Spiritual Resistance in Auschwitz

good afternoon and welcome to today's program with Professor Judith bammel Schwartz who has traveled from Israel to be with us today i'm ari goldstein manager of special projects at the Museum of Jewish heritage a living memorial to the Holocaust we're here today to talk about Auschwitz which was the largest in a vast network of Nazi concentration labor and extermination camps and the subject of the groundbreaking exhibition ash wits not long ago not far away which is on view at the Museum through August 2020 the scholar Michael Baron Baum has beautifully said that Auschwitz is quote was quote a place where everything has been taken away where everything and everyone has been lost home and family mother and father brothers and sisters sons and daughters everything one owned everyone one loved all freedoms were lost he continues except for the freedom to affirm the human spirit except for the freedom not to consent not to give in it is these intimate essential freedoms the claiming of which we think of as spiritual resistance to which today's program is dedicated and about which profess hold that Professor Bauman shorts will lecture professor Bausch warts is with us today we're in a few different hats personally she is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and the extraordinary artifacts to your left about which she will tell us are from her family professionally she is an acclaimed Holocaust scholar and the director of the Arnold & Leona Fink ler Institute of Holocaust research at bar-ilan University in Israel she is also a good friend of the museum and spoke with us very powerfully in September so we're glad to have her back we're deeply grateful that professor Bauman Schwartz is with us today to share the stories of spiritual resistance at Auschwitz that have shaped her family animated our exhibition and inspired people around the world without further ado thank you very much I I feel terrible sitting but I broke my toe on Friday so I'm a little bit stuck I'll like get up so I can see you all hi sit down again so you'll forgive me I'm great with try this because I really would like to see you I'm amazed that so many people actually came to hear me speak and I'm thrilled that you're here and grateful that you're here friends family people who are interested in the topic so I thank you all for coming and I'd like to start with a story professor YouTube our our most famous Holocaust scholar in Israel has always said to us to be a good historian you have to tell a good story so we're gonna start with a story the story takes place on Hanukkah in Auschwitz what's known as ash which three or Ash woods Monowitz has another name outwits buna which is how I'm going to refer to it December 3rd 1941 a young man by the name of Bernard or in Yiddish Boris Mirza was deported to Auschwitz just a month before he came from Antwerp he was a youth group leader twenty-two years old very religious his father was the chief show hit the chief slaughter of one of the Jewish communities in Antwerp he had started working a little bit in diamonds and she was mostly a youth group leader he had a bunch of young men who were sixteen seventeen years old that he was their counselor and when they were deported he didn't have to be but he went with his boys and he gets salads and now it's a month afterwards Annie's in Hanukah and the world is falling apart for him he kept the diary in his head as he used to like to tell me and after the war he wrote it down and it was made into a book about 20 years ago so I translated something that he wrote there I'm gonna quote from it December 3rd 1941 he can say it better than I could paraphrase it more than a month in buna that is now it's 3 was we are building I am lying on my wooden pallet on the third tier up near the blocks roof in the middle of the night a light tap and I wake up during the past month I've barely slept everything seemed surrealistic absurd strange impossible I dream with my eyes open maybe everything is a hallucination it can't be real I see someone motioning to me with the Shh and telling me to climb down I did so and followed him as if in a dream he took me into the partitioned off area shared by the elite of the block the functionaries behind the partition I see two tiny stumps of candles and a small towel the man pointed to me to put the towel on my head and wash my hands I realized that he had woken me up in order to like Hanukkah candles on the second day of Hanukkah I felt like I was dreaming it was so far removed from reality I recited the blessing and lit the two stubs which he almost immediately blew out and motioned to me to return to my wooden pallet afterwards I found out that the day before one of my youngsters had told him that his counselor was here and it would surely give him such tremendous pleasure if he could like Hanukkah candles it gave me such hope even for a minute usually when we have Holocaust testimony we have the testimony of the person and we never had the other side of the story this is one of the few cases where I can bring you the other side of the story what the functionary who brought him in to light the candles thought clinic in 1942 the first holiday after I reached out streets was Hanukkah the camp was new the supervision at night was lacks and so a few of us retreated to the sleeping Hall in the rear and in a corner we lived Chanukah candles the candles came from polish workers with whom we had worked in the factory and who understood that this is for us like Christmas when they also use candles so they traded us some candles for food portions bread or something else I remember it was night I said a few comforting words to the small group of people on Hanukkah but by the next night there was too much supervision to even do such a thing even for a functionary it could cost us our lives to get together as a group but I still obtained a few candles by trading food for them and then I heard of another religious prisoner I tried to bring him in to light candles as well even though he had to blow them out almost really I knew that such moments were precious they reminded us of who we were and that although the Nazis treated us as slaves in our hearts we would always remain freemen the reason that I have the second testimony is that the functionary was my father and that baurel Mirza was one of his closest friends after the war so we have a picture from both sides that gives us an idea of what spiritual resistance in Auschwitz was like this is not going to work standing on one foot and see if this works if I sit forgive me I have to see let's do a couple of definitions so we get a framework spiritual resistance in Auschwitz we're gonna start with the easiest word Alex what is Auschwitz now it says a camp divided into three basic camps there's outfits one called ascension the former Polish army barracks that the Nazis turned into first the concentration camp and then into a death camp it was built in 1940 it housed at most somewhere between 15 to 20 thousand prisoners the history of the camp you have better down the block you can see the exhibit it'll tell you much more than I will here I'm just giving you as I said a framework the second camp is Auschwitz to Birkenau gingka the German name was built in 1941 in 1944 it housed approximately 90,000 prisoners and in that year it had about 90 subcamps the largest of which was outwits 3 which is where this story took place that was built in 1942 as Marisol says we are building the camp my father was also one of the first people who built it before he was told that he would be appointed forced to be a functionary there actually it had about 