joseph has the rest of his life to make sense of the Holocaust, to find a way to re-connect with a God painfully absent from the destruction of his people.
Joseph is an infant when he and his parents are forced onto Nazi train transports and sent to Westerbork. Joseph’s father dies shortly after their next train transport. He and his mother face years of starvation, brutality, and deplorable conditions. They, along with other Jews, await final transport to a Nazi death camp.
At Westerbork, the family discovers that Nazi Germany has forced committees of Jews to create transport lists to carry other Jews to the death camps. These committee Jews were forced to decide whether to send their own children or to send the children of other families to their deaths. The author also notes that while about 50% of the Jews in Germany, France, Belgium, and other Western European countries perished under Nazi control, about 90% of Dutch Jews died.
After the war, the government of the Netherlands forced surviving Jews to prove that they were parents of children who survived in a different location. These starved, sick, beaten Jews escaped without a scrap of clothing, let alone birth documents for their children.
After a harrowing, heartbreaking manhunt across Europe to find their children, parents discover that the Dutch government is forcing the children to remain in orphanages or with foster parents. Arriving at their homes, the Jewish survivors find neighbors or strangers living there who refuse to leave. In most cases, it was these very neighbors who turned in the Jews to the Gestapo two or three years earlier.
Joseph’s earliest memories of Bergen-Belsen include playing hide and seek among mountains of skeletal bodies. The constantly increasing piles of corpses, stacked like so much cord wood, are ubiquitous, like the pervasive stench of death and the endless agony of starvation. These are among Joseph’s earliest memories. Happier times in The Hague are gone, replaced by sickness and death.
After liberation, Joseph and his mother struggle to reenter the world, battling serious physical ailments and a society that does not want to hear or think about Nazi concentration camps survivors. After living among corpses and terror, they must quietly push back against the demons of their past, while the reanimation of those horrific memories await every night in their sleep.
Many Holocaust survivors leave God far behind. They ask what deity could allow his “chosen people” to be so dehumanized, disparaged, degraded. What sort of God allows Nazis to force His devout people to watch as their loved ones are killed, before they are also murdered? What God allows His people to be starved, raped, brutalized, and forced into gas chambers by the millions, without preventing or stopping it? After the horror, Joseph decides to pursue a career in which he might find answers for the Holocaust—a way to comprehend how and why people can behave so terribly.
Joseph also seeks to understand God’s role in the terror and genocide. So he becomes a rabbi. Joseph eventually realizes that he will be one of the last Holocaust survivors, one of the final firsthand witnesses to the horror. But to do so, he must find a way to recall those long-ago events that so terribly impact his life and his mother’s life. Not only is Joseph attempting to recall specific events that took place when he was a toddler, he is also struggling to define something virtually without description; to recall events that defy sanity.
Joseph Polak is an outstanding writer. His memoir is an essential contribution to Holocaust literature. In unadorned language, Polak presents the story of a young boy who witnesses terror and horrific circumstance that would be difficult for anyone to recall and describe. In this brief volume of work, Polak describes how he and his mother suffered, but also how he eventually becomes a rabbi, teaching the Torah to his progeny. Having lived for years among rotting corpses, having survived that which is not survivable, he returns to God and finds a pathway to understanding.
This fast-paced, brief memoir reads like a novel. It is haunting and melancholic, unforgettable and poignant. Polak is a wonderful writer, proffering a terrifying truth while speculating about the wisdom of the Torah and the apparent absence of God. He describes physical and spiritual survival at its most visceral level. He is instinctive, instructive, and intuitive. Beyond a physical deprivation and suffering that few humans can endure, Polak teaches us about the cognitive and spiritual toll that survival demands—essential ingredients for making sense of that which defies understanding.
Charles S. Weinblatt was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1952. He is a retired university administrator. Mr. Weinblatt is the author of published fiction and nonfiction. His biography appears in the Marquis Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education, and Wikipedia.
Joseph is an infant when he and his parents are forced onto Nazi train transports and sent to Westerbork. Joseph’s father dies shortly after their next train transport. He and his mother face years of starvation, brutality, and deplorable conditions. They, along with other Jews, await final transport to a Nazi death camp.
At Westerbork, the family discovers that Nazi Germany has forced committees of Jews to create transport lists to carry other Jews to the death camps. These committee Jews were forced to decide whether to send their own children or to send the children of other families to their deaths. The author also notes that while about 50% of the Jews in Germany, France, Belgium, and other Western European countries perished under Nazi control, about 90% of Dutch Jews died.
