Of the 52 Hersh family members who died, 35 were children.
Some people, well-intentioned and otherwise, say we should forgive and forget, if only for our own sanity. How long must we dwell on such unspeakable tragedy?
Rav Dovid Weinberger of Congregation Shaarei Tefilah in Lawrence, New York, recounts that when the Ponovezher Rav, Rabbi Yosef Kahaneman, zt”l, was asked how long we should remember the Shoah, he responded: “How long should we remember the Shoah? FOREVER.”
Elie Wiesel in his classic memoir Night defines forever: “Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
How many of us pay special attention to the Tisha b’Av kinus written by the Bobover Rebbe, zt”l, on the Shoah? I wonder.
How many of us would respond positively to the idea of adding a fifth child to the Arba Banim, the Four Sons we describe on Pesach? The chacham, the rasha, the tam, and the she’aino yodea l’shol joined by the ben haShoa – the child of the Holocaust.
What was it like growing up as a ben haShoa? My brother and I would sleep in the room next to our parents in Crown Heights and hear our father, a”h, screaming most nights that German soldiers were chasing him. My mother would awaken him and say, “Isidore, kainer is nish du – there’s no one here.”
My mother-in-law often laments those people who walk around today in 60-degree weather without a jacket and complain of a sniffle. Back then, our parents and grandparents marched in freezing snow for hours in uniforms and plastic slippers – and survived.
On May 15, 1944, a Wednesday, my mother, her family, and the Jews of Fekete Ordo began their journey in a cattle car. The story my mother has repeated most often is of the beautiful melodic Birchas Rosh Chodesh her father, Reb Dovid, davened that Shabbos in the cattle car. Three hundred people in a space meant for 100 were davening and following him with full kavanah. What a kiddush Hashem.
On Monday, May 20, Rosh Chodesh Sivan, after five days in the cattle car amidst unimaginably intolerable conditions and packed together with the bodies of those who died on the journey, they arrived in Auschwitz. As they were separated, my grandfather said to his family, “Children, try to keep kosher.” My mother and her sisters could not have known that these would be the last words they would hear their father speak.
The image I want to leave with readers is that of a potato. A common, everyday potato. Everyone has heard countless times how people in concentration camps were fed bread and water, soup with rocks you removed, potato peels you scavenged for a meal. Please pause for a second before devouring that delicious potato kugel Friday evening or that succulent chulent with a potato on Shabbos. Stop and look at that potato, and just for a second think about the Shoah. Think about your parents, your grandparents, your uncles, your aunts. Think about your friends’ grandparents. Think about my grandparents.
If all of us could view a potato in this way every Shabbos and think of ourselves as a bnei haShoah – as children of the Shoah – the wordsVehigadita l’bincha bayom hahu would not just be something in the Haggadah we recite on Pesach. The story of the Shoah would be embedded in the fabric of our lives, as it should be.