10,000 prisoners at any one time so now we know what Alice is let's try the second word in the title resistance resistance is defined as the refusal to accept or comply with something the attempt to prevent something by action or by argument that's pretty straightforward then we get to the third word spiritual spiritual is already more difficult if we're going to take a straight definition then out of the dictionary it's relating to religious or religion or religion or religious beliefs relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things why did I say that the difficult because just a few weeks ago I was reading a testimony of a young survivor who came out of Teresa's ghetto and she writes there we talk about spiritual resistance what is spiritual spiritual resistance can be having a concert except there's a problem my mother was lying dying on her pallet while three minutes walk away other prisoners were having a concert they were being spiritually raised as she was dying so it wasn't spiritual resistance for her that's for sure I therefore would prefer today to talk about the religious definition not the cultural definition because spiritual resistance can also be maintaining a school and it can be having a concert and it can be holding a play and I'm not taking away anything from that definition that is indeed a definition of spiritual resistance here I'm really limiting myself to religious spiritual resistance in Auschwitz but it's not limiting because it's something that affects many people in Auschwitz of all religions and we're going to be speaking about all of that let's talk about how we're going to divide up this tremendous tremendous amount of stories and material that we have somebody once described very well how we cut up blocks of time life they said progresses simultaneously on two tracks one is the linear' when something starts and when something ends think of it as a pole something that doesn't move and the second is the spiral that goes around it those are the years so you've got from when somebody comes into the camp until either he or she dies or is liberated and you have the cycle of the year starting with the cycle of the day after that the cycle the week after that the cycle of the year did they survive more than a year the cycle of the years so we're going to start with the linear side of it and the things that affected people on a daily basis what affects people who are looking for spiritual belonging or spiritual comfort on the most frequent scale prayer prayer is something that happens every single day for a believing person and if you're going to do it ritualized and if you're talking about Jews then you're talking about praying three times a day this was the first thing that a prisoner a Jewish prisoner who was a believing person who came into a concentration or an extermination camp II at Auschwitz or be at any other camp this was the first thing that happened to them they looked up and they said oh it's time for the morning prayer afternoon for our evening prayer and then what happens my father was incarcerated in the Nazi camp of bul involved in 1939 he spent the entire period of World War Two in Nazi camps he used to say to me don't ever ask me about a ghetto I don't know what it was I was never there I was in bull involvement in Auschwitz and in bowling balls from the first day of the war to the last day of the war and I once asked him about prayer and he told me the following story I'm quoting from a book I wrote about him we arrived in a big hall where we were received by an officer of the SS who greeted us by saying you should know that this is your last station from here no one will come out alive the best thing that you can do is to hang yourself now we gave up all our clothes and all of our possessions which for me included my Tolleson villain we got concentration camp prisoners clothing and we were sent to various blocks as the hour was already late in the day I was staying at the place which was assigned to me near the window and I began dominating men praying the afternoon prayer the supervising Steuben Dean's came up to me and immediately gave me a hearty slap in the face and threw out my cap and said one of the first things you should know you're not in a synagogue and forget all about this nonsense and yet despite the fact that this was the reception that they got people continued to pray Jews continue to pray when they could pray even group of course if they would be caught it would be their lives they did it we have stories of the Nazi group meaning Jews that were forced by the Nazis to take care of the almost dead bodies dead bodies burning the bodies in Auschwitz they were known as the Thunder commando the special commando and one of the people in the Thunder commando wrote secret notes which were buried that were found after the war in which he writes every day at the end of the day we get together and we say Kaddish for all the victims that we had to take care of that we were forced to care for today all the people that we were forced to learn at least we knew that they would say Kaddish people would give a week's worth of food if they heard that somebody had a small sitter a small prayer book and they would be able to use it sometimes other prisoners of course took advantage non-jewish prisoners who could bring it into the camp took advantage of it and they Hindi's worth of bread you know it was ten days worth of bread not to have a sitter to use it to be able to use it for one prayer and there were people who did it it was that important to them my father told this story that I once asked him what about religious artifacts and he said somebody somebody in Auschwitz had half a pair of spillin it's called a pair because you put one part on your head and another pot on your arm and he said there was half a pair of filling and people would give up food rations in order to be able to go for five minutes they would have to walk to where it was they would end up not being able to eat their morning whatever a piece of bread because they wouldn't be there when it was handed out in order to fulfill the commandments of putting that feeling on their armor on their head this is how much it meant to people not only was there prayer but there are prayer objects one of the things that let's see if I can get this to work can I get this to work okay we'll start with this what we see here is known as a tell it's Catan in Yiddish attalos cooking it's a small Tallis it is a garment that religious Jewish men wear everyday under their clothing you can see it has four fringes and those fringes are like the fringes of a Tallis this specific one is the tallest cousin that my great grandfather the grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great grandfather and some of the people in the audience Nachman ensign Berg was wearing when he was pulled out of his house in neova in the Bukovina and he was sent to the the area known as Transnistria he was deported to there with his family they didn't give him time to take anything from the house that was the only religious object that he had on him as far as I've been able to check he didn't have tallest in Finland they wouldn't let him go back into the house they wouldn't even let him take a coat and that's the other thing that you see this was a floor rug that was on the entrance to the house and when they said you're they wouldn't let him go in to get anything he picked it up he wrapped it around his shoulders to keep warm and I've heard stories that because he didn't have a tallest he would specifically make sure that when he would pray when he would dava in the morning as if a memory he had his