After the war, the government of the Netherlands forced surviving Jews to prove that they were parents of children who survived in a different location. These starved, sick, beaten Jews escaped without a scrap of clothing, let alone birth documents for their children.
After a harrowing, heartbreaking manhunt across Europe to find their children, parents discover that the Dutch government is forcing the children to remain in orphanages or with foster parents. Arriving at their homes, the Jewish survivors find neighbors or strangers living there who refuse to leave. In most cases, it was these very neighbors who turned in the Jews to the Gestapo two or three years earlier.
Joseph’s earliest memories of Bergen-Belsen include playing hide and seek among mountains of skeletal bodies. The constantly increasing piles of corpses, stacked like so much cord wood, are ubiquitous, like the pervasive stench of death and the endless agony of starvation. These are among Joseph’s earliest memories. Happier times in The Hague are gone, replaced by sickness and death.
After liberation, Joseph and his mother struggle to reenter the world, battling serious physical ailments and a society that does not want to hear or think about Nazi concentration camps survivors. After living among corpses and terror, they must quietly push back against the demons of their past, while the reanimation of those horrific memories await every night in their sleep.
Many Holocaust survivors leave God far behind. They ask what deity could allow his “chosen people” to be so dehumanized, disparaged, degraded. What sort of God allows Nazis to force His devout people to watch as their loved ones are killed, before they are also murdered? What God allows His people to be starved, raped, brutalized, and forced into gas chambers by the millions, without preventing or stopping it? After the horror, Joseph decides to pursue a career in which he might find answers for the Holocaust—a way to comprehend how and why people can behave so terribly.
Joseph also seeks to understand God’s role in the terror and genocide. So he becomes a rabbi. Joseph eventually realizes that he will be one of the last Holocaust survivors, one of the final firsthand witnesses to the horror. But to do so, he must find a way to recall those long-ago events that so terribly impact his life and his mother’s life. Not only is Joseph attempting to recall specific events that took place when he was a toddler, he is also struggling to define something virtually without description; to recall events that defy sanity.
Joseph Polak is an outstanding writer. His memoir is an essential contribution to Holocaust literature. In unadorned language, Polak presents the story of a young boy who witnesses terror and horrific circumstance that would be difficult for anyone to recall and describe. In this brief volume of work, Polak describes how he and his mother suffered, but also how he eventually becomes a rabbi, teaching the Torah to his progeny. Having lived for years among rotting corpses, having survived that which is not survivable, he returns to God and finds a pathway to understanding.
This fast-paced, brief memoir reads like a novel. It is haunting and melancholic, unforgettable and poignant. Polak is a wonderful writer, proffering a terrifying truth while speculating about the wisdom of the Torah and the apparent absence of God. He describes physical and spiritual survival at its most visceral level. He is instinctive, instructive, and intuitive. Beyond a physical deprivation and suffering that few humans can endure, Polak teaches us about the cognitive and spiritual toll that survival demands—essential ingredients for making sense of that which defies understanding.
Charles S. Weinblatt was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1952. He is a retired university administrator. Mr. Weinblatt is the author of published fiction and nonfiction. His biography appears in the Marquis Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education, and Wikipedia.
September 17, 2016
Early childhood development specialists emphasize the importance of hav-ing a nurturing and stable environment for infants and toddlers. That’s when the foundations of a child’s personality are formed and influence the rest of their life. Studies have shown that many of the children that grew up in the Communist Romanian orphanages during the 1980’s, who lived in deplorable conditions and were deprived of love, attention, adequate sanitary facilities and healthy food, developed personality deficiencies that marred their lives. Many felt emotionally detached from others and could barely communicate, even as adults.
What about the youngest children of the Holocaust, growing up in the most hellish circumstances imaginable? Most, of course, perished in the fires of the crematoria, being the first to be selected for immediate death. The few so-called “lucky” child survivors recall bits and pieces of might have been an even worse fate. Rabbi Joseph Polak’s recent memoir, After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring (New York, Urim Publications, 2015), winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award, depicts surviving as a toddler in environments whose only certainties were suffering, squalor, misery and death.
