Could the Shoah happen again? In 1942, the Munkatcher Rebbe, son-in-law of the Minchas Elazar, returned from a trip to Poland. He implored the people of Munkatch to leave, describing the atrocities he heard and witnessed. “It’s coming here,” he said. No one listened.
The family of my uncle Shalom Romanovski, a”h, had a large supermarket. Credit was extended to all – Jews and non-Jews. His father said, “Why should we leave? Ma’ne goyim vet mir nish kein shlecht – my goyim won’t do bad things to me.”
Have you visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington? Did you note the words in the grand entrance hall? “The Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” George Washington said that on August 17, 1790. If only those words were true in the days of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when his government was begged to intervene and did so little.
Hitler cultivated German children to hate Jews. He taught them in schools, displayed pictures of hatred on the streets, embedded anti-Semitism throughout German society – in the newspapers, the banks, the theaters, the universities. Jews lived with a yellow symbol of hatred.
Given the opportunity, Hitler would have killed nearly everyone reading this newspaper.
We have an obligation to cultivate our children to remember these very Jews Hitler worked so hard to destroy.
The Nazis killed every Jew at least twice. They humiliated and degraded them, shaved their heads, made them stand naked, gave them numbers to replace their names. Hamavayesh et chaveiro b’rabim, k’ilu hargo. That was one death. And then they cremated them – a second death.
Others were taken to the forest and shot. That was their first death. Then their bodies were burned – a second death.
Those non-Jewish schoolchildren in Tennessee understood this. After collecting six million paper clips (by 2005 the total had swelled to more than 30 million; among those who sent in clips were President Bush, director Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Hanks), they wondered wat they could do with them. One suggestion was to smelt the paper clips into an iron memorial. The children said they couldn’t, “because every paper clip represents a person and it would be like killing them, cremating them all over.”
My mother, and her entire Hersh family arrived in Auschwitz on May 20, 1944. Two signs greeted them: Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes Free) and Arbeit Macht Das Leiben Suss (Work Makes Life Sweet). An all-girls orchestra in gray striped uniforms was playing beautiful music.
My mother and her parents, sisters, nieces, and nephews all went though The Selection. Twins run in my family and my mother’s sister Hindee had five children including six-month-old twin girls. My Aunt Yides remembers facing the infamous Dr. Mengele standing with his dog and making those simple hand gestures – left, death; right, life; left, right, left, right, left, right. To this day my aunt wonders about those twin girls in Dr. Mengele’s hands.
On that same day, my mother and her two sisters had their heads shaved, their possessions removed, their arms tattooed:
Fifty-two Hersh family members perished on that day, Rosh Chodesh Sivan. That is my immediate and extended family’s yahrzeit. A day when my mother says Yizkor but now can’t remember the names of her 52 immediate family members or her 120 extended family members who perished in the Holocaust.
It is incumbent upon parents to take their children to visit the children’s exhibit in Yad Vashem in memory of Uriel Spiegel. One and a half million Jewish children perished at the hands of the Nazis and their eager collaborators. It is a haunting yet beautiful place to visit: one stands there, listening to the names of the children in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, and of course one cries.