tallest cookie and he would put that around him while he was doffing that's how important this is what it's called the biography of objects you look at it and it's a formal part floor rug but it has such a tremendous story objects belong to people objects become living objects from inanimate objects they become religious objects they become imbued with memory they become imbued with meaning besides your daily prayer you have special blessings that you're supposed to make on various occasions one of them for example is called in Hebrew beer cartago male in Yiddish to bench Gouri mill it means that when you've gone through a life-threatening situation there's a special prayer that you say that you thank God from having delivered you from that and here's a story again that my father told me I remember someone returned to camp after work and said under normal circumstances he would have had to have oh yeah for the Torah and to bench Komal and that my father said to me to decide of course I would say under normal circumstances it wouldn't have happened at all this was not normal but what happened one of the very heavy barriers of construction fell a hair breath from his head and it broke to pieces but here what could we do so I said let's go all together a minyan and he said ok and he said the prayer of deliverance he benched Comal and everybody answered I mean amen these little things give people a sense of you can take away Who I am you can take away my name you can give me a number in Auschwitz but I'm not gonna be that number I'm gonna be a human being now this isn't part of the talk but it's something that I really have to explain to all of us because it took me time to understand that I grew up with all this stuff this I knew from ages ill I grew up with I always said to my father you were lucky you had a world before Hitler I grew up from day one with this and I once said saying how in the world did you survive five and a half years and he said to me we didn't know it was gonna be five and a half years every single day we thought tomorrow will be the deliverance and then the question is I said how did you keep all these things so you're gonna hear about it as the talk goes on why how and he said because when you look at it you know the end and you said it was crazy and therefore give up everything just survive we didn't know and maybe that was good he said because then we tried to maintain as much as we could of what we used to be in order to remain human beings part of its of remaining human beings is Jewish learning in other words the commandment to learn Torah what do you do when you don't have one you have to know it by heart it took me years to understand why as a little girl I would come home from school and my father would say to me what did you learn today and I would tell him and he would say and do you know what by heart you know why and he would make me sit down and learn absolutely everything by heart I'm one of the few people sitting here today that I'm sure I can recite the Yom Kippur prayers from beginning to end without a sitter still because he said to me you never know when you're not gonna have a sitter you have to know everything by heart so what people would do those people who knew things by heart they would be working on a work Commando and they would be reciting arguments from the Talmud and discussing it with each other if they had another religious workmate in order to just be someplace else and again I see triangles so we're gonna hear about that a little bit more later something else that affects you on the daily basis of the linear cos root religious Jews have dietary limitations so what did they do about that again I quote from my father who he said for the first three or four months when he was in concentration camp he didn't eat the food he would eat the bread and that was it until one day he fainted at work now my father never worked as a rabbi but he was a rabbi and he knew that he had reached the stage which is known as peacock nephesh where you are risking your life when does not risk one's life for cos truth there are three things in Jewish belief that you risk your life for idolatry murder if somebody tells you kill somebody or I kill you you're supposed to be killed instead and illicit intimate contact those are the three things Cosmo doesn't fall into that category and only then with a heavy heart he said did he start eating the soup and the piece of potato that he was given every day there were lots of Jews like that the one thing though that as many people as could who were believing kept is that when it came to Passover when it came to Pesach they would not eat their bread my father said that he did she follows a hebrew expression she do wrong and daily and how would you say that he did he went out of his way as much as possible to try to trade his bread for pieces of potatoes if he couldn't he just went hungry that day but you went through six paces in both involved in Auschwitz and he said a piece of bread never passed his lips but not only many many other religious Jewish men and women with whom I've spoken something that happens every week with Sabbath what do you do about the Sabbath here I spoke to women who have said comes the first Friday night and you're supposed to light candles what do you do they would look up at the stars and they would make the blessing for the Sabbath candles on the Stars that's what would keep them going I read just last week when I was preparing this talk about a group that I thought I knew everything about them I've written so much about them they were known as the thinner shaft the group of 1010 women who spent the war together there were all students and teachers in the death Jacob school network that's the Orthodox Jewish women's school network in the south of Poland and they were first in the plash of camp together afterwards they were in Auschwitz and they were liberated in bergen-belsen this story takes place when they were in Auschwitz they were in a work commando and to keep their spirits up on the Sabbath they would see Sabbath songs there are specific songs that you sing with melodies and week after week if they were trudging to work they would sing Sabbath songs once all of a sudden a driver with a big pot of food that food was taken to the Far Away commando so that people would eat their lunch there and be able to continue work he stopped by them he looked at them he took a little bit of the soup offensive something gave it to them and he said three words in Yiddish lukovitch Shabbos dish in honor of the holy Sabbath and he gave it to them he heard them sing and the next week again he stopped he heard them singing and he brought them soup and he said look over Shabbos dish it reminded them that they were human beings that they were not just cogs in this horrible Nazi nightmares bombers all described it it kept them alive now let me give you the parallel side of the coin when I said I'm speaking about spiritual resistance in Auschwitz notice I didn't say Jewish spiritual resistance in Auschwitz we have Christian spiritual resistance in Auschwitz to the same degree as we have Jewish spiritual resistance I have stories that I found about mass being offered in Auschwitz secretly and it's the same thing had these people been caught they would have been murdered here let me give you a testimony in Auschwitz I had an opportunity this is a with 16 I had an opportunity to participate in the Holy Mass it was celebrated in the Attic of block 16 such practices were absolutely secret and the information about them was shared only with absolutely trusted people when you knew for sure that someone was a Catholic another woman writes I remember that once I received the communion during my stay in block 11 I don't remember precisely when it was we received the hosts I have no idea how they got hosts in Auschwitz from one of the functionaries of block 11 I remembered that I stood by the door and I was the one who received from him an envelope with the host it turns out that the Catholic Church in the nearby town of oz Manship the priest there risked his life in order to smuggle hosts into Auschwitz so the Catholic prisoners could have mass I recall the figure of an inmate a Polish priest who held certain religious practices in the Monowitz buna camp that's the one that my father in burglars over and he listened to the inmates confessions he distributed communion he was a man of about 40 years old he was caught he was killed various groups all felt the same need to do something to strengthen themselves spiritually so that they would remember that they were human beings let's stop for a second with the stories and I always say my students okay I've told you a lot of stories let's put them into a framework let's analyze it a little bit sociologist Edward shills wrote a fabulous article about 50 years ago and it's called ritual and crisis and in it he asked the question why do people keep religious ritual of any kind if they're in a crisis situation if you're in a crisis situation you throw up your hands and you say forget it this isn't normal it's just survive but yet people keep to religious ritual he came up with four reasons he said ritual and religious ritual is a common response to danger it's a pattern of symbolic action that it renews your contract with the sacred it renews your contact with what you believe is correct everything around you is wrong you are doing something right and most of all people who are believing people of all kinds believe that religious ritual is a action against destructive and immoral forces because it sanctifies the participants ask anybody I participated in a religious ritual not only in Auschwitz but under the Nazis a secret religious ritual for which they were sacrificing their lives possibly and they will tell you how true it is it's sanctified them it made them feel that they were doing something that was so right now Judaism is a religion that doesn't have priests as opposed to Catholicism where your priest is your conduit to God to sever direct line but yet we have rabbis Jews have rabbis what purpose did rabbis or religious scholars fulfill in a place like our shirts well my father used to say that in a certain point when people realized that he was an Arab I they would come to him with questions and they wouldn't ask him what does one do under this situation or that situation and at the beginning he tried not to answer and he would say you do what you think is right and he wasn't the only one many many rabbis did that one of the most stark stories that we have took place in Auschwitz it took place in 1944 and the rabbi involved was a rabbi by the name of rabbi T V Hirsch meislish a group of 2,000 young men boys more likely in second I got to sit down with this foot they were rounded up and the idea was that we only want young men who can work and young men who can work have to be of a certain height they set a bar and they had all the boys go under the bar their head touched the bar they lived it's not they died and boys described it they put rocks in their shoes they went on tiptoe everything there were still two thousand boys who were caught and they were put into a closed area this was Rosh Hashanah 1944 and they knew they were going to death one of them had a father and the father went to Rabbi to be Hurst modulation and he said I have the possibility of ransoming my son my son was taken I have enough bread put away that I can save him I can take him out but I know that it means that the Nazi guards are gonna go and they're just gonna go and kidnap some other boy because the number is set it's got to be 2000 am i permitted to ransom him when I know that another boy is gonna be killed rabbi mindless wrote about it in his book and he said I debated I said do what you think is right where did I hear that before and he refused to answer and he said this man pressed him and pressed him and pressed him and pressed him until he finally said the strict letter of the law is that you're not supposed to do it and in the whole story and he swore I get goosebumps even when I tell it the most amazing line is the one that he writes after that and he said and this Jewish man this father went off satisfied in his heart that he was doing the right thing and he did not redeem his son because he knew it meant that somebody else would be killed in his stead now you asked me as a human being and you asked me as a mother what I think about this I think it's crazy you know this is the story about a Jewish mother if she has two kids she gives each one a kidney and she goes on dialysis this is not normal but Auschwitz was not normal nothing about it was normal and for some people who in a million years I'm not even talking about judging I can't even try to understand them for them knowing that they were doing the right thing is what kept them alive this takes me back to Edward Schultz who said that what do we say ritual is a contact with righteousness with doing the correct thing so yes this is what we have in terms of rabbis in Auschwitz once again I tried to make sense of it so I was looking for a theoretical framework and I came across something interesting a retired American Brigadier General named Thomas Colditz wrote a book called in extremist leadership in which he talks about the following he said what is leadership in life-threatening environments there are four conditions condition number one is you have to have rapid decision-making no time to start thinking well I'm gonna go check it in a book you don't have time for that yes no second the danger has to be equally shared by the leaders and by the followers this creates trust it's not that you're asking somebody who he's safe you're not you're both in the same danger the third is there has to be a no disparen see between your life and the Earth's you've got to be on the same level in the same place while this holds true in Auschwitz and the last thing is the followers demands a very high level of competence from their leaders under such situations there's no time for a leader to look inward and to contemplate he has a split second to move and in a chapter in this book which I actually took out and I read because it was so fascinating it's called retracing pathways in the shadow of death he was talking about first responders there by the way certainly not about Auschwitz but he said remember that successful outcome doesn't exist if you're talking about in extremist leadership there are one speaks of hurt healthy dead alive that was a story in Auschwitz hurt healthy did alive there were no other possibilities that's are linear and now we're gonna move on to the spiral the cycle of the Jewish year I know everybody's looking at the chauffeur and you're all waiting for me to tell this story and you're gonna wait because we're starting with um Kippur after Russia Sharna we'll get to the chauffeur what is Yom Kippur um Kippur is considered the holiest day of the Jewish year it's a fast day of 25 hours it's a day that you're not supposed to work it's a day that you were supposed to contemplate it is the day of judgment what happens on Yom Kippur in Auschwitz and in other camps well one of the things that I heard stories about is that there were commandos where the Nazis the SS Benton who were head of the commandos they had heard that it was Yom Kippur and of course they were going to play a trick on the Jews the day before they gave them no food the day after they would give them no food on Yom Kippur they would take out delicacies that nobody even saw in the war and they would say the prisoners go eat on your Yom Kippur and people didn't eat and people starved because nobody was going to tell them when they were gonna eat and when they weren't going to eat nobody was gonna take that away from them I quote from Boris morels diary September 1944 Yom Kippur he's working in a distant commando where my father who was one the work dispatchers in the camp had sent him and a whole bunch of other religious Jews so that there might be a chance that they could pray together in a minyan secretly because there was less supervision and the head of the commando was also a prisoner was a man by the name of stanislav bronec he was a non Jewish prisoner polish prisoner but he had spent two years in Palestine working with the philharmonic orchestra during the 1930s and he was also the head of the camp orchestra in buna so I quote from rehearsals diary t door my father suddenly shows up in my commando that was composed of about 30 people so it was not to work on this holy day Tito returns to brunette can says you've been to the Holy Land and you know what you mean Kippur is right so tonight is Yom Kippur I went out and said whoever doesn't want to each tomorrow stand outside the block by the wall and when we get back from work many decided to fast Roenick put a pot of soup aside with a double portion of margarine and marmalade for the 30 men who were praying I led the services and to raise our spirits veronik decided that he would take an accordion that he had been playing and he would accompany us he first started by playing Kol Nidre and then he ended up by playing mouse or which is a Hanukkah song but because he was the head of the camp orchestra he could play anything without his being suspicious and therefore we'd often Kol Nidre to the tune of mouths or in 1944 incredible unbelievable and they fasted and they worked and one of the things I asked a friend of mine who's 95 year old mother was also an Auschwitz survivor and I said I'm giving a talk in New York tell me religious things so she said ok I'll tell you three things I was never Mahal Shabbos I never just created the Sabbath the whole time that I was in Auschwitz I managed to find work I never ate on Yom Kippur those were the two things that she remembered and she said that kept me a human being the cycle of the Jewish year what comes after Yom Kippur the holiday of Sukkot is Tabernacles that's when you're supposed to go to a little booth that you have special prayers that you say and it reminds you of the journey of the Israelites when they left Egypt took us 1944 again from the diary of bombers all the sleeping pallets were built as three-tier wooden structures and once in a while we would have to take them outside to clean them that year it happened during suka s-- I stopped I looked at the upper planks and I had an idea I moved them to leave room between them to get a few blankets tied them around the sides and calls a few friends from nearby saying quick coming to the suka say the blessing they did within five minutes however we had taken the whole thing apart and we continued to clean the palace just as the guards walked by as if nothing had happened Chanukah you've already heard about Hanukkah I'll tell you another story one that didn't take place in Auschwitz but it's a place in book involved in 1939 right after the war had begun this is a story I have from my father a bunch of young boys came to him he was already an older prisoner he was in his late 30s and he had taken care of them and he they said to him it's gonna be Chanukah we've got to do something we have to remember and my father got this idea okay we're gonna have a Hanukkah party get this Hanukkah party boy involved right 1939 crazy so he went to the head of his block or was a communist by the name of Eric Heisler and he said I want to put together something for the prisoners it'll raise their spirits and we're gonna do it all together we're gonna share everything like good communists and I said to him no no no no no until he finally said okay but I don't know anything I'm not gonna be there if you get caught you're dead I have nothing to do with this and then my father told me the following we set up guards all around to give us a warning if anyone from the SS should enter the area we mobilized our people everyone was in some type of a workshop a commando in the camp one in carpentry the other in cleaning shoemakers tailors and in every one of these places were volunteers who prepared what was necessary for a Hanukkah celebration I wouldn't cut menorah candles paper towels as a tablecloth there has been from the food department a quantity of apples word has gone around that is a specific time after nightfall there will be a gathering but it should remain discreet and secret and so it happened the hall had been filled to the top and people were climbing on each other and through the window to get in the candle lighting had been preceded by a number of encouraging words which I said which with the background in the history of Hanukkah how we vanquished our enemies and it was a hope that in this darkness we would take courage and strengthen in order to survive this evil decree what I didn't quote is that he said to me afterwards and he looked through the window and he saw Eric Eisler the blockhead looking in through and shaking his head that he couldn't believe that a bunch of people that it was so important to them and he said religion okay I'm a communist how can you believe in this religion and my father said to him afterwards if it keeps us alive it's worth it and I said yes if it keeps you alive it's worth it the next holiday on the scale of the Year porin the holiday of delivery from deliverance from the the evil decrees of Haman in Persia both were so poor in 1944 I'm in the infirmary what does the person think about first of all what his mother used to cook and bake how his father would receive the note those are food portions that people send to each other his presence on Purim from half the city and Antwerp and we would distribute them among the poor lying there I thought I am in the deepest of Hell forgotten by everyone alone with no contact with anyone who cares about me nor by my family not even with people from my city everyone around me as a number I don't even know the names of most of the people around me and the only thing I can learn from a person's number is his seniority in the camp and the place where his transport came from I lie there and think and dream and suddenly I hear the door open and someone calls out his seventy two thousand seven hundred there the head of the block and the infirmary answers in the affirmative and the man says I am coming from the chief Work dispatcher I see a very young man about seventeen a Romanian climbing up to my pallet and in his hands I see a jar with something that looks like jam and a slice of bread he turns to me and says your friend Tito sends you leash lower my note that's what he said he obviously learned the words by heart until he could halfway say them I was in shock with tears in my eyes I told him tell Teitur thank you the young man left and I remain alone with the jar and the slice of bread there was little emotion left in Auschwitz and yet I still felt something two years in the camp how could it be that someone on this planet actually remembered me it's impossible to describe what it does to you when you were at the ends of hell and someone thinks about you in the middle of all this loneliness never-ending suffering where everyone worries only about themselves there's someone who notices that it's poor Impe knows that I know it is well and that it's important to me and he bothers to send me me schlock my note and what it must have cost him in terms of his own food my hunger got the best of me I ate it all and all day long it were as if I was in a different world it would be exaggerating to say that it gave me hope but I felt something more than a momentary awakening much more than the actual eating itself I knew that one should not give up hope that one is not alone and then if the almighty wants to show himself he has many ways and many messengers to help him with this task the next holiday as we said is Pesa passover and there we have stories of Jews who managed to get hold of flour in various parts of the camp and paid for it almost with their lives in order to bake little inedible masses that were more precious than gold and when somebody heard that there's ice it's my father did you ever have a matzah like this and he said no only at the end in 1945 the last pace of some book involved then we managed to bake matzah little tiny inedible black monsters that was the first time in five years that he had a piece of Martha and that my friends brings us to the next big holiday because the one that's in the middle cheveux the Pentecost there's nothing really special except eating dairy products that really take their story of the chauffeur because we're back to Rosh Hashanah so for those of you who maybe heard the story and want to hear it again or those who don't know the chauffeur that we have here is a very incredible religious object it's a chauffeur from Auschwitz a chauffeur that my father had the most incredible privilege of bringing out of Auschwitz although I'm not really sure what he thought of it at the time in 1944 we've already heard about Yom Kippur he had sent all of his friends including bursal to this distant commando on Rosh Hashanah in the hope they would be able to pray together and they came back and world came to him and said Castle you won't believe this somebody had a chauffeur they blue chauffeur and my father asked who it was and they told him and he went to that person he said please I hear you have a chauffeur can you give it to me for a minute so that this was really almost evening so that I could blow chauffer so that I can have the mitzvah and this prisoner was very scared my father never repeated a word twice he always used to say that our sages use the expression be very very humble and he's very very only when something is tremendously important and when he said to me about this prisoner he said he must have been very very scared fast forward four months January 1945 the death march prisoners 65,000 prisoners are leaving Auschwitz including the 10,000 from buna and as they're about to leave an emaciated prisoner and rags comes over to my father and thrusts this little bundle into his hands and says here it is this is the chauffeur take it you're strong you'll be able to make it on this March I'm gonna die here I'm not gonna make it out take this chauffeur out and tell them that we blue chauffeur in Auschwitz five minutes later my father with 10,000 other prisoners left the camp in rags in the snow in January walking for 24 hours people with illnesses with broken bones you know and I complain to somebody about my foot that I had broken on Friday and a friend of mine from bar-ilan University whose father was also in Pune wrote me something that I said this was the first time that I smiled since I got out of emergency he said you have a doctor you have a chair you have ice don't complain if this would have happened to either of our fathers they wouldn't have been able to make it to the morning upheld they would have been shot so just go on and give your talk I said yep yep exactly so my father and Bora Herzl and 10,000 other people walked for 24 hours in the snow my father was carrying the chauffeur and he managed to keep it with him after he was sent to the concentrate Camp of bull involved where he was liberated and he kept it with him when he founded kibbutz Ville involved that was the first pioneering kyboots of post-war survivors after the war and he had the privilege of bringing the first group of kibbutz people involved survivors to the Land of Israel at the time pre state Israel Palestine in September 1945 they reached there on the second day of Rosh Hashanah and on the first and the second day of Rosh Hashanah he blew this chauffeur for the first time for the survivors of both involved of Auschwitz and of many other camps and for many many years he had it with him actually kept it with him until he died all of his Odyssey so I inherited it afterwards and I used to ask him about it and he would say oh yeah it's from there and when I became a Holocaust researchers I said daddy tell me more now that's when he told me the story and we have it here and this is the chauffeur that I gave on long-term loan to the auschwitz-birkenau it's not long ago not far away along with a big plaque on the wall of my father's story afterwards when the wonderful Maggie read with in charge of this we'll be bringing it back all of you are welcome to go and see it and to read my father's story but here we're not finished what did it all mean what's this story here another one of the people was with my father in buna and afterwards in both involved was somebody whose name you all know Elie Wiesel and I quote what my father's late friend my late father's late friend Elie Wiesel wrote about religion I was lucky enough he writes about his experiences in Auschwitz if I may be forgiven that expression to have a former Rosh Yeshiva director of a rabbinical seminary of Galicia origin as a teammate in Auschwitz I can see us now carrying bags of cement or large stones pushing wheelbarrows filled with sand or mud all the while while we were studying a law of the Mishnah or a page of the Talmud my teammate knew it all by heart thanks to him we were able to escape we went to rabbi Hanina Ben dosa and we begged him to pray for us we accosted racial occasion another stage of the Talmud would he use his Herculean strength to free us we wandered the alleys of Pumbaa DITA and the hills of the Galilee where this all took place I listen to sages debating whether the Sh'ma Israel should be recited standing up or lying down in the morning my father and I would rise before the general wake-up call and go to a nearby block where someone had traded a dozen rations of bread for a pair of fillin we would strap them onto our left arm and Farhad quickly recite the ritual blessing and pass them on to the next person few dozen prisoners thereby sacrificed their sleep and sometimes the rations of coffee and bread to perform the Mitzvah the commandment to put on tefillin yes we practiced religion even in a death camp I said my prayers every single day on Saturday I humped my Sabbath's songs at work in part no doubt to please my father to show him that I was determined to remain a Jew even in this accursed Kingdom my doubts and my revolts gripped me only later why so much later my comrade and future friend primo Levy also borne a prisoner asked me that question how do they surmount these doubts in this revolt he refused to understand how I his former companion of Auschwitz three bounnam on Ovitz could still call himself a believer for he primo was not and did not want to be he had seen too much suffering not to rebel against any religion that sought to impose a meaning upon it I understood him and I asked him to try to understand me for I have seen too much suffering to break with the past and reject the heritage of those who had suffered we spent many hours arguing with little results even in Auschwitz we led different lives we were equally unwavering for we came from different new-year he was a chemist I was nothing at all the system needed him didn't need me he had influential friends who could help and protect him I had only my father I needed God primo did not where with God in Auschwitz that's the question that everybody asks themselves and one of the answers that was given was that in every single religious act in every act of belief in every act of we're in every act of trying to get a chauffeur and only god knows how that chauffeur even injured the camp God was there in that act now that sounds so spiritual and I'm gonna bring it down we can't all remain on that float Oh to something very mundane you see here I'm holding a bowl got some holes on the bottom metal bowl I'm telling the story 35 years ago 35 years ago I interviewed a couple from Tripoli North Africa Libya they had British citizenship because the man's great-great-great-great grandfather came from Gibraltar and so they kept inheriting British citizenship when the Nazis invaded North Africa in 1942 British citizens were rounded up and even though they were Libyan they were sent first to Italy to a labor camp first they were in a camp in Libya where they could live together as a couple and they had a child who was born their son with the son they were sent to Italy where they worked at a labor camp and she became pregnant there and they had a second son and then when Italy was taken over by the Germans in 1943 they together with a hundred other Jews from Libya were sent north to the German camp of bergen-belsen where they lived within a very special camp within a camp camp were divided up they were in the Libyan camp where once again they could live together and they had a son born in bergen-belsen now when you have a baby boy on the eighth day you circumcised him you have a bris and usually bring the baby out on a pillow except to add a pillow in bergen-belsen they had somebody one of the Jews there had been a mohel had been a circumciser he knew what to do and mrs. Gabor BIA she came to him and she said I want you to circumcise my son he's eight days old and they actually had a ceremony and she said she had taken this bowl with her when they were deported from Libya and she carried it through this it's hollien camp she'd be telling trends oh and she had it in bergen-belsen and she said she put the baby into the bowl and she brought him out can you imagine this with a bowl in which she held a baby in 1944 in bergen-belsen before he was put on somebody's lap so that he could be circumcised we filmed this this was 36 or 37 years ago that I interviewed her in Israel and at the end of the interview and we all had goose flesh by the end she her husband get up and they walk out and the polls they're right after I said this is BER beer you forgot your bowl and she looked at me and she said no Judy I didn't forget my bowl now it's your bowl it's done its work for me you keep it you show it to people you tell its story and now I have thank you very much [Applause] okay we're supposed to move into questions and answers if anybody has questions one second we have a moderator to do this not me sorry hello they know thank you very much it was very moving and very emotional I just want to make one comment I could understand all the rituals being done I mean I difficult to understand but I could imagine my wold imaginations being done in two camps and and together was the one thing that is beyond my imagination is blowing Schieffer because you can't stifle the sound exactly you can hide the light of the Chanukah you can I don't know make Matz's in secret whatever under the most stressful condition what do you do about this sound of the chauffeur I've heard several stories by people in different places who've told me about the stories like that who were there and I cannot grapple with the idea of how you blew Schieffer and get away with it - in my house - and by the grace of God my father used to always say that I'm sorry that I'm like this I would say to him how how did you survive and he would always say by the grace of God everything was positioned by the grace of God I don't know he would say that's I don't know I don't have an answer by the grace of God had happened that people were and this is not the only story it's the story that I came across as a Hungarian survivor from Auschwitz - from Birkenau who was interviewed and he said in Auschwitz we blew the shofar they had one there also and my friend who interviewed him she called the book in Auschwitz we blew the chauffeur this professor Ilana Rosen from ben-gurion University and she brings his testimony this is a Hungarian Jew by the name of high in Farkas and he writes we had a chauffeur it had come with us somebody smuggled it into the camp and we blew a chauffeur how did they get away with it I tell the stories I can't give that kind of answer other questions please first of all thank you for just that an enthralling lecture much appreciated anyway your story about your broken toe resonated with me a great deal because I am also a second-generation both my parents they were Polish Jews who survived the camps and I want to ask you you know in your attempt to complain about your ailment you would say well if you think that's bad imagine having a broken toe in the concentration camp so I know growing up for myself whenever I would complain about my trials and tribulations my parents played the ultimate trump card oh okay so I was never shoeing the crowd I was never able to articulate read you simply my difficulties and somebody thing you know they they paled in comparison to their difficulties so I need to know it you know at some level do you harbor any and the resentment might be a too strong of a word but has it bothered you through the years that a second generation you could never articulate things that bothered you because they paled in comparison to what your parents went through oh I'm smiling only because first I'm gonna read you third generation when I told one of my daughters who's still in Israel what happened she writes me how are you heard you hurt your foot feel better hope it's not fractured at the time we didn't know and then she writes as follows whoever blew the show for 75 years ago probably wasn't in great shape so maybe it's go rail that's the stage that he gave Veda grandfather the chauffeur because he couldn't Marsh but a free Jew in New York can take an uber to the Jewish Museum not just any taxi and uber that's what she writes me so yeah it goes on to the third generation I you you are you are as we say in Hebrew barging through an open door because one of the projects that I have in the Institute that I had that think ler Institute of Holocaust research at bar-ilan University it's called researchers remember it's the second generation group who decided on a profession that have to do with research and what are the things that we discuss is exactly that and this morning I was going back and forth with members of the group telling them what happened to me and without exception one said to me stop complaining and the other one wrote to me be grateful nobody's yelling at you Chanel and this is listening we're all a little crazy our parents were normal but we're a little bit nuts but it's a good kind of nuts that's it's important to remember proportions it wasn't that I couldn't complain and sure I heard the same thing I have a brother and sister who went through the Holocaust and when I was a kid it was when your brother and sister were your age they three dots and I could never complain did I feel that this made that he disenfranchised me just the opposite at least for me it gave me tremendous pride in that I come from what is one of my cousin's right to me this morning you come from strong stock I don't know I I think that it is an honor and a privilege to have to be alive because if Hitler would have done what he wanted to do I wouldn't be here neither would a lot of other people in this room right so yeah I'm complaining my foot hurts it hurts a heck of a lot right now I shouldn't list it at all but it was worth it in order to be able to see all of you who didn't give me honor because I'm nothing I'm the descendants of the man who brought that chauffer out I'm the person who had the privilege to speak to the rupiahs I am the vessel that brings their story to you and if that's one of my purposes it's worth everything any more questions hi question about how the tweet Katan and that and the chauffeur how did they manage to hold on to them because I've read a lot of memoirs that say when they took people to a different camp they would be disinfected they weren't allowed to keep any this wasn't in a camp this was in this was in a ghetto and when my great-grandfather died it went to his family some of which are sitting here and who maybe Martha do you remember what happened you were there this is my cousin who was there at the time he had frozen to the wall he had it in his bundle of rags and he marched with it that's all he's bundle of rags when he was in Auschwitz he marched with it out of Auschwitz and he managed to hide it in his bundle of rags he said that his luck as he used to say the Mazel the luck was that in books involved there was such a mess there was no administration that nobody checked your belongings anymore he said there was also no organized work otherwise there was no way he could keep it but because it was the end of the war he managed to keep it that was the only reason think and this is incredible stories of incredible people any other questions and he says that people who came in religious came out religious people who came in irreligious came out irreligious people did not change is that a statement that you would agree with it's a good question I thought you were gonna say something else one of the things that Tolkien a sucker rod writes is people that eat like a rat the former director general of Yad Vashem wrote in his book on the Reinhard operation that people who came into the war into kind of religious came out religious and people who weren't remains irreligious I don't know I can tell you that I know a lot of people lost their faith and I know a couple of people who gained faith and who came out religious who came from totally religious families also so go to find religion is it the minut a of how much you keep is it believing that there is or is not a creator of world and if so where was he during those years he was in Florida without a transistor he didn't know what happened I don't have any answers to that I haven't taken a poll I have asked religious survivors how did you stay a believing person and I think that the most honest answer I got from someone who said and if I would have given up my belief I would have had nothing I would have had nothing if I would have given up my belief so I think that there were a lot of people who lost their beliefs and there were some people who gained belief I don't think that what he wrote was precise any other questions I'm married to a survivor so every time I complain well you know you didn't go through the whole war he was born in lunch and September 16 1939 and went through the entire war including two years in bergen-belsen and I wanted to ask you because he was taken to Palestine right after and I'm wondering if he was in that same transport that first transport he was with rabbi Lau they went to book him out from bergen-belsen and then they were on the matter oh ah yes and they arrived in Palestine in July I have the cards July is the first trip matter OA took two trips the first one was in July 45 the second was in September 45 my father came in September your husband came in July uh-huh okay yes they weren't together no thank you anyway it was very nice present when I thank you for really beautiful and touching talk and and and inspiring as well I wanted to ask you about the question you raised at the beginning that you sort of put aside which is the whole question of spiritual resistance that isn't religious how do you deal with that because I I don't want to exclude it entirely from the notion of resistance you're a hundred percent correct spiritual resistance by Nathan ition is anything that raises somebody's spirits under such a situation of what we would call in extremist situations and as I said that can be a poetry reading and that can be a clandestine school and that can be anything that you do that raises your spirit there were so many examples like that and I've only chose to focus on religious resistance as spiritual resistance because the question of after I read that testimony of the young woman from Therese instead where she said other people were listening to a concert while my mother was dying and how could they be singing while my mother is dying the juxtaposition of those two things was just too too stark for me to be able to deal with it in the same breath as I'm dealing with religious resistance but yes a lot has been written about it it is a very very important component of a person keeping their humanity and remembering as barbers all said that he wasn't just seventy two thousand seven hundred or my father was not just six eight seven one five but that he was classical Teitur a human being and anything that you did that kept you believing that you were a human being under such circumstances that is spiritual resistance and it is all incredibly admirable we have time for two more questions I see a hand in back I want to say thank you so much for coming today and it's interesting that I was speaking to a bunch of students we were talking about number of the stars and just talking about even going through the numbers with them and how unbelievable it is and even last year when I was in Israel at Yad Vashem and saying that the last survivors will not be here in a couple of years and then how do we tell these stories how do we make them believable and in a certain aspect especially when children who are not Jewish who are not told these thing they're like this is unbelievable and I do think her children well for Jewish children that all these stories from the Bible are all so hard to comprehend as well and it goes to this whole notion of even though we're not there and we can't see it there are things that happened and that's why the stories are so important say thank you for sharing that thank you that's it well I thank all of you for giving me the privilege of having an audience for this talk for allowing me to pass on the stories and now the stories are yours please pass them on thank you god bless you all [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Jewish Heritage

Views: 411

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Museum of Jewish Heritage, A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, New York's Holocaust Museum, Spiritual Resistance in Auschwitz, Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away., Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Spiritual Resistance in the Holocaust, #StoriesSurvive, Artifacts showing spiritual resistance

Id: rlk8pHuUdc8

Length: 65min 55sec (3955 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019