Joseph Polak was born on October 16, 1942, in a Jewish family in Ger-man-occupied Netherlands. The Dutch Nazis were ready to snatch him from normal life and send his entire family to the transit camp Westerbork even before he was born. His mother recalled the loud pounding on the door in the middle of the night by “the Police” when she was nine months pregnant with Joseph. She courageously warded off the Dutch Nazis by pointing out the advance state of her pregnancy, but they didn’t stay away for long. A year later, on September 29, 1943, they returned. The Polak family was sent to Westerbork for about two years, joining 100,000 other Jews who would be deported to “the East”.
Being so young, Joseph retained only hazy traces of memory of the transit camp, enhanced by his mother’s subsequent descriptions: its crowded, sweaty, uncomfortable conditions; the state of anxiety of so many uprooted, displaced people deprived of their roots, assets, professions, families and identities while awaiting to be sent to what they rightly suspected would be a miserable place. The Dutch government set up Camp Westerbork in the fall of 1939 for Jewish refugees who were not Dutch citizens and entered the country illegally. Follow-ing the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, the camp grew and became, between 1942 to 1944, a transit camp for all Dutch Jews on their way to Nazi concentration camps. While the camp organizers, who were also Jewish, attempt-ed to create some semblance of normalcy through various routines and activi-ties—which included entertaining diversions such as plays and musical shows—inmates were obsessed with the weekly lists of candidates for deportation to the East. Staying versus leaving Westerbork could mean the difference between life and death. But eventually almost everyone had to leave.
Joseph and his parents were sent to Bergen-Belsen on February 1, 1944, during a period of time when the camp was receiving a large intake of prisoners from Eastern camps evacuated by the Germans faced with the Soviet army’s ad-vance. Grossly overcrowded and without sufficient food and medical supplies or sanitation facilities for its growing population, as we’ve previously noted, in its last year Bergen-Belsen became a breeding ground for typhus, dysentery, typhoid fever, tuberculosis and death. Starving and deprived of adequate care, with a mother who had become a shadow of her former self and weighed only 50 pounds, little Joseph wandered around hungry and in rags, playing among the miles of corpses lined up at Bergen-Belsen. The narrator depicts, vividly, the overpowering stench of feces and decomposing bodies. Ultimately, his family was “lucky” again. On April 9, 1945 they were sent along with 2500 other Jews to Theresienstadt. On the way, they were liberated by the Soviet Army in Troebitz, a little village of 700 people in East Germany. Despite being “freed,” his parents no longer had the strength to survive. His father passed away in May, while his mother fell gravely ill. Joseph was taken by the Dutch authorities and placed in the care of another Dutch-Jewish family.
Joseph doesn’t have many memories of this brief period. He only recalls a fleeting impression of security offered by his adoptive father. The young boy held on tightly to his jacket as they rode together on a scooter, enjoying the sights and the breeze. Their destination would be a new shock for little Joseph: a white hos-pital bed where he’s reunited with a mother that he can no longer bond with or even recognize. It takes time for mother and child to begin to heal, to grow to-gether again, in the more livable conditions offered by a center for Jewish survi-vors in The Hague, where they spend the next three years, from 1945 to 1948. Later, his mother tells Joseph how she managed to put the atrocious conditions of the concentration camp momentarily out of her mind by imagining that she was at her favorite department store, far removed from the squalor of Bergen-Belsen. Then she takes him to that store again. Flashes of memory spark in the child’s mind as he perceives, with a sense of wonder and incomprehensible nostalgia for the sordid yet familiar past, the contrast between the luxurious goods in front of his eyes and the misery of his first years of life. In December 1948, mother and child sail to New York together. They end up living with her family in Montreal.
It took Rabbi Joseph Polak decades to return to his early childhood past, which he only vaguely recalls in bits and pieces, and which, for a long time, he wanted to forget. When he was fifty years old, ten years after his mother had passed away, he returned to Bergen-Belsen after a trip to Paris, where he lectured on Jewish law. He was ready, by then, not only to remember his family’s experi-ences of the Holocaust, but also to preserve and share them with others. It oc-curred to him that as even the child survivors of the Holocaust age and pass away, there is a risk that their memories will disappear along with them. Reading After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring will do more than remind readers of the Holo-caust; it will help us empathize with the victims by putting us in those circum-stances through different narrative means.
First of all, After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring is a beautifully written, evocative memoir. In parts, it’s also a theosophical dialogue, staging discussions between the narrator and the Angel of Death on the timeless question of theodicy: how can an omnipotent and omniscient God allow such horrific suffering of chil-dren, of innocents? I’m not sure that this question is answered in any definitive way by the text, but readers can find some solace in the evolution of the author’s life. Rabbi Joseph Polak used his good fortune of being one of the few very young child Holocaust survivors to fill the void of nihilism left by the trauma of his past and make something worthwhile and redeeming of his life. Instead of turning his back upon humanity for what so many did to their fellow human be-ings, he reached out to help and heal others, both as a Rabbi and as a writer.
This narrative is also an educational text. It makes pedagogical bridges with new generations of readers. Where relevant, Rabbi Polak offers helpful his-torical background and places the Dutch Holocaust in proper perspective. Middle school and high school students, exposed to Anne Frank’s diary and little else about the Holocaust in the Netherlands, may perceive Dutch citizens of the era as heroes who risked their lives to hide Jews from the Nazis. While many certainly did, as Polak points out, the Netherlands was at the same time a country that rounded up Jews with remarkable zeal and efficiency. Between the summer of 1942 and the fall of 1944, the Dutch collaborators sent over 100,000 Jews, or 75 percent of the country’s Jewish citizens, to concentration camps. Only 5,200 among them survived. The odds were better for those who went into hiding with the aid of the Dutch underground or helpful non-Jewish friends. Of the 30,000 Jews who hid from the Nazis, two thirds survived.
Last but not least, After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring has a beautiful, authentic and often lyrical style. At times, it reminded me of Marguerite Duras’ writing: vivid yet also vaguely suggestive; drawing out the philosophical implica-tions of sensory descriptions; versatile in the way it reaches out to its readers. Memoir, philosophical and religious treatise, oratory, history lesson and literary text: you will find all this and more in Joseph Polak’s After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring.
February 11, 2020
ust finished After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring by Joseph Polak, an eminent teacher and Rabbi. Rabbi Polak born in 1942 in the Bergen-Belsen death camp is thought to be one of the youngest of the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors alive today. The book is a haunting account of seeing what no child should see. His ability to overcome these horrible experiences and yet maintain his humanity and decency is amazing. A short book but a very moving experience.
August 15, 2018
I have never read a book on the Holocaust such as this. The pain and suffering the Jewish people went through after the war was immense. This book captures that. I had never thought of how hard it was for the survivors to rebuild their lives after they were liberated. Life didn’t just go on as before. This is a must read.
May 12, 2017
Rabbi Polak survived Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen as an infant. This is unheard-of; the infants were the least likely to survive. An unfathomable story within an unfathomable scenario, which shows that the Holocaust did not end when World War II ended.
May 15, 2023
This is a small book with significant thoughts. Not your usual memoir. Wrestling with the reality and impact of the Holocaust- his wrestling with the reaction that because he was so young, it didn't impact him as it did with older survivors. And yet, of course, it did.
February 5, 2020
Heart rendering yet hopeful.
December 18, 2020
Read it in one go. Important read.
March 8, 2017
This book is the first I've read about the Holocaust that is by an author who was an infant through toddler age in the concentration camps. While even his earliest memories are vague and a bit blurry, he has the perspective of others who told him stories from his time there. More importantly he has the experience of having to deal with the feelings of humiliation and shame he picked up from his mother and father as well as others who knew him in the camps and after. He describes the aftermath once the war ended and how there was still a lot of residual anti-Semitism when Jews tried to return to their homes and were chased out by those who took over their properties. Many then immigrated to Israel, Canada, and the US. The author gives us a glimpse inside his mind and what he had to overcome to try to resume a somewhat normal life. Hard to put down. Great insight for anyone interested in WWII and the Holocaust.
January 10, 2015
So moved, saddened and inspired by the memoirs, the information gathered, the presentation of events, and the rich spiritual overtones. A difficult undertaking to bring deep dark painful memories to light after having lived "without" them so to speak.
October 10, 2015
I had to keep stopping every few lines to absorb the pain before I could keep reading. An important read. Heartbreaking. As long as we and our children and our children's children remember it is never over.
February 8, 2015
poignant, painful, exquisitely written and deeply psychological. Every Holocaust survivor has a world of stories, but to listen to someone who was a child at the time reconstruct his memories is unique and breathtaking, often in the literal sense of the word.
August 21, 2016
This is one of the occasions where the words "really liked it" that appeared when I clicked on 4 stars gave me pause... I deeply appreciated the book, but I don't think that "like" is the appropriate word.
April 3, 2016
An amazing gut wrenching book with facts and emotions important to read!
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March 30, 2015Review by Eleanor Ehrenkranz for the Jewish Book Council.
July 26, 2015
Excellent!
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews