A Letter to Levi

 

A LETTER TO LEVI

Howard Shaff ¹

3rd draft
June 2, 1985 Box 650
Keystone, S.D. 57751
(605) 666-4449   A

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Levi, even at this stage, with the first draft of your grandfather's story put down on paper, we know this will not be an easy book to write. In many ways it has been a labor of love because Irving Shapiro has become my brother. in the truest sense. It has also been a labor of sorrow. How could the attempt to write such a story be anything else?

Still it had to be done because when we met your grandfather he was ready, no, more than ready to tell his story. He had reached a stage in ^his life where he had a need to purge himself and we, evidently, had a need to listen.

Writing is a lonely art. You have a pen, ink, thoughts and paper. As part of the act there is the reading of books and papers stacked in musty archives, university libraries, cardboard boxes in attics and cellars and of letters, carefully preserved as treasured   B keepsakes. For a writer there is the inevitable struggle to break through and find the emotion, the key that will enable him to understand and then convey the sense of the person or event.

It seems it is so easy to find out ABOUT a person, but so hard to penetrate deep enough to KNOW the person. With Irving as a subject the situation was reversed. We learned so much so quickly we were overwhelmed. We could not hold back the tears inside or out and could not retain our objectivity. We had to fight an inner struggle until we could accept that and go on. Does that make sense to you?

Once his story was on tape and we had absorbed as much holocaust literature as we could the real job began. We had to sort out our thoughts, try to decide on a format, an approach that would enable us to write as we hoped.to. We had to figure out what we expected to accomplish and toward what purpose.

Was there a chance we could be objective? Did we want objectivity? Obviously the answer to the first question was a resounding, "NO", and in retrospect the answer to the second was the same. Did that mean we were about to add our voice to the chorus condemming Germany? And if we were would that be enough?

We hoped not on both accounts because we wanted to do so much more. We have always believed that the holocaust was a crime, not only of Germany [deleted], but of the world. For too long it has been too easy for the rest of the world to point a finger, to say, "we did not know," or, "there was nothing we could do."

  C

Levi, such self-rightious denials are too pat, too easy. The reaction to the Nazi attack on the Jews of Germany, and then of each of the conquered nations, was universal. Avenues of escape were cruelly cut off. Immigration was reduced until it was almost non-existent. For example; your grandfather applied for entry into the United States in 1937. He had a cousin in Nebraska willing to sponsor him and give him a job and a home. The papers were filed and in order, but the war came before his number was reached. After surviving five years of camps, death marches, transportation in cattlecars unfit for humans, beatings, starvation and unimaginable privations he was freed. He reported to a displaced persons camp and learned he had barely moved up the list despite the fact that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of those ahead of him had been murdered and could no longer claim their place.

Great Britain took an overt stand against our people. They closed the gates of Palestine and waged a relentless war against those who tried to enter illegally. Those they caught were imprisoned and treated like common criminals.

The newspapers of the 1930's carried dozens of stories of ships loaded with despaerate people being turned away at all the ports of the world. Helpless, they were left with only two choices; stay on the open sea until all aboard starved or return to Germany and die in the concentration camps.²

Each country had its own reasons and rationale. For some in was 'policy', political, economic or both. For others it was blatant or   D thinly veiled anti-Semitism cloaked in the niceties of polite society, but no reason could quite hide the fact that governments were callously sending people to their deaths as surely as if they were packing them into 'shower houses' and dropping gas pellets at their feet.

( The holocaust, Levi, should not be a stone weighing on the conscience of the world–a bad feeling that refuses to go away. It should be an object lesson to help us all realize how far we can go astray if we do not remain cognizant of our natures.

Man may govern by law, but he is little more than a jungle creature if he does not guide himself by a sense of brotherhood. We are our brother's keeper in the truest sense. The moment we forget that we become barbarians, beasts in the guise of man.

Sitting in the chapel at Ellsworth Air Base on Yom Kippur I was aware of my Jewishness as I have seldom been before. I filled with a sense of well-being, of peaceful joy. There was a sense of belonging, of companionship that was a new experience, even though I had spent countless hours in shuls when I was growing up.

There was one other time in my life–a span of several months–when I felt that same sense of being Jewish. It was when I was in the air force during the Korean war. I was stationed in Illinois and we had this wonderful chaplain, a rabbi from Massachusetts whose name has faded with time from my memory.

On Friday nights we would gather in the chapel and the rabbi would lead us in prayer. When the service was over he would invite   E us to join him for a bit of fellowship and the lox and bagels sent to us by the women of the Chicago Hadassah.

Standing at the podium, he would look at us with a twinkle in his eye and say, "Well, there are seven of us here, think I'll open a bottle of wine," or, "Hhhmmmmmmm, I see only five of you showed up tonight, guess I should open two bottles of wine."

It was not the quantity or the quality of the wine that made such an indelible impression, but the quality of the man. In the short time I knew him he taught me, by example, what it meant to be Jewish. It is a feeling that remained with me.

Thirty years later that same feeling returned on the night I met your grandfather. We were both part of a gathering of Jewish people from a five state area. We were meeting in the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota to discuss such questions as, "How do you get a minyon when you are the only Jewish person for two hundred miles?" There were twenty-six of us there. Nineteen who had been born Jewish, six Jews by choice and a Baptist who had a special arrangement with his Jewish wife.

When I first saw your grandfather I instinctively felt that he was someone I wanted to know, but it was not until we gathered on the first evening and I saw him with his yarmalka ³ and tallis⁴ that I knew he was truly someone special.

The weekend was a busy time. Everyone wanted to get to know everyone else. Each meal we sat with different people. We learned each other's names, joined together in prayer and fellowship and   F discussed the issues that had brought us together, but there was not enough time for long, 'get to know' people conversations.

Sunday morning we met early for services and then sat on the patio for a wind-up session, to sum up what we had done and to decide what we wanted to do the following year. Then we went into the dining hall for brunch that was to be the final gathering before we went our separate ways.

We took our tray.s, found empty seats and rwalized we had joined your grandfather. It was only then that I saw the Auschwitz number tatooed on his arm. As the conversation warmed I found the courage to ask him about it. He seemed a bit reluctant, but he touched on the story and mentioned the newspaper article about him that had appeared in the local paper.

A few days later the copy of the article I had asked him to send arrived. Reading it brought tears to my eyes. It was frightening. I could sense something I had never felt before and somehow I knew we were going to do something together. Re-reading the article half a dozen times I found concepts forming in my mind and my courage building.

The last paragraph quoted Irving as saying, ("Sometimes I feel ashamed that I can't participate more. I wish I could be more involved, perhaps to spread around the 'good news', so to speak, so it would not happen to other people. We who know the pain of injustice cannot ignore the fate of other people who are suffering." ) That quote gave me the courage to write and suggest we meet and   G discuss the possibility of telling his story. We worded our letter carefully. We felt audacious and very much an intruder, although it was ambivilant because we also sensed that Irving would not see us that way.

A few days later he phoned and we arranged to spend a weekend at his home. The day before we were to leave another friend called me to ask a favor. A rabbi was flying in from New York to visit a group of Indian students who had visited Isreal to studdy the kibbutz movement. My friend needed someone to drive the rabbi because he could not make the trip.

Despite our pressing schedule and the fact that we were going to drive to your grandfather's house in Nebraska that afternoon, I could not pass up the opportunity and readily agreed.

Before leaving for the reservation we met for breakfast and spoke about all sorts of things. When I mentioned your grandfather and the fact that we were going to visit him and, maybe, write his story, the rabbi became pensive. "Be careful," he warned, "of what you are doing. Make sure you know what you are getting into. You probably will hear things you don't want to hear. You may find yourself judging and you may turn from the man." There was more, all along the same line and it gave us much to think about.

The rabbi was sincere and so much more experienced and knowledgable on the subject that we could not dismiss anything he said lightly, but, by the same token we could not readily accept that particular bit of advice. Can you understand why, Levi? He was saying that we   H would listen and judge. We were not certain that we would even be able to listen. We knew that what we were going to hear would be hard and painful, but we also knew we would^could never judge.

We arrived in Gering at eight in the evening, had a drink and then sat down to the kind of dinner only your grandfather can serve. In our conversation we decided that after dinner we would just talk and try to get to know each other, that we would not conduct an interview. There would be no questions about the camps, Poland or the other aspects of his story. For that we would wait until morning and then talk with tape recorder and notepad.

After dinner we sat on the couch and I said, "So?”

He answered, "So?”, and then began to tell his story. There were others in the room and we were all transfixed as we found ourselves carried back in time and space. Suddenly the reality of the situation, the discipline of my purpose broke through and I had to stop him long enough to allow me to set up my tape recorder. Then we spoke until late that night and all the next day.

There were many times when we were forced to stop, to take a ride and talk about other things. Usually we were^{I was} the one who go could go no further for the moment. Once started your grandfather seemed determined to take the story to the end.

When we left two days later we essentially had the basis for this book. We met several times over the next few months for 'work' sessions and countless times for better reasons. We had become brothers in the truest sense of the word. For me the bond transcends   I blood ties or personalities. To me your grandfather is kin and spirit.

So.....the story was on tape and in my mind, my heart and my soul. The rabbis warning was still in our thoughts and we were thankful that it had not come true. We had heard much that was horrible–much that brought tears to our eyes and twisted our insides. We heard much that made us wonder about the depth and heights of the human condition and everything we heard made us aware of how far beyond us your grandfather’s suffering had taken him. We could listen, we could try to empathize, but we could not judge.

( This letter is rambling a bit, Levi, perhaps because we know what lies ahead, but indulges us for just a little while longer. ) We had the information, but did not know what we would or could do with it. We needed a format and none presented itself easily or quickly. We had a purpose. We wanted to put your grandfather's story on paper, but we also wanted to do more and found it difficult to define that 'more'.

It is impossible to hear a survivor’s tale without experiencing every possible emotion. Anger, pain, sympathy, guilt, they all well up until you feel you will burst. We knew that would come across no matter what our final format, but we wanted more.

In every story of inhumanity there is a counterpoint of courage. Where there was baseness there was also a transcending nobility. Where there was despair there was also a stubborn spark of life. If there had not been there would be no survivors. Anyone who doubts   J this should experience the joy of seeing Irving Shapiro read from the Torah and then test their conviction. Standing in his yarmelka and tallis, rocking on his heels as he recites the ancient words–he is our people. He is all we have ever been–all we can ever hope to be. That was part of it, part of what we hope this book will express, part of what it will convey.

And there was more–so much has been written about the holocaust, both in commentaries, histories and personal experiences. If we simply add your grandfather's voice to those who have told their stories in the past, that would make this effort worthwhile, if only because then you and yours would have the record. But if we could do more, if while we told the story we could bridge the gap between the generations, that would be better.

After all, we reasoned, we are going to try and tell you, and all the Levis in the world, not only what happened to Irving Shapiro, but we are also going to try and give you some idea of how such a horror came about.

Of course that is a tall order. No matter what we do this will not be easy and we will not be writing a ^nice'pretty' story. We once wrote that to tell the story the way it was you would have to do so with shrieks^screams rather than words, but all we have are words because the shrieks must remain inside. I can hear them as I write and you may hear them as you read, but they cannot go on the paper.

A straight narrative, we knew, would be hard enough, to add other goals, other purposes might put it beyond the realm of   K possibility, out of the range of our ability. ( And if that happened then what? That was the simplest question of all. ) If that happened we would fail. If we could not accept that strong possibility we would be done before we began and we knew we were going to make the attempt.

So it finally came down to a format, Levi, and we decided we would write to you. Sometimes we will write you in narrative form and other times we will switch to letters. Much of that will depend on what is happening inside us, how the pressures are building and what we feel is working and what is not.

The man we write about is now Irving Shapiro of Gering, Nebraska. He was born Isreal Szapiro of Meidzyrzec, Poland and to you he is grandpa. As the story unfolds we may call him by one name or the other in both the letters and narrative. Indulge us to that degree, you will know who we are writing about and the devis^ce may be necessary to keep us going. Besides, it will make no difference, he will still be your grandfather and my brother.

Shalom

  1 PROLOGUE

Dear Levi,

We were at Ellsworth Air Force Base, thirty of us, gathered for Yom Kippur services. It was 1984. You, Levi, were less than two years old. You were bright, beautiful, full of life and energy.

Early in the afternoon the services reached one of those quiet moments. The rabbi was standing at the podium with his head bowed in silent prayer. You were in the aisle, exploring, praying, I assume, in your own way, when you stopped and stared up into the rabbi’s face. He looked at you, smiled and winked. It was at that moment that I knew that as long as there was one Levi on this earth and one rabbi, all the Nazis in the world, even with a successful "thousand year Reich", could never destroy our people.

  2

It was that look that provided the courage it took to write you and attempt to tell your grandfather’s story. Even then that courage came with much difficulty and in very small doses. Part came from your infectious grin, which is definitely a part of your heritage. It was fueled by the need to understand their roots that compelled your family to ask the questions and then there was our need. We felt compelled to pass on what your grandfather shared with us.

We are Jews, Levi. We are victims. No one can walk this earth, Jew or Gentile, and not be affected by the crimes against our people, but those crimes were so enormous, so beyond our ability to comprehend man’s ability to inflict pain, when he desires to do so, that it is almost impossible to reduce those crimes to words. Even Nora Levin ⁵ could not keep the sense of individual suffering at the shrieking, ear-piercing, humanity destroying, enervating, debilitating, gut-wrenching level that defies understanding and she was forced to try and convey the magnitude of the holocaust by citing numbers.

( Somehow it seems neat and tidy when the discussion is about 'transports', although they were actually cattlecars filled with people suffering agonies beyond our imagining. They were cattlecars filled with Jews and the Nazis told the world they were being moved as part of a 'resttlement' program which was a phase in a master plan called the 'final solution'.⁶ The words gave the plan a rather pristine, tidy aura. But that aura was a sham, a fake, the

  3 ultimate travesty and we, the living, must never let the world forget what those words and phrases actually meant. )

'Transports' were death trains, cattlecars and freight haulers, trucks and wagons filled with Jews being taken to a place where they could be slaughtered. Abraham Szapiro, your grandfather's brother, was just a boy of sixteen when he was murdered. Your great-grandfather, Hershel Szapiro, his wife, Mala, her father and her sisters, their children and husbands were taken away on a 'transport'. They ended up at Treblinka where they were forced to undress before they were crammed into shower rooms that were actually gas chambers. Then they were reduced to ashes in the crematoriums and fire-pits that were built to destroy the bodies. )

Your grandfather watched them go and then suffered through years of unimaginable agony in the camps, on death marches and work details, through beatings and torture, selections and the moments of despair when with all hope momentarily gone he thought about taking his life. ( He thought about becoming a 'musselman' the name given to the prisoners who gave up and sat down to die, but at those moments his faith coupled with his inate desire to live, fueled by the injustice of his plight and his anger at his torturers forced him to go on. )

He watched the people undress and walk into the gas chambers and he helped cart the bodies to the ovens. He hauled boxes of cement that weighed more than he did and lived on less food than you or I scrape off our plates after a meal, and he survived.

  4

How can a Jew not seek to understand? How can any person not seek an answer to why this monsterous thing happened? When your grandfather speaks you can not help but hear voices from the distant past and it makes you wonder if they are the voices of our roots or a trick of the mind trying to avoid hearing what must be heard?

At breakfast one morning, we told the rabbi that we planned to write this story.

"Be careful of what you are getting into," he said.

"Why?", we asked.

"You may not like what you will hear."

(Of course we won’t," we said. "How could any person not cringe when hearing of such unspeakable horrors? How could anyone not cry in the face of the pain of a friend?")

"I don’t mean it that way," the rabbi said. "You are planning to hear the story of a man who has survived in hell. He will tell you things you do not want to hear. Your friend may never seem the same to you again. You will hear things that may make you turn away. This has happened to me and it has happened to many others."

In one way the rabbi was right, Levi. We did hear stories we wished we had not heard. They filled us with guilt, guilt because one person could suffer so while others in the same world seemed oblivious to their pain. But he was wrong about the turning away. Who could be smug enough to judge?

Your grandfather’s story, told so many years later in the comfort of his den in Scottsbluff,Gering in front of the fire in our Black Hills   5 home, or out on the deck with the wind rustling the pines, had to be told. It was hard for the telling and hard to listen to. He often spoke in a matter of fact way and then the story suddenly flamed into an emotional telling that transcended time and place. It was told with tears, usually more ours than his and most of the time we were the one who said, "enough for now", but it had to be told and we had to hear it all.

The story, Levi, will be told to you as close to the way we heard it as possible, but to try and make you understand we must also share some thoughts with you. And if we cannot give you any answers we hope, at least, to be able to voice the questions.

There is a library of books developing on the holocaust. The study is taking is taking on the proportions of an organized, recognized discipline, treated almost as a science. Scholars are devoting lifetimes to the "phenomena". There is a prevalent feeling, particularly among the survivors, that by telling the stories we will somehow be able to prevent a re-occurence. It is hard to argue with that theory, although to our point of view it seems to miss the point. If it were within our power every survivor’s story would be told along with the stories of every one of the twelve million who were murdered. We mourn the victims of the attempt to eliminate Judaism by murdering our people, but we should not forget that six million others died with them.

It matters little what you were or why you are being tortured at the time that it is happening. Every day the newspapers fill   6 with stories of individuals victimized by rapists, terrorists, gangsters of all sorts. The articles are written by reporters skilled in the use of words that arouse emotion. Their goal is to make their readers fill with righteous indignation, with pity for the victims. They want their audience to share the feeling of being violated, soiled because all society has been made less by a vicious attack.

The effort should be applauded. It should also be repeated six million times for our Jewish brothers and six million more for the other victims, because that is what the holocaust was, Levi. It was a criminal attack on innocent people on a scale larger than any the world had ever known. It was an attack on living, breathing, thinking, feeling and, at least in most instances, G-d loving people who had no idea of why they had been singled out to die.

The textbooks of the discipline fall into two general categories. There are the eyewitness accounts, the first person stories of men like Elie Weisel⁷ and Samuel Pisar⁸ and the sweeping indictments of historians such as Nora Levin⁹ and Konnilyn Feig.¹⁰

The accounts of Weisel and Pisar bring tears of frustration, anger, pain and bewilderment. How can any Jew, or any human being, read them without experiencing a "but for the grace of G-d", feeling while at the same time experiencing the shame and terror of knowing others suffered in ways you cannot comprehend?

There is a so-called revisionist movement that attempts to 'prove’ that the holocaust never happened. It is a tool of the anti-Semites that becomes a farce when measured against the stories of the victims.   7 They are not accounts being conjured up by storytellers, but the irrefutable testimony of the victims of inconceivable brutality.

As long as the voice of an Elie Weisel or Irving Shapiro is heard the world will not be able to turn its back or deny that the Nazi killers killed. They may choose to ignore the lesson and repeat the crimes, but they must do so without hiding behind the claim that they did not know.

The historians serve a different purpose. Their histories are an attempt to provide a perspective. They write about the numbers, the physical layout of the camps, the logistics and, at times supposed reasons, world reaction and Nazi motivation.

This letter, Levi, will not fall in either category, but will hopefully bridge the gap. Much will fall into the historical grouping, but when your grandfather tells his story you will read and feel the words of a victim.

When I asked Irving what the prisoners talked about at night, he said, "Nothing. We were so hungry and weak we only sat there and thought about food." Pain is all-consuming, all-encompassing, immediate and ever present. The eyewitness can give us a glimpse, but only a glimpse, of the personal nature of the crime that has been committed against him.

You and I can cry for the pain and suffering this man we love was forced to endure, but we cannot begin to fathom the extent of that suffering. We cannot comprehend the pain he felt and at times still feels. We can only know a personal sorrow and try to come   8 to terms with our empathy and compassion. We can only try to understand.

The scholars are constantly trying to provide the tools for those who seek that understanding, but the subject might as well be called, "The study of the incomprehensible”. Still we must continue to make the attempt because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. It could be another Hitler committing his bloody crimes in a world that would later claim, "we did not know.”

Such a claim would be as fallacious as it was in the 1930’s. It was made then by civilized nations that possessed a remarkable ability to turn their backs on anything or anyone it felt it would be expedient to ignore. Governments did them, and still do, make diplomatic excuses. They say, "it is not in the national interest...”, or, "national policy precluded..." Leaders talk about priorities and reduce human suffering to polite terms that fit accepted niches and allow 'civilized’ people and societies to sink to the level of barbarians.

Levi, you were born into a world that often appears to have gone insane, but that cannot be used as an excuse for any of us to be less than we are capable of being. As individuals we must not even try to escape our personal responsibility. We are all links in a chain. We must be answerable to others as well as to ourselves and ultimately to our maker.

We are links in the chain of Judaism. We are here to bear witness to the coming of the Messiah, even if we form our own concept about the form of the 'Messiah' and what the 'coming actually means. Each   9 of us is a link. It was this chain the Nazis sought to break and, if you strip away the pretenses, they were allowed to try because the world would have liked to see that chain broken. When Hitler came to power it seemed right to much of the world, to the part that was not Jewish or not German and politically oppossed to him. That is not meant as an indictment of all people or nations. It is not meant as an indictment of the majority, but there were certainly nations that could have stopped him politically, economically or militarily had they not been so concerned with retaining their self-deluded images. Hitler assumed power at a time when the world was morally weak and unable to either recognize or react to evil. It was the policy of governments and the wishes of the men who governed that allowed them to turn their backs on the suffering people and give tacit, if not overt, approval to the Nazis to seek the "Final Solution."

We are also links in the chain of human existence. Men are brothers and an outrage committed against one is an outrage committed against all. We are all enriched by a noble act and degraded by inhumanity. We all bear responsibility for what happens in this world in which we live and for the world our children will inherit.

It is with this in mind that I attempt this letter. If you are to understand your roots, the fact that you are a Jew of Polish descent, the grandson of Irving Shapiro and, therefore, in a very real and personal sense a victim of the Nazis, than you must acquire a basic knowledge of our people. You must also learn about the events   10 of the 19th and 20th centuries that so drastically affected all the people of the earth. I will try to explain all this to you as I understand it. We must discuss Poland as a nation, Polish anti-Semitism as a policy and the way the Polish peasants felt about our people.

Your grandfather said, "In Germany the government was anti-Semetic. In Poland both the government and the people were anti-Semetic." That is a major difference.

We must discuss the anti-Semitism of the world. We have to try and understand Adolph Hitler, his racial views, his regime and his goals. We must discuss the role of the 'free' world and its responsibility, even if only by default, for the 'Final Solution'. We must cover the gamut from the United States' refusal to acknowledge that there was a problem, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to Great Britain's overt acts against our people. And we must discuss the possibility that all of what happened might have been part of G-d's plan. Of course no man will ever know that, which is why there is that possibility. To discuss all this we must write about a world gone mad while we examine the pieces, Meidzyrzyc, Poland, the town of your ancestors, the Ruzals and Szapiros (later changed to Shapiro) who were your people. We must discuss the life they were leading while the world collapsed around them and destroyed all that was sacred to them before all but your grandfather were murdered.

Why was he the one exception? That, at first glance seems to be   11 the real question, although it is not. The real question should be, why were all the others murdered? Either way the questions is not answerable. We can only hear the stories and wonder. We are, after all, only links in the chain.

Levi, when your grandfather was asked if he felt he could tell the story of the horror he had been forced to endure and then carry with him for the rest of his years, he said, "The stories must all be told so that it will not happen again." Then he paused and sighed. It was Sunday morning. We were in the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota sitting on the deck of a home set deep in the pine forest. He looked around and almost in a whisper, added, "Also, I think that if somewhere on a shelf there is a book that tells my story maybe one of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren will pick it up and at least know who we were."

That thought gave us the courage to write. We hope it will be enough to sustain us in the bad times and enough for you at the times when we seem to be groping.

In everything we studied to prepare for this letter one fact kept intruding. Maybe it is absurd, but it persists so it must be shared. It takes the form of a 'what if’. Had the Germans not been obsessed with their racial theories and their desire to destroy our people they would not have diverted so much manpower, thought and raw material from their war effort. The murder squads could not be in the trenches fighting the enemy. How many bullets that could have been used against their enemy’s military forces were used to kill   12 the one hundred thousand innocent victims who were murdered at Babi Yar?

The question, Levi, is this; could all that diverted energy and material have made a difference in Germany’s war with Russia? The fact is Himmler, Heydrick, Eichmann and so many other cruel, calculating cunning men, men with the ability to organize, terrorize and kill were completely occupied and pre-occupied with the transport and killing of our people. The Eisengruppen, the SS death squads that ran rampant in western Russia as the Nazis advanced were responsible for untold massacres that left over a million people dead. With a genius for destroying the Eisengruppen had equipped trucks so that they became gas chambers that killed with their own exhaust. They used them for small groups of up to a few hundred. Larger groups, like the hundred thousand at Babi Yar, were marched to mass graves, gravel pits, swamps, the lime coated floors of small valleys, and shot.

Who would have won the war if these killers had been firing at the enemy? How many troops could have been rushed to the front in the railroad cars that took our people to the death camps? What could the builders of the gas chambers and crematoriums and the manufacturers of the poison gases have contributed to Germany’s war effort if they had not been so consumed by the desire to build the tools to kill the innocent? How many fighting men could have been released for the army if the labor force represented by the Jewish people of the conquered lands, with their many skills, been utilized? Could the   13 "buzz bomb", the rocket that terrorized England as the war neared its end, been developed two years sooner when it could have made a difference? Could the energy used to create the ghettos and the manpower used to keep our people behind the ghetto walls have made the difference between victory and defeat for the Nazis?

Perhaps, Levi, just perhaps, the answers to these questions contain the answer to THE QUESTION, Why?....Why?.......Why?

If we are G-d's chosen people, chosen to bear witness, then could it be possible we are also chosen for other purposes? If the demonic forces set loose by Hitler and his killers were defeated because the Nazis allowed themselves to be diverted by their hatred for our people, then maybe that was also part of G-d’s plan.

Perhaps, and there’s that word again, the Nazis were sent to earth as a warning, to give humanity a glimpse of what could happen if man did not change his ways. Considered that way the Nazis can be seen as a plague sent by G-d. A plague much like the ten that were visited on Egypt just before Moses led our people out of bondage, but a plague on a monsterous scale.

If not a warning then the Nazi could have been a genuine threat and the fate of mankind might have hung in the balance while the fighting raged. In either case, warning or attack, if our martyred people made the difference, who can say whether the price was too high, who can judge? The victims, maybe, but who else?

It is all conjecture, food for thought to be mulled over, thoughts to ponder, to reject or take solace from.

  14

*****************

Levi, if at times we seem to digress, to ramble or dwell on the superficial, try to understand. Never lose sight of what we are trying to do. The story of your family cannot really be told in words, at least not in words that will convey the terror, the horror, the ultimate inhumanity. The story is a shriek of pain and indignaty, an ear-piercing, death-defying, top of the voice moan that is viscerial, gut-twisting. It is an unbearable ache that must be shared by every human, even though none of, including the survivors, can really understand. Does that make sense to you?

Your grandfather said, "I can never be happy. Content, yes. Pleased, amused, satisfied, but happy? Never!”

Why? He feels he paid too high a price to think of his own survival as a reason for happiness. Survival meant going on, but it also meant carrying the terrible burden of the past. Surviving required a unique form of courage and exacted a horrendous price. The courage needed was a different sort of courage than what usually comes to mind. Most of us can understand the courage of the defenders who knew they would die in the Warsaw ghetto, but what do we know about the courage it took to empty a gas chamber of its twisted victims? What do we know about the courage it took to leave the barracks for the daily counting while a musselman, perhaps a brother   15 or a cousin, stayed behind to die because that was his choice? What do we know about the courage it took to walk between the walls of electrified wire, day after day, and not embrace the wire?

It is so hard to free the heart of deserved animosity. After he was freed your grandfather felt more bitterness toward his fellow Poles than he did against the Nazis. That may be difficult to understand unless you have a perspective of Poland, her history, geography and her own unique brand of anti-Semitism.

To write about Poland without seeming bitter is impossible if you are Jewish and have any knowledge of her systematic cruelties toward a people that she promised sanctuary and both political and religious freedom. Still, despite the acknowledged bitterness, the facts are the facts. As a nation Poland poses many questions, not the least of which is how she has managed to and why she exists. In one form or another her history dates back a thousand years, yet her longivity cannot be explained with any of the traditional answers.

Poland’s borders have never been firmly established for any long period of time and she has almost from the beginning claimed areas that were claimed by her neighbors. She has no natural geographic boundaries. No major rivers separate her from her neighbors. There are no mountain chains to provide a natural line of defense. All there is are the arbitrary lines on maps which indicate the portions of land that were Polish at the time the map was drawn.

Poland has no harbor or outlet to the sea, although that has   16 always been a national dream that has often made her go to war. The problem was that when she did manage to win a conflict and gain a port the victory always seemed to carry the seeds of defeat. Along with a port would come an alien people who could not, or would not, assimilate and consider themselves Polish. With an unconquerable enemy in her midst and controlling the port it was always only a matter of time before war broke out again.

With the Allies still concerned about the threat represented by a defeated Germany after World War One it was thought at Versailles that by cutting the German territory of Prussia in half by creating the Polish Corridor and forcing Germany to share the Black^{North (Baltic)} Sea port of Danzig, Poland would become the dominant force in the area. As always, however, the Poles were unable to control the citizens of Danzig and the port remained a bitter issue until Hitler’s armies invaded and defeated Poland in 1939.

With the huge land mass of Russia to the east, with a powerful and war-like Germany to the west and north, touching in places Romania, Czechoslovakia and other small nations who’s borders were in a constant state of flux, Poland was never secure. Her borders either had to be guarded zealously or face constant encroachment. As a result partitions and annexations are an integral part of Polish history.

To add further to the mystery of Poland’s longivity is the fact that she has no product, either natural or manufactured, that the world needs or covets. Poland controls no needed minerals or the   17 access to any rare or vital substance. It is true that the Polish noblemen were renowned,in most of the courts of Europe, for their wit and charm, but other than serving as a handy battlefield, a buffer between Russia and her western enemies, there seems no valid reason for her existence.

Poland cannot even claim a racial uniqueness. Basically her people descend from the same Slavic stock that inhabit Russia, Germany and many of her other neighbors. Before Hitler and the death camps she was predominantly Catholic with a Jewish minority of about three and a half million living mostly in their own communities.

Ironically, Poland did have a product at that time that was unique and much sought after. Most of the people of Meidzyrzec, your grandfather’s town, were engaged in the cleaning, sorting, bundling and selling of hog’s hair which was sold to brush manufacturers all over the world. That industry, like most others, ended with the war.

Down through the centuries the Poles have been a two-class society of rich land-owners and impoverished peasants locked to the land. There were few countries that could match her for economic contrast. The ruling class controlled every facet of Polish life, while the peasants struggled for survival.

No matter what he was forced to endure the peasant seemed to be able to sustain himself with his dream of owning a place of his own. He wanted his own land more than he wanted anything else on earth. To get, even a plot too small to sustain himself or his family, he   18 seemed willing to do almost anything. Feeding on this desire the landowners were able to levy high taxes, keep the peasants ignorant and retain total control simply by promising land ownership sometime in the distant future.

Land reformers who tried to organize the peasants made little headway with the uneducated masses who seemed to prefer superstitution to knowledge. The reformers usually found themselves trying to arouse people who could not comprehend life as being any other way than it was. Only at times when it was necessary to have the peasants leave the farms to join the army did they show any signs of unrest and those were quickly squelched by force or by a minor land reform that amounted to almost nothing.

It was with this control in mind that the nobility decided to allow the oppressed Jews of other countries to settle in Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Jews needed a haven and the nobility needed a new class of people. The world was being shrunk by outer forces. Adventurers were discovering new lands. The Industrial Revolution was still many years away, but signs of its coming were unmistakable and new markets were opening.

Reacting to the challenge the Polish leaders made their choice. Needing merchants and artisans they thought about re-training their peasants, but then decided it would be better not to disturb a system that was working to their advantage. They realized their needs would be better served by a people not rooted in the soil, one more attuned to settling in the cities. These people would have to   19 be willing to work long hours at benches, counters and desks. They would have to be an industrious people who would demand little and give much. They needed craftsmen, brokers, bankers, moneylenders and storekeepers.

In essence they needed a new breed of Poles. There was also another factor that had to be considered. As one of the wealthiest of the land owning class the Catholic Church, to which most Poles belonged, had long issued bans against lending money for interest. It was a totally self-serving rule designed to keep the peasants from borrowing to buy land. It did so successfully, but it also prevented growth in other areas. As the dynamics of world trade changed it became apparent that the rule had to change or a way found to circumvent it.

The Jews of Russia, Germany, France, Spain and other, smaller countries provided the way. The were a people with all the attributes needed by the Poles. As victims of countless pogroms, inquisitions and policies of discrimination that had harrassed them for centuries, they needed a sanctuary, a place where they could settle, work and observe their religion without fear. They would ask little of a country that would give them protection. They wanted only the right to work and to be left alone.

When the Poles made them welcome Jewish people flocked from the cities of Europe and quickly established their own Polish communities. They gloried in the fact that they had been granted the right to practice their religion without interference, to govern themselves   20 on a local level, run their own courts and schools as they saw fit and could live peacefully under special laws designed to protect them. These laws, in most instances, were enforced vigorously with the backing of the nobility, although when it was convenient, for political reasons or because it was felt the Jews needed to be taught a lesson, they were temporarily forgotten.

In return for their new found freedom the Jews kept to themselves, opened the badly needed shops and markets and began to manufacture. Almost overnight Poland had acquired a much needed merchant class without disturbing the relationship between the peasants and the landowners, or the relationship between the peasants and the church.

It was as if Poland had suddenly come of age and she seemed headed for a new era of prosperity, and she was, even though the peasants quickly began to resent the strangers in their midst.

Levi, writing in the pages of Mein Kampf, Hitler declared, "By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." It is a statement that seems to prove how easily the zealot can rationalize and turn the worst horror into what he thinks is a   21 sane and reasonable cause.

As we go along if Hitler seems to be over-quoted bear in mind that it was on the strength of his madness that the anti-Semites of the world found a rallying point. Keep in mind that Mein Kampf was written in 1924 by a man who appeared to be little more than a posturing fool leading a splinter group of fanatics who had failed in an absurd attempt at revolt in 1923. Ridiculed as "The Beer Hall Putsch" the attempt to sieze control left fifteen of Hitler's followers dead at the hands of the police in Munich and resulted in Hitler being sentenced to three years in prison. It was there that he wrote Mein Kampf, his blueprint for world conquest. It was there he perfected his technique of using the "Big lie", the practice of repeating falsehoods until they were believed or accepted, and in his book he spells out his demagogues case against the Jewish people.

Mein Kampf is a self-righteous, psuedo-intellectual explanation of disjointed beliefs, blatant lies and ill-conceived concepts. It is a diatribe that is almost impossible to read from cover to cover. Still, as a document that dissects the National Socialist Party and their plan for taking over Germany and then all of Europe, it is an interesting insight, but even when viewed from that perspective it is difficult not to read with a mixture of boredom and disgust.

Hitler wrote that his reason for becoming an avowed anti-Semite, after having been totally in sympathy with the 'Semites', was that his studies convinced him that there was a direct link between   22 Marxism and Judaism.

Citing his own observations, he claimed to have discovered that the Jews were the directors of Austria’s white slave trade and that as a people they did not keep themselves clean. He had 'discovered’ his facts as a rejected student before World War One and confirmed them after his return as a gassed, homeless veteran of the defeated German army.

He wrote, "The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, I must say is a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell these were no lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes closed...Added to this was their unclean dress and their generally unheroic appearance.”

We were heading for the gas chambers and the crematoriums, Levi, because we did not don the uniforms of storm troopers. Our people did not choose to goosestep or try to instill fear or awe in those who watched from the sidelines. To Hitler that was our fatal flaw. To our people, with their rich heritage, it was a source of pride. They may not have seemed heroic to the people who admired the brownshirts and the SS. Such concepts did not fit with our heritage or tradition, and in that sense was true. By Nazi standards we were not "heroic”, but the charge that our people were 'unclean' was a lie based on ignorance or malice.

Before the age of indoor plumbing the mikvah¹¹ was as much a part of the Jewish community as the shul¹² , besmedrish¹³ or synagogue. A pious Jew would not even think of going to pray while physically dirty.

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If Hitler’s powers of observation were as sharp as he claimed he must have known that the mikvah is used not only for spiritual cleanliness, to prepare brides for their wedding night, but also as a daily bathing place for the community.

We can ridicule his logic, or anything else we choose, but the fact is that somehow he caught the imagination of his people and went from political fanatic, to leader, to becoming the architect of the "Final Solution". He cast his spell and much of the world watched, helpless or indifferent, as he tried to create his "Thousand Year Reich" out of the ashes of his victims.

"The Thousand Year Reich" was the ultimate boast and rallying cry-Hitler and his followers would breed an aryan, super-race that would rule the world for a thousand years. It caught the imagination of millions. The present day neo-Nazis still dream of establishing it, but for Hitler it lasted just a little more than ten years..

The war had ended. Your grandparents had survived and had made their separate ways to the displaced persons camp at Neustad-Holstien where they met and fell in love.

It was October 12, 1945....They could hear the clickety-clack of   24 the train wheels riding rails that were tired of the fighting, the bombs and the cargoes of death; the transports filled with the victims of the "Final Solution".

Now there were no more transports. The death camps were cold and silent. Some were being dismantled, while others remained intact, mute witnesses to the fact that man could sink to levels of depravity that were never thought possible. But even as they did they also served as a reminder that at the same time other men, the victims, could rise to unimagined heights when their courage, will and fortitude were tested to the limit.

Standing in an open coal car, bracing themselves against the swaying motion, Irving and Clara looked at the black, bomb-scarred landscape that at times seemed to express all the hapless, sad, inconceivable insanity of war. Abandoned buildings, wrecked, deserted vehicles, shattered trees, fields unattended and choked with weeds, defeated people wrapped in rags and then, suddenly, a flourishing farm that seemed tranquilly unaware that a war had been fought.

Holding hands they tried to find a reality that had eluded them for five years. In the world they had once shared with others, the world of mother, father, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, neighbors and friends, a world of ^a shul, shops and comfortable Polish homes, their present journey would have seemed as bizarre as the open jaws of the crematorium. But both worlds no longer existed. They were gone, forever, one to be mourned and the other dreaded. What they were experiencing together was   25 their only reality and to each the other was all that was real in the world.

They had been married on September 4,1945. The civil ceremony had been performed in City Hall by the German mayor of Neustadt-Holstein. It all seemed ludicrious. After all they had been through to be married by a German was a testimony of faith that touched the soul, but even so it was not enough.

They were Jews and not even the fires of hell could change that fact. They had suffered years of physical and mental abuse and knew that if they were going to rejoin the world they had to renew their faith and re-establish their sense of self. To them that meant being married in a Jewish ceremony. To do so they had to find a rabbi and that was not easy in post-war Germany.

The only rabbis there were military chaplains. The nearest one to Neustad-Holstein was stationed at Bergen-Belsen a300hundred miles away. When they climbed aboard the coal car heading for Bergen-Belsen both were dressed in the best clothes they could find, but by the time they reached their destination it really did not matter. Despite the blankets they had wrapped about themselves to keep out the dirt and cold both were covered with coal dust that blackened them from head to toe.

The trip was a tedious adventure. Germany had been divided into military zones controlled by Americans, British and Russian troops. Each had its own rules and because of the poor conditions of the rails and rolling stock trains moved only during the day and even   26 then movement was sporadic. They knew the journey would take at least two days.

(On the morning of the second day they were in the waiting room of the railroad station in the small town of Cele. Irving had a far away look and an expression of overwhelming sadness that would not go away. Clara tried her best to bring him back. She took a piece of newspaper and wrote a note in the space between the printed lines. The note was written in Polish and had the lyric quality of their native tongue that is often lost in translation, but the emotion she expressed is universal.)

The note said;

(My Dearest Husband,

The road to happiness is paved with roses. We must get to it through thorns, like for instance losing a watch or a gold chain or other sadnesses. But the end of this road is full of happiness worth the largest sacrifice. Do not wrinkle your dear face and try not to think of those who could not live and suffered or those who, not too long ago, dissappeared in the waves of war.

Take life just like it is and then you will always be satisfied by it.

Your very true being in the world,

Clara )

When they finally reached Bergen-Belsen they went to the apartment of a friend to rest and prepare themselves for the ceremony. Clara   27 went to prepare herself at the mikva¹⁴ , but the hut containing the ritual bath had been destroyed by vandals and could not be used. She laughed and told Irving that she felt lucky because the mikva hut would have been drafty and the water in the bath cold.

They traded with a stranger, cigarettes for the traditional gold ring, which turned out to be brass, but even that did not dim their enthusiasm. With their friends joining in they stopped men in the hallway until they had enough for a minyon, the gathering needed for a Jewish ceremony. Then they took their places in front of the rabbi. The prayers were read. They sipped the symbolic wine and Irving broke the glass under his foot for good luck. The rabbi said, "mazeltof”¹⁵ and they finally felt married in the eyes of G-d.

After a quiet celebration with their friends they returned to the railroad station to catch a train back to Neustad-Holstein. They could have gone anywhere, could have returned to Poland if they wished and tried to regain their property, but what they craved was freedom and in their minds freedom meant America.

But America, with her fabled streets of gold, her welcoming beacon on the Statue of Liberty and her modern-world reputation of being a home to the homeless, did not want them. After the millions of immigrants had poured across the oceans in the hundred years before World War One America had grown timid. The west was settled, there were no new territories. The factories and dynasties of the Industrial Revolution were all established. There seemed to be no new horizons and she had succumbed to the fears of most older   28 societies and grown timid. Restrictive quotas had been set in the early thirties, primarily to keep out European Jews who were trying to escape Hitler, and the quotas remained even after the Second World War. The victims of the worst atrocity man had ever visited on his fellow men, had to wait until their numbers were called before they could emigrate. To have even that chance they had to be registered with the United Nations Relocation Agency and they could only do that if they remained in the camp to which they were assigned.

There they were forced to endure a disheartening, interminable wait obviously designed to discourage. The Polish quota was so small that even those who had applied before the war had to wait despite the fact that so many who had applied with them had perished. No special arrangements were made for the survivors, not even for the few Polish Jews who had made it against all odds.

(The train from Bergen-Belsen was so crowded the newlyweds could not find even standing room inside the car. They had to climb on top of a coupling where Clara clung to Irving while he held a rail with one hand and their suitcase with the other.

After a hundred kilometers or so the train pulled into a station for the night. The town they were in had been all but destroyed and there were no accomodations. They went to a bomb shelter already filled with almost three thousand people and found space under a bench. There they spread their blankets and settled down for the night.

  29

In the morning they resumed their journey. For both it was a re-birth in the Jewish tradition in which they had been raised. It was the beginning of a new life they would share. Both had survived a crucible of fire. Both had suffered because they had been born Jews. They were still Jews, and thus, still whole. They could look to the future, but could never forget the past.)¹⁶

Let us go back a bit, Levi, back to the sixteen and seventeen hundreds when the Jewish communities were formed in Poland. Despite their new found freedom many of the Jewish immigrants did not have an easy time. Those who had permitted them to become Poles demanded that they stay visible and remain different. From the standpoint of the lawmakers it was desirable that the Jews fill their function, but also that they be disliked by the peasants.

With Jewish communities in their midst the nobility felt they had another weapon to keep themselves in control. They passed laws granting the Jews physical protection, and for the most part enforced them, but whenever the peasants became restless, as they did   30 during periods of extreme hardship, drought or other crisis, the nobility always had a handy, visible scapegoat. There was the Jew in the marketplace. There was the Jew, the landowners agent, collecting taxes, rent or interest on the money loaned for seed. There was the Jew, the middleman in most transactions. He was 'different’, distinctive in dress and custom. Because he was 'different’ he was not considered 'Polish’ and as a result the nobility could appease the peasant by allowing them to release their frustrations in a short, vicious pogrom. Then, after the violence had run its course, they could step in, restore order and keep everything under control until the next time.

As a result the Jews never assimilated as a group. There were many individuals who became more Polish than Jewish. Some converted to Catholicism and tried to put their Jewishness behind them. They moved to the urban centers, affected the modern dress of their neighbors, educated their children in the universities and entered the professions. They thought of themselves as Poles, but when the forces of anti-Semitism took control a Jew’s outward appearance or personal preference meant little. All were Jewish.

There were even political parties founded on anti-Semitism and their hateful preachings were accepted as a valid political point of view and given much credence.

Functioning in that atmosphere the Jewish communities were forced to weigh their actions carefully. They had to think always in terms of consequences and security. That was why they chose to [deleted] stay   31 to themselves, to have as little contact with non-Jews as possible and never to fratenize.

This is the story of your grandfather, Levi, but it is also the story of all our people who suffered with him. It is the story of political victims trapped by circumstances. For any of us to even begin to understand we must have some background knowledge. None of us, not even the victims, will ever comprehend in the true sense of the word, but if we can learn about Polish anti-Semitism, Hitler, his Nazi movement and the attitude of the world while he seized power, perhaps we will find some of the answers.

Poland was an occupied country dreaming of regaining her independence from the partitioning powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, for most of the 1800's, into the twentieth century and all during the First World War. When the war came she saw her chance in an Allied victory and tried to make the best of it although she had no army or functioning government. Josef Pilsudski¹⁷ organized Polish patriots, formed fighting units and waged a guerilla war against the Axis while Ignace Paderewski¹⁸ , the pianist, formed a government-in-exile in America and tried to win recognition from President Woodrow Wilson. Polish hopes for freedom rose sharply when the Allies were victorious. With the fighting ended they were able to shift their hopes for the future to the peace table.

The face of Europe was changing. Czechoslovakia had been formed and granted independence under Tomas Masaryk¹⁹ after he convinced Wilson to recognize his government. Germany, humiliated in defeat   32 and forced to accept unconditional surrender as the only terms for peace was stripped of some of her territory. Much of what was taken was awarded to Poland with the creation of the Polish Corridor which gave her access to the sea. The corridor divided East Prussia from the rest of Germany and remained a cause of bitter dissension until war broke out agin in 1939 and Germany defeated Poland.

But that was later. In 1919 Poland was looking toward a glorious future when her dream of independence was finally achieved. Under terms of the peace treaty a parlimentary government was set up that would take official control as soon as the Versailles Treaties were ratified. The stumbling block to that ratification was the concern the Allies had about the way an independent Poland, given her history of anti-Semitism, would treat her minorities.

The emotional issue was debated for a long while and in the meantime there was much jockeying for position among the emerging Polish leaders. Pilsudski was the hero of the people. Paderewski, who had abandoned the piano to fight the political battle for independence, was the leader of one of the major parties. Roman Dmowski²⁰ , an avowed anti-Semite, was the leader of another and the major cause of concern.

Dmowski's views were well known. He blamed the Jews for all of his country's missfortunes. To him our people represented a threat to national unity. He accused them of being a separate nation within a nation and advocated their expulsion from Polish territory. Refusing to acknowledge that most Jews were as poor as the peasants and that   33 and that the wealth of the nation was actually controlled by his supporters, primarily the Church and the aristocratic landowners, he accused our people of controlling the wealth. Poland, he said, must reduce its Jewish population from the ten percent it was to no more than three percent. He called for the passage of laws that would restrict Polish Jews geographically as well as economically. He admitted that his purpose was to make it so restrictive for Polish Jews that they would be unable to function.

Dmowski's threats were serious enough to concern the Allied councils. When issue of Polish independence was placed on the agenda it became the subject of much debate and consumed more time than the British, French and Americans wanted to spend on Polish problems, but once the debate began they had little choice. Finally, after much haggling, a Minorities Protection Treaty was drafted and the Polish government was ordered to sign as a condition of independence.

The Poles considered the treaty an affront to their honor and with twisted logic blamed the Jews for putting them in such an embarrassing position. By being visible victims our people had made Polish bigotry a matter of world concern. Therefore, they were responsible. Dmowski and his followers vowed that the Polish Jews would pay dearly for the insult as soon as full independence was granted and the newly installed government could assess the risks of violating the Minorities Protection Treaty.

The treaty was 'paper protection' at best. The Allies had forced the Poles to sign, but they had no way to enforce its terms. As with   34 so much else that came out of the peace conference it hurt those it was designed to protect.

There were two events in 1923 that profoundly affected you, Levi. One was the birth of a son to Mala and Hershel Szapiro, 65 Lubaelska Street, Meidzyrzec, Poland. They named their son, Isreal and, because he was a Levi,^coen the first born to the family, there was much rejoicing in the Lubae house which was home to grandparents, several aunts, uncles and cousins.

We will return to this house soon, Levi, but first you should know about the other event of 1923, the aborted revolt, led by Adolph Hitler, that has become known as the "Beer Hall Putsch". The putsch was 'aborted', but that does not mean it was unsuccessful, despite appearances at the time. Subsequent events proved that it had worked in Hitler’s favor. It was premature, but it paved the way for his eventual takeover of Germany.

By all standards Hitler should not have survived when his revolution failed and fifteen of his followers were killed by the police. The   35 fact that he did survive made him a force the world eventually had to deal with. At the time Germany was composed of several provinces. East Prussia, Prussia, Bavaria and smaller areas such as Thuringia, Schleswig and Oldenburg. Together they formed German Republic.

The Germans always favored a strong central government, but the Treaty of Versailles stripped the government of control over many of the areas and set up provincial governments that were connected in a loose federation. The Allies had deliberately chosen to strip the central government of its power in the hope that it would prevent Germany from ever again going to war. The problem was that the Allies did not take the German character into account. Fiercely loyal and proud the Germans never accepted the governments forced upon them and never gave up their desire to be united.

That the Allies did not realize that their attempts to prevent another war were actually sowing the seeds of the next conflict, is difficult to imagine, but apparently they did not. Perhaps one of the reasons was that after the fighting the Allies were tired and wanted the peace conferences over and done with so they could get on with their own business.

Had they not been at cross purposes on so many of the issues that might of been easier to do. The French, for example, had deep concerns about their common borders with Germany. They wanted a buffer zone that would serve as a defense against future German aggression and a neutralized Germany that would no longer threaten French security. To the British and American the French seemed overly   36 concerned, almost paranoid.

The Wilson administration had committed itself to the League of Nations despite knowing that they were facing strong congressional opposition. Their primary purpose at the peace conference was to use it as a forum that would sell the League to the American public.

The British were somewhere between the two. They also wanted to see the League of Nations become a reality, but, to a degree, they shared some of the French concerns about preventing Germany from becoming a threat in the future. The difference was they were not as deeply committed to either concept as their allies.

As a result many questions were left unanswered and many issues unresolved when the conference broke up and the treaties signed. As it turned out the Treaty of Versailles, the climax to the "War To End All Wars” provided the imetus for the next world war which followed less than twenty-five years later. Under its terms Poland was granted her independence, but her boundaries were not firmly established. Strategic areas were left in dispute, those who lived in them were left stateless or forced to live under governments they viewed as foreign. A good example was the German in the Polish Corridor and elsewhere. No matter who was in charge they considered themselves Germans and vowed to keep up the struggle until they were re-united with the fatherland.

In every respect, and due in a large measure to French fears and American and British lack of understanding of the situation, the Allies won the war and then gave away the victory at the peace table.   37 To add to the difficulties, at least from the standpoint of the Germans, the Allies saddled Germany with a huge war debt. All the nations who fought on the Allied side presented bills that were completely out of proportion to Germany’s ability to pay. Faced with this staggering, impossible debt the Germans allowed inflation to run rampant so they could pay their debts with worthless currency. By the early 1920’s prices in Germany were six million times their pre-war level and money was being printed in billion makrmarks denominations. Workers were being paid several times a day because the mark was losing value on an hourly basis. Those on fixed incomes were impoverished, but there was little they could do beyond forcing a series of no-confidence votes that created parlimentary crisis and a spiral of ever-weakening governments.

The provincial governments eventually became as weak and dispirited as the central government. Confused by events they could not control, inept and impotent they became victims of their own devices.

Hitler’s "Beer Hall Putsch” was not unusual. It was only one of a series of attempted coups and revolutions. It was unusual only in that it was so bloody. At first it seemed it would be successful, but then the city rulers regained control. There was a confrontation across a bridge. Hitler’s men were ordered to lay down their arms and surrender. When they refused the police fired. Hitler’s men dropped and the putsch was over.

For his part in the action Hitler was sentenced to three years   38 in prison, but his jailers treated him as if he was royalty because despite their victory the government was was afraid of his growing following. He was allowed a private secretary. His most trusted aide, Rudolph Hess²¹ , was jailed with him and together they wrote the first draft of "Mein Kampf”.

The rise of Hitler from a common soldier to a power broker who could plunge the world into a catastrophic war is a study in itself. No person could have risen from more humble beginnings or shown less promise in his early years. At best he was an average boy and a below average student with some artistic ability. His childhood was normal until both his parents died while he was still in his teens and he was forced to support himself. He did so by moving to Vienna and finding work as a laborer.

In Mein Kampf he claimed that in Veinna he began to educate himself by reading, attending sessions of the parliament and studying the various political movements. With his new found knowledge he determined that the Germans were a superior breed and therefore their troubles could not be of their own making.

His search for a scapegoat brought him tpo our people, the Jews of Vieinna, a people different in dress and custom and the favorite target of the rabble-rousers and demagogues²² . It was not a new or novel thought, but once it entered Hitler’s mind it grew to a proportion that was beyond comprehension.

He set out to prove, among other things, that the media was totally under the control of Jewish conspiritors. He then tried to establish links between the press and the Marxists in a scheme in   39 which they planned to conquer the world. With his own unique style of reasoning he traced the origin of the plot all the way back to Moses. In his pursuit of an 'education’ he became dogmatic and totally convinced that he had found the 'truth’.

During World War One he enlisted in the German army and served with distinction. He was decorated on the battlefield and promoted to the rank that later earned him the derisive title of the "Little Corporal". In his final battle he was gassed and temporarily blinded.

When he recovered he went to Munich and followed the bargaining at Versailles with a growing sense of bitterness. He roomed in a settlement house and earned his meager living by painting little street scenes that a room-mate peddled to tourists.

One evening, in 1919, he wandered into a neighborhood beer hall. It was the night the German Worker’s Party held their weekly meeting and all six members were there. To those who knew the party it was little more than a harmless debating society that united a few old buddies over mugs of beer, but to Hitler it seemed more.

Why? The eternal question. Why did he enter THAT beer hall THAT night? How could he have had even an inkling that such a small, ineffectual group could be turned into a dominant, deadly force? Who knows if he did? He claimed so, but that was later, after the fact.

Maybe the devil had chosen that moment to come to earth to challenge G-d for control of man and G-d decided to give the world a glimpse of what would happen if the devil won. If you take that   40 arguement one step further you would be saying that Hitler was, therefore, an agent of the devil and if he was did G-d's "Chosen People" become the instrument for stopping him? Could such an arguement be made?

So many questions, Levi. You were born into a world full of questions and somehow you must supply most of your own answers. There seems no other way.

The fact is Hitler took control of that paltry little group and built it into an organization that threatened the world. He did not do so instantly nor with any magic formula. Somehow he figured out a way to move the dark side of people, a way to appeal to the baser instincts and then exploited them. He began by holding public rallies attended by those who were drawn to the meeting halls by advertisements placed in the newspapers that advocated anti-Semitism. He hammered his audience with the dual concepts of German superiority and the evil character of the plotting Jews and their Bolshevik cohorts. He was saying what his listeners wanted to hear and many joined his party.

By the end of 1920 he was speaking to crowds of over two hundred who cheered him on while he perfected his ways of controlling the emotions of listeners. His views were considered radical even by the anti-Semites and he attracted only the radicals, but there were enough of them to swell his ranks. He had no compunctions about using force and terror. Whenever he spoke the faithful mingled with the crowd and physically silenced hecklers. On other ocassions he   41 led his men into the meetings of those he disagreed with and started bloody fights.

Hitler was seeking and getting a reputation for being a lawless ruffian. His tactics alienated much of the law-abiding, non-violent population, but they were of no consequence. They were not the ones he was trying to attract. He was convinced that power could only be gained by using force and that violence and intimidation were valid necessities of revolution. All he needed was a large enough force of hoodlums to frighten the authorities and convince the people that he was invincible and that nothing could stop him from restoring Germany to her former glory.

The conditions for accomplishing his goal seemed right. The runaway inflation worked for him. The feeling of the majority of Germans that they had been sold out at the peace table and abandoned by the world worked in his favor. He knew they could not support their weak provincial governments for long and that the feeling of alienation was particularly strong in the rag-tag armies of the homeless, aimless remnants of the Prussian army. Being one of them, and speaking their language, being able to express their bitterness in terms they understood, he did not find it difficult to attract a following.

On December 24, 1920 Hitler released his twenty-five point program that formed the basis for all his future policies and actions. It was filled with anti-Semetic diatribes that demanded that our people become stateless.

  42

Levi, can you imagine what a sane, rational, Jewish citizen of Germany, say one who could trace his ancestors for several generations, must have thought when he read Hitler’s demands? What were they? "....That Jews be treated as aliens...be denied the right to hold public office. Be deported if the state found it impossible to feed its population and be expelled immediately if they had arrived in the provinces after August of 1914.” He did not say whether that arrival meant by birth or immigration, but that was a moot point at best.

By the end of 1920 Hitler was firmly in control of what had become the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The membership stood at three thousand and because they were the toughs, they seemed much larger in number and influence.

In fact they were so aggressive that most of the authorities were intimidated to a point where police, judges and other officials tried to avoid them. When they could not they handled them gingerly.

Under the circumstances Hitler thrived. On May Day, 1923, with a membership of almost fifty thousand, he began making demands that he assumed would lead to his taking over the governing of Bavaria. He was not seeking to do so by negotiation, but wanted a violent confrontation that would force the government out of office.

That situation did not develop as he expected. In a test of will Hitler and fifteen hundred of his followers were ordered to turn over their weapons and they complied. To Hitler’s enemies it seemed he had been humiliated and would no longer be a threat, but they   underestimated his determination and the loyalty of his followers.

After regrouping he attempted another putsch on November 8, 1923 and for the first few hours he was successful. The city officials were put under guard before they could order the police to take action, but somehow Hitler’s communications broke down and he did not order his men to take complete control while they held the advantage. In the time that was lost the police were able to take up defensive positions and free the captive officials. When the two forces faced each other across a bridge and the police fired at Hitler and his men the "Beer Hall Putsch" quickly ended.

In the smoke of that short battle Hitler had lost over a dozen of his top men and again he appeared finished as a leader. In the confusion following the battle he dissappeared. Rumors spread that he had turned and ran at the first shot, abandoning his men and their cause.

Two days later he was captured by the provincial police who found him hiding in the home of one of his loyal supporters. He had a dislocated shoulder, suffered when one of his bodyguards pulled him to the ground and out of the line of fire. His captors claimed he was cowering in a corner when they found him, frightened of what lay ahead, but if that was true his fears were groundless. For some reason the men he had tried to depose treated him with the respect usually reserved for heads of state or conquering heroes.

He was given spacious quarters and several of his aides were jailed with him to provide a staff. He served three years in Langsberg   44 Am Lech Fortress and while there firmly established his Nazi movement. He made contact with the industrialists who financed him and wrote, Mein Kampf, his blueprint for riding the world of Jews and creating his "Thousand Year Reich”.

It is very difficult, especially from a position of hindsight, to understand how the other world leaders could have so totally ignored his threats especially when he began to enforce them.

In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote, "For only in the brain of a monster- not that of man-could the plan of an organization assume form and meaning, whose activity must ultimately result in the collapse of human civilization and the consequent devastation of the world.”

He claimed to be writing about the threat of Marxism, but what was he really describing, Levi? What movement fit his description? What leader seemed possessed with the brain of a monster?

Do you daydream, Levi? Do you lay on your back in grassy fields and look for cloud images in the sky? Do you see friendly, puffy creatures that blow with the wind, change form and become knights in shiny armor? Do you wonder what the world would have been like   45 if there had been no Hitler, no anti-Semitism, no war? Do you ever wonder what your life might have been? Forget the practicalities, Levi. Deal with the questions as if the possibility existed.

Do you like being a boy from Meidzyrzec? Do you like Lubalska Street and your friends in the besmedrish²³ ?

Your grandfather felt it was the best of all possible worlds. How could he feel otherwise? He was born on April 15, 1923 into a warm, loving home. The Szapiros had a fine apartment right on the ground floor. Outside their bedroom was the hall that led to his grandparent's apartment and his aunts lived upstairs with their husbands and children.

Meyer Ruzal, your great-grandfather, owned real estate in Warsaw and Mi a dzyrzec and had a large lumber business. Working with his three sons-in-law his crews harvested trees on the estates of the local noblemen and then turned them into a variety of wooden products.

It was a good business that not only earned them a living, but gave them standing in the community and in the small besmedrish, the neighborhood shul²⁴ , that was only a few doors from their house.

Me i dzyrzec had a fine eighteenth century synagogue, but it was a twenty minute walk from the house, which was a long way on a cold morning. The Szapiros and Ruzals went there only on special ocassions. At other times they joined their neighbors at the besmedrish, which was the center of their religious and social existence.

Remember, Levi, these are your grandfather's memories recalled after a lifetime so full of varied experiences, from the depths to   46 the heights, that it is a wonder he could remember them at all. Memories are like a kaliadescope, an ever-changing view that is often distorted. They crowd and push and then bits and pieces, long forgotten, suddenly surface. Some can be recalled with crystal clarity, while others become hazy or remain just beyond our ability to recall them.

Asked about the big synagogue your grandfather recalled going there with his father when a visiting rabbi was going to speak, at the invitation of a friend or for a wedding. They never went for a bar-mitzvah because in those days a boy simply went up and read from the Torah on the day he became a man, without today’s fuss or fanfare. He remembers that the synagogue was always crowded. It had huge doors that led into a large lobby with a decorative mosaic floor that was always damp, no matter what the season. And he can not talk about it without shaking his head and smiling as he recalls how everyone was afraid they would get rheumatism from standing on the damp tiles.

As the memories crowd in the smile fades because other memories take their place. The Germans turned the synagogue into a stable for their horses and a prison for hostages. They tore holes in the roof, desecrated the Ark, burned the Torahs and murdered Jews in the lobby.

The building survived the war. It was rebuilt. It is supposed to be a synagogue again, but where are the Jews to worship there? Those like your grandfather who would have carried on the traditions   47 passed down for centuries have been scattered by the winds. So many were turned to ashes by the Germans that the few who survived could not return and resume life in the air poisoned by death and hatred.

Many, like your grandfather, could not even go back to claim what was rightfully theirs and the few who were able to could not bear to stay. So the synagogue has been restored and it stands in the center of Meidzyrzec a silent, empty rebuke-an enduring reminder.

The Szapiros named their first born, Isreal. He was a fine baby, cheerful and healthy. He grew up in a loving atmosphere, sheltered and protected, not only by his parents, grandparents and relatives, but by his neighborhood and his school. Those who attended services and classes at the besmedrish²⁵ were almost like an extended family. Everyone knew everyone else and the children were taught to respect and obey their elders.

The apartment on Lubalska Street was the center of your grand-father's world. As he remembers his mother was always bustling about. She often sent him to the grocery which was a few doors down the street. He loved to go there. The store was filled with the pungent odors of spices, dried fish and meats, fruits and grain. It was stacked high with burlap sacks filled with treasures from around the world and it sold all the staples that did not require refrigeration.

Perishable foods were bought elsewhere, from the peasant women who peddled door to door or in the open air market. Once bought they had to be quickly stored in the cold room dug out below the house   48 that could be entered only through the trapdoor in the hallway. It was a cool place both summer and winter.

Like most of the families in the neighborhood the Szapiros had an account at the grocery. Isreal would take his mother’s list and wait while the grocer put the order together, a half pound of this, a slice of that or just a pinch of a special spice needed for the supper simmering on the stove. When the order was complete the grocer added up the amount and gave Isreal the sack while he entered the amount in the ledger that he would take with him on collection day.

There was trust and a closeness in the community. Some had more than others, but basically most of the Jewish families had similar comforts and discomforts and they shared the same values.

By community standards the Szapiros were 'well off', but that does not mean they had any of the modern conveniences we take for granted. Their house was heated by wood. In the center of each apartment there was a stove topped by a four-sides columm of ceramic tile that picked up the heat and sent it into the other rooms.

This wall of tile represented many things to your grandfather, Levi. Even today, when he closes his eyes, he can see his father returning from work at the sawmill or family factory, standing with his hands behind him, backed up as close to the stove as he could get, listening to the day’s news while he soaked up the warmth. He can remember his own delight in the colors of the tiles, the images they represented and the sense of being well-off because such tile   49 columms were rarely found in the homes of the poor.

The house had no indoor plumbing. Water came from the town well. It was delivered in a big tank fitted on the back of a horse-drawn cart and pumped from there into a barrel that sat outside the kitchen door. They brought it inside for cooking or washing by the pitcherful. Milk was delivered fr^esh each morning by a peasant woman who filled the Szapiro’s milk jug from the large goatskin container she carried by a strap hung over her shoulder. The milk was raw and had to be boiled, but it was still creamy-rich and delicious after it was cooled. Eggs, cheese, fresh vegetables and fruits were bought in the marketplace where they also purchased their kosher meat from a butcher who slaughtered a calf each week. Bread was baked in the stove at home as were the cakes and cookies for the holidays.

Your grandfather remembers his mother as a robust, laughing, happy woman, almost always in the kitchen, cooking, baking, putting food up in jars. In his moemory the house was always filled with the heady odors of spices hanging in the kitchen, pots simmering on the stove, bubbling and sputtering. There always seemed to be the smell of fresh-baked chalah. When he talks about it his childhood sounds like a wonderful time of being loved. The mother he recalls was never too busy to give him a hug, talk to him or tell him a story while she worked.

In the summer, because the cities were considered unhealthy, as well as uncomfortable, all who could afford to get away went to the country. Sometimes they chose the wooded areas outside Warsaw or   50 went further to the mountains, a day's journey or more from Meidzyrzec. They rented small cottages or rooms in the huge mansions that had been converted for summer visitors when their owners fell on bad times.

(Away from the routine of the city they enjoyed the cool vistas, walks in the woods, an easier, more relaxed lifestyle and the (hot baths) and ( mineral springs ) your great-grandfather sought for his arthritis. When they could find a suitable place not too far away ( Hershel took the train back and forth and was with them every night,) but when they were far out in the country he joined them only on weekends.

Your grandfather remembers those summers as the best. It was not that he did not love his father, but that it gave him so much more of his mother. Their country places required little housekeeping. They usually shared a kitchen with several families which limited the amount of time his mother could spend at the stove and left her with extra hours for her boys.

In those times, when he saw less of his father, it seemed that the time they did spend together was richer and more meaningful. Father and son took long walks and spoke about current events, what was happening back home, what it meant to be Jewish and what it meant to be a man. And in the afternoons they went together to the mud baths and mineral springs.

Formal religious activity slowed in the summer. It was not that Hershel prayed less than the three times a day that was his habit,   51 but that in the country everything was more relaxed. Services were usually held in the large family room of the rooming house in an informal manner. They ended as soon as each man finished his prayers and there were none of the social obligations, such as finding a stranger and bringing him home for dinner. There also were no community activities to fill Friday night and half of Saturday.

Growing up was a happy experience for Isreal. Loved and loving, well cared for and learning to express himself mentally and physically, encouraged to explore, to think, feel, question, to be a good family member, a good citizen and a pious Jew. He grew up feeling good about himself and his future. Perhaps this is what gave him the strength, courage and sense of self that enabled him to survive. This, in the final analysis, may have been his inheritance, the ultimate gift from his parents. If it was it all came early in life when he was the only child because Abraham, his brother, brought up at his side, died in the camps. Maybe that means survival was nothing more than 'luck’-both good and bad.

Still, Meidzyrzec was a fine place in which to grow up. The population, just under twenty thousand, was almost all Jewish. Living within its insulated boundaries a boy could be Jewish and not fear the consequences, in fact he could be excused if he assumed the whole world was as Jewish as he was.

It is an irony, Levi, that almost defies comprehension. Your grandfather was born in the very center of a volcano, but because his parents kept him sheltered with their love he never knew there   52 was danger or felt the heat. As a result when the eruption finally came he was caught unaware. He found himself, with all the others, swept up in a situation beyond his control. He was just another of the helpless victims.

Levi, how could this all have happened? How could these people of ours end up in such a desparate condition without having been aware? There are no simple answers. Most of the small Jewish communities, such as Me i dzyrzec, were fairly self-sustaining and isolated from the world. Of course the elders and those who had contact with the world outside knew what was going on in the world, but chains forged by centuries are hard to break especially when the threat seemed intangible and there was no easy escape. It must have seemed better to shield the children, go about their business and hope for the best.

Besides, pogroms had been a fact of life for European Jews for too long to be considered catostrophic. True, they were almost always fatal to the victims, but you do not change your life because you may be one of the unlucky ones. Where would your faith be? And if they did consider running they had to face the matter practically and had to ask, where was there to go? What would they do when they   53 got there, if they got there? How could they exist if they gave up their living, friends, and way of life?

With such questions needing to be answered it was far easier to go about your business and do the best you could.

Actually the situation in Poland, in the mid 1930’s, was reminiscent of that experienced by the large plantation owners just prior to and during America’s Civil War. The wealthy tried, to the bitter end, to cling to the old ways, to their regal style of living, but it was mostly facade and they knew it. Once they lost their fortunes they had nothing but the habits forged by centuries of servitude to bind the peasants to the land, and after World War One those habits were not enough.

Your grandfather remembers the prince who lived in Me i dzyrzec. His name was Robia Yatofsky.^{HRABIA POTOTSKY} He lived in a castle in the center of town on property that had been in his family for generations. At one time the Yatofskys had owned everything, including the town, for miles around. Then wars, depressions and political changes had reduced their holdings to just a shadow of what they had been. Still, they owned a great deal of timber land, one of the three distilleries for making vodka out of potatoes and a winery.

Most of the lumber from Yatofsky's forests was bought by Meyer Ruzal and his son-in-laws. There relationship, while formal, was a good one and when the prince needed money he knew he could turn to Meyer. One day he sent a messenger who offered jewelry as collateral for a loan, but, as your grandfather remembers in one of   54 those childhood memories that are always bigger than life, "My grandfather went over to the safe and took out the money and gave it to the messenger and refused to take the jewelry. He told the messenger to tell the tradePrince they would fix it up in trade.”

Fighting to hold on to a way of life that had been theirs for centuries, and losing the battle, men like the prince began to clutch at straws. One of those straws was the National Democratic Party led by Roman Dmowski²⁶

The NDP was neither strong nor cohesive, but it had a voice way out of proportion to its strength. It was primarily the party of anti-Semitism. It blamed the 'averice’ of the Jews for all of Poland’s economic ills and staged pogroms to mask the real problems and its demands were heard at Versailles, but following the war and the granting of independence it certainly was a party that could rule.

Itn that respect the NDP was not alone. Independence, even though it came only after centuries of struggle, seemed to come to Poland too soon. After the peace conferences of 1919 and the granting of independence Poland went through a series of governments, each one less effective than the last. By 1925 her economy and policies were in such a sorry state that Josef Pilsudski²⁷ , unquestionably the most respected and beloved of all the Polish leaders, felt compelled to take over the government in a bloodless military coup.

Pilsudski was the man the Poles had been turning to for over thirty years. He had been a leader in the fight for independence   55 before the turn-of-the-century. He was a warrior, the editor of an undetrground newspaper, a rebel with a price on his head, an imprisoned martyr and then the general who led the battle that led to freedom. To the poles he was, without question, their greatest leader. With his coup he was expressing the growing sense of frustration and dissatisfaction with the splintered forces that were controlling the nation through the SEJM, the Polish congress.

When the coup was successful, seemingly to Pilsudski’s suprise, because it is not clear whether he was serious in the attempt or simply seeking to force the SEJM to change its ways, Pilsudski had to make some quick decisions. He suddenly found himself heading a government he had not expected to lead. In fact the coup put him in power before he had a chance to formulate a policy for his new government and forced him to impliment many of the demands he had made on the old government while he tried to assess his situation and decide what he wanted to do.

There was no question he could established a totalitarian government and taken complete control. Within his own country his power was greater than that of Hitler, Mussolini or Franco at the time they came to power and the people would have followed him in any direction he chose, but he did not want to be that kind of leader.

He wanted Poland to be a free nation ruled by elected officials. He had no desire to become a dictator or the leader of a coalition party that would try to lead a fractionalized SEJM from one crisis

  56 to the next. He chose instead to officially refuse to head the new government. He might rule, but it would be only in the capacity of an ‘unofficial advisor' to the government from which he banished the more outspoken opposition members and which was going to be headed by his own appointee to the presidency, Gabriel Naratowicz²⁸ .

It was hoped that Naratowicz could bring the needed stability to both the government and the economy, but he was in office only five days when he was shot by a royalist who claimed he had shot the president because he was a puppet of the Jews.

Despite all this political turmoil in Poland the outside world was barely taking notice. The Poles had been fighting amongst themselves for so long that the foreign press no longer considered the squabbles newsworthy. Besides that had a bigger story that commanded their attention. Germany had begun to flex her muscles. The territories she needed to supply the raw materials needed for her heavy industries, the St. Miheil Basin and the Rhur Valley, were still occupied by the French and Germany wanted them returned. She was also threatening to annex the Polish Corridor and to throw the Poles out of Danzig if her demands were not met.

It was a critical time for the world, in terms of peace or war, but the world seemed unaware of that fact. The Versailles Treaty had been harsh on the Germans, but no provisions had been made to force implimentation of the various clauses. Germany knew this better than anyone else and took advantage of the situation. Her boundaries with Poland had not been firmly established and when the   57 Poles were distracted by the Pilsudski takeover and the Narutowicz assasination Germany demanded a settlement of the border issue and made suggestions that were heavily in her own favor.

France strongly objected to all the German moves, but she could not get her wartime allies to back her position and she was forced to stand by helplessly as the Locarno Pacts were drawn up. The Pacts returned the Rhineland to the Germans and established her western borders with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Belguim. More than that, however, it gave Germany a sense of renewed power and let her know she could continue to pressure for territorial concessions with little fear of reprisal.

With the signing of the Pacts the United States finally felt she was free of European entanglements and the American isolationists, whose numbers were growing, were overjoyed. For her part Britain felt the continent had been stabilized and thought a new era of peace was about to begin.

Others, particularly those whose borders touched Germany’s, were not sure. Poland and Czechoslovakia were apprehensive. Both had defense pacts with the French that they considered vital to their existence. The Pact had made it obvious that the French were hardly in a position to defend their own interests and that they no longer seemed to have any influence with their allies. With this becoming apparent at the same time that Germany was showing her territorial ambitions made the situation ominous, particularly for Poland because the issue of the corridor and Danzig were still   58 to be settled.

With the death of Narutowicz Pilsudski was forced to take a more active, public role in the government. He allowed the SEJM to continue to rule, but by banning the more militant opposition parties he was able to limit the SEJM to men who would do his bidding. In the next few years he managed to force some land reform and made an attempt to stem the rise of anti-Semitism.

By doing this he risked alienating the Church which was anti-Semetic on a doctrinal basis which gave validity to the views of the anti-Semetic parties and the prejudices of the peasants. Locked to their land and their ancient superstitions for centuries they felt compelled to believe their priests. When the Church decreed that lending money for interest was contrary to G-d's law, the peasants accepted without question.

That the Church was acting more as landowner than religious leader seems without question. The decree was just another way to lock the peasant to his land. It also served to keep our people isolated and made them seem that much more evil to the peasants. The Jewish communities lent money and charged interest. Their willingness to do so was one of the reasons they were brought to Poland and allowed to settle. Lending money, transacting business, acting as agents, collectors and middlemen, for both the nobility and the Church, were the basic functions of the Jewish merchants and bankers.

It is possible the Church may not have meant to make more than   59 an academic arguement that required little more than lip service acceptance, but there were enough demagogues²⁹ in the Church to sieze the opportunity. They fanned the flames into an irrational hatred that was fed by the bigots.

Levi, we live, we die and in between we are. We exist. We experience joy, suffer through wars, we have birthdays, anniversaries, we laugh and we burn in crematoriums. When that happens some of the world weeps with us, some weep for us, some do not weep at all and life goes on.

Pogroms, bigotry, racial diatribes became a way of life in Poland. Most Jews, to avoid being targets, quickly learned what they could, or could not do, and adjusted their lives accordingly. In some areas they lived in constant fear of their lives, but not in Meidzyrzec where the Jewish population outnumbered the non-Jews eight to one. Because of that there was a sense of security in all but the few neighborhoods that were considered 'Polish'.

"Besides that,” your grandfather said reaching back in his memory, "There were some pretty tough Jewish boys in town and they let anyone   60 who looked for trouble have as much as they wanted." Still, he also remembers how his father took a public hack to the train station rather than walk through the Polish section.

When your grandfather recalls his childhood his mind seems to fill with loving recollections, activities, adventures and all the happiness that most of us associate with growing up in a healthy, loving, protected, family oriented home. That is not meant to intimate that this is the story of Huck Finn, not even a Jewish Huck Finn on the Vistula River, but only that he grew up viewing life as good and wholesome, a treasure to be cherished. Along with the good there are bittersweet memories, illnesses, deaths and other family crisis, but all within the norm and all a part of growing up.

(He remembers his grandmother becoming ill when he was still very small. He was sent away to stay with relatives and when he returned she was gone. It was a mystery that bothered him for a long time. He missed his grandmother, but he learned that life goes on.)

It was only a short time later that his grandfather, Meyer, remarried and brought his new bride home to Lubalska Street. The daughters resented her and Meyer finally moved his new family to one of his buildings in Warsaw. Your grandfather was not happy about that move. He felt he had lost both his grandparents because after that Meyer was no longer close and their special relationship ended.

One of the things he missed was his grandfather’s urging him to spend his afternoons at the besmedrish³⁰ studying the Gemorrah³¹ with the scholars. It was so important that he gave him three zloty to   61 go every day. Your grandfather enjoyed the studies, but he was not driven solely by a desire to learn. "With three zloty,” he explained, "I could take a girl to the movies every week and buy her an ice cream besides.” The movies were a popular attraction in Meidzyrzec, just as they were all over the world. Most of the movies were American made with Polish sub-titles until the 'talkies’ came along and then the American films used dubbed in voices speaking Polish.

School was the center of life that formed a core with the home and the besmedrish³² . The Jewish community revered biblical scholarship and honored the learned above all others with the exception, perhaps, of the unusually pious.

Hitler’s concept of this Jewish love for education was an amazing distortion of fact. Whether he truly believed what he preached or lied to serve his purpose is impossible to know, but in terms of the end result it seems irrevelant. In Mein Kampf he quotes what he calls his ‘facts’ knowing they were not ‘truth’ or even an attempt at truth, but simply a means to an end, a way to serve his ambitions. He wanted an army of disciples that would follow him and do his bidding without question. He wanted men with no scruples and no aversion to physical violence. While building his organization in the early twenties he purposely appealed to the basest elements in the society and melded the ruffians into a potent force by filling their heads with untruths. He wrote, "Therefore something of the most insolent lie will always remain and stick- a fact which the greatest lie virtuosi and lying clubs in the world know only too well and   62 make the most treacherous use of."

Who knows what he believed? No one really, but to the world he was a self confessed liar. He boasted about his lying and still his followers accepted his words blindly. When he wrote Mein Kampf he meant it only for his hard-core followers, the fanatics who had to be whipped into a frenzy of hate. He was not trying to convince the world, sitting there in his jail cell dictating to Rudolph Hess³³ , that the Jewish people were the enemy. He was only trying to justify the anti-Semitism that was the basis for his policies and the justification for the violent acts committed by his followers. It was only after he had become the acknowledged leader of all of Germany, war lord and master, that Mein Kampf became almost the bible of the Third Reich.

Levi, this man Hitler obviously possessed an evil genius. As a charismatic spellbinder he needed only a cause to ignite the flames. Rallying his people behind the banner of anti-Semitism he found a ready target with few defenders. Using our people as the rallying point he turned them into the focus for all the frustrations and hatred that came out of the First World War and the Versailles Treaty.

Expressing what was in the hearts of the anti-Semites he found in our people a convenient, viable target that he could use as a bargaining chip when he tested the world’s willingness to challenge him. Somehow he knew that deep inside even the most liberal government was an anti-Semetic thread that would keep those who might stop him in check. All the rationalizations do not hide the fact   63 that anti-Semitism was so entrenched in almost every government that the fate of our people who were burned in the ovens and buried in the lime pits was decided long before Hitler came to power and put the theories into practice, at least they might as well have been.

Hitler preached that Jews were a race not a religion. From 'race' we quickly became, in his lexicon, a 'parasitic race'. In the next step we became a 'conquering, parasitic race and that was his justification for seeking to exterminate us.

He wrote, "As long as the Jew has not become the master of the other peoples he must speak their languages whether he likes it or not, but as soon as they become his slaves, they would all have to learn a universal language.”

Evidently Hitler's library, which he claimed he used to self educate himself, was filled with tales of Jewish conquests in which enslaved populations were forced to learn our language. Obviously that is ridiculous and would seem to be little more than the ravings of a madman if the mass graves and cold ashes did not exist to bear witness to the fact that his words struck a responsive chord and released a force of evil that roamed the earth and ran the death camps.

But we were discussing Hitler's views of the 'parasitic race'. He discusses our "Jewish education", using the term in a sneering, derogatory way and tying it into an anti-Christ concept. He writes that we are not Christians and then calls on Christ to bear witness against us.

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"Jewish education” is an abomination. He wrote, "The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world...and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always sees in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence-in return, Christ was nailed to a cross...”

Levi, is that difficult to understand? It should be for it makes no sense. It is a total distortion, not only of the story of Christ, but of all theat Christ stands for, but still it was the seed that sprouted into the holocaust. In the world of the anti-Semite, the more audacious and absurd the lie, the more readily, it seems, it was accepted. There was another book, The Protocols of The Wise Men of Zion, whose publication was attributed to the assembly line genius Henry Ford, that was widely circulated and often quoted. It was purported to be the Zionist’s master plan for world conquest, when itn reality it was simply poorly fabricated lies put together to provide an excuse for persecution.

Hitler moved much as a spider does weaving a web. Perhaps leaders in the high levels could see what he was doing and what lay ahead, but if they did they certainly did not pass the word along. For the people in the Jewish communities where everyday life meant caring   65 for the family, religious observance and making a living there was nothing they could do about what was going on in the rest of the world so they convinced themselves there was little reason for real concern. Demagogues³⁴ had been calling for the destruction of our people since before the time of Moses, but we still existed. Other Hitlers, maybe less brutal and efficient than the ultimate Hitler turned out to be, but evil enough to leave their mark, had tried to eliminate our people and failed. What reason was there to really believe this one would succeed?

He might cause trouble. No one could deny that because of him Dmowski³⁵ and his cohorts had become bolder in Poland and were calling for new restrictive laws, but with Pilsudski³⁶ assuming control things were bound to get better and in 1926 they did, at least for a time. Under the circumstances who could be blamed for hoping they would continue to improve?

Levi, make sure you keep that in mind when you find the questions forming in your mind. "How could they not have seen what was going to happen?" "How could they have been so blind?"

No one was blind. We all try to judge the future by the past. What else is there? Our people have been persecuted, enslaved and victimized in one way or another for a very long time. We have been murdered, tortured, deported and debased. We have been forced to convert and swear allegiance to gods we did not believe in and, yet, somwhow we have survived. Why should our people have thought that events were leading to a time when we would not?

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All people, and the German citizen of the early 1930’s is as good an example as any, live by similar rules. Somehow in the daily struggle to do all we feel must be done, we take little time to dwell on the broader questions.

In 1926 the immediate concern for Poles, and almost everyone else, was the economy. With the world in the grips of one of the worst depressions in modern times it was not certain Poland and many other countries could survive. Always disadvantaged in terms of economics, the impact of the world situation was particularly hard on the Poles.

Primarily an agricultural country Poland did not enjoy the prosperity shared by the industrial nations who did not feel the affects of the depression until the early thirties. Prior to then they enjoyed a relative prosperity that was not shared by the agricultural sector. The farm prices that rose astronomically during World War One had fallen sharply almost as soon as the war ended and never rose enough to end the hardship.

Poland was also caught in another economic bind that resulted from a political situation. Despite the ongoing arguements over Danzig and the common borders between Germany and Poland, Germany was Poland’s best customer after the war. She not only bought much of what was produced on Polish farms, but also imported much of her surplus labor.

This gave Germany a political advantage that she sought to use to her advantage after the Locarno Treaties were signed and she   67 regained control of her own affairs. Knowing she had an advantage the Germans began pressuring Poland, demanding a settlement of the border disputes.

Much of the pressure was applied at Danzig, the port the two nations were supposed to share. The Poles had never been able to supplant the German majority that ran the port and did all within their power to make the Poles uncomfortable. The German demands were considered an affront to Polish pride and they reacted by announcing plans to build their own port at Gydnia.

It was a foolish over-reaction. There was not enough business for two ports, a fact that should have been taken into consideration, especially with the Polish economy already strained to the limit, but it was ignored. Then, when the Germans reacted by cutting off all Polish imports, the situation went from serious to critical.

Perhaps it could have been straightened out if Pilsudski could have retained his iron grip, but he was aging and no longer able to control policy. The parties he had banned from the SEJM were working their way back into power. It was a time of intrigue, political back-stabbing and fiery rhetoric, but all on a level that did not seem to affect everyday life in Mei dzyrzec.

At 65 Lubalska Street things went on much as they had been. Grandfather Ruzal was living in Warsaw with his new wife and his businesses were being taken care of by his son-in-laws. Hershel was still taking the hour and a half train ride to the lumber mill, although he had cut back on his workdays as business fell off, and   68 as usual, he stayed home on Fridays to prepare for the shabbat.

Hershel was a religious man. He wore his yarmilka³⁷ at all times, prayed three times a day and observed every holiday. It would seem that what rooted your grandfather's faith and gave him the strength to withstand the horrors of the camps and survive was his being brought up in such a deeply religious home.

Your grandfather was brought up Jewish in every sense. Although he does not remember that there were any strict demands made of him or his younger brother Abraham, he never forgot the sense of who or what he was. Hershel seemed content to teach his sone by example. He made sure they observed the shabbat and all the other holidays and let them make their own decisions. Whether this was because that was his nature or because he could see the storm clouds gathering is impossible to say. The fact is the boys did not wear yarmilkas or pray on a regimented schedule as their father did.

What they did do was go to school six days a week and work hard. The school, which was both elementary and high school in one, was just a few doors up Lubalska street from the house. Your grandfather could wait until he heard the bell ring before taking his lunchbox and heading out the door. Classes started early in the morning and went until two in the afternoon, with a break for lunch at eleven. After school there were classes at the besmedrish³⁸ and twice a week the students returned to school at four in the afternoon to study foreign languages.

On Friday school let out early to allow everyone to prepare for   69 the shabbath. The whole house was cleaned in anticipation of the holy day and the weekend chulent was prepared in the big iron pot that simmered on the woodstove all day. The chulent was a savory mixture of potatoes, garlic, brisket of beef and kishka, a particularly tasty delicacy made with sweetbreads. Started early in the morning the stew simmered until almost sundown. Then, in what had become a ritual, it was taken to the neighborhood bakery and put in the oven that was still hot from baking the chalah, the traditional braided white bread that symbolized the holiday. At the bakery the iron pot was sealed with moistened black bread pressed along the edge of the cover and then put in the oven with the iron pots of the neighbors.

When the boys came home from school on Friday they took a bath and put on their holiday uniform. It was no different than their daily school uniform, but it was new and kept for special occasions.

In the early evening the family walked to services. Along the way they stopped to greet friends and neighbors and to exchange a bit of news. When they reached the beshmedrish³⁹ they parted. The males going into the main section while Mala joined the other women behind the curtain in the back section.

While they waited for prayers to begin the men gathered in small groups to discuss the news of the day, the difficulties in the marketplace and the latest rumors about that crazy man who was taking over Germany. Somehow, even with the reality of Hitler’s ascension to power, his initial anti-Semetic decrees and the atrocity stories being told by the refugees who were coming in ever-increasing numbers,   70 it all seemed beyond comprehension. It was all too bizarre to believe, except perhaps in your heart. After all, they reasoned when they talked, even in a civilized country criminal elements sometimes took over for a short while. When that happened, as they all well knew, there were pogroms and murders, but the saner elements always regained control and put an end to the violence. The stories coming out of Germany, however, kept getting worse. It was almost too much to admit, so instead the story tellers became suspect. They told each other that the refugees must be exagerrating. Maybe, they said, they had to flee because they did something wrong.

With the german refugees suspect their warnings fell on deaf ears. Who could blame those future victims? Levi, if they believed what they were being told how could they have continued to function? Given the attitudes of the countries surrounding Poland as well as those in distanr nations, how would they have helped themselves? No, under the circumstances it seemed better to try and shrug off the danger and go on with life.

At sundown the men shuffled to their seats,( put on their prayer shawls) and began to pray. As each man’s turn came he went to the podium and read from the Torah. There was no rabbi to lead the congregation, only a mahrooha, a learned man, to see that every was in order.

After the service ended everyone stood around to continue the conversations started earlier in the evening and to meet any guests that had not been introduced to. After a while they went home to the   71 supper that had been left warming on the stove which retained some of its heat because the fire had been fed and banked before the sun went down. When they could they brought a stranger home, a relative from another town, a businessman or a visitor from another country. As time went on and the Nazis increased the pressure on the German Jews, more and more of the dinner guests were refugees who had fled for their lives.

Strangers were always welcome. It was an honor to have someone share your Shabbat meal and a sign that you had standing in the community.

After the meal they remained at the table sharing stories with their guest and then they went to sleep so they could rise early. In the morning they returned to the beshmedrish⁴⁰ to continue the Shabbat service and prayed until early afternoon. When they were done they again joined their friends outside to take part in the religious discussions that had been carried on for so long they seemed to have had no beginning and no end.

As the world situation worsened they tried to stick to the topics that lent meaning to their lives and gave them a sense of security, but it became more and more difficult. They could not avoid talking about the threat of Germany and the repressive measures in their own country that were making the anti-Semites bolder and bolder.

Not wanting to break off the conversations or separate from their friends they lingered as long as they could before returning to their homes for the holiday meal. Once again, if possible, they brought   72 a stranger with them. Hershel stayed with his guest while one of the other family members, your grandfather as soon as he was old enough, ran to the bakery to get the warm chulent. As soon as he returned home Mala broke away the black bread seal and the savory, steamy stew, hearty and full of vegetables and meat was ladled into bowls and eaten with chunks of braided chalah.

Do the memories seem filled with the goodness of food, Levi? If they do it is because you should keep that image in mind when you hear about the best meal your grandfather ever ate. By his own account it was scraps of dog roasted over an open fire by his German guards and thrown his way when the meat sickened them. He believes those scraps of dog landing on the floor in front of him at a time when he was starving may have saved his life. They very well may have...but that is getting ahead of ourselves. We do not want to do that, but you should know about the roasted dog. Everybody should know about the roasted dog, even if it does make it difficult to sleep at times.

Levi, by the late thirties Hitler had siezed control of every facet of German life and atrocities against the Jews were a part of his national policy. The stream of refugees trying to escape   73 through Poland had increased tenfold and their stories could no longer be dismissed or ignored.

While the world was struggling to counter the "Great Depression" Hitler had conquered it in Germany by putting his people to work building a war machine. It was contrary to the terms of the Versailles Tr[deleted][deleted]eaty, but he had renounced the treaty and defied the Allies and their impotence had made him twice as bold. With Field Marshall Herman Goering⁴¹ as his chief aide and expert on aircraft he was building an air force superior to any Europe had ever seen. At the same time he was training the Hitler youth, which numbered over seven million young people, to be ready to man the S.S., the S.A. and the German army when the time was right. It was an exciting time for the Germans and the people were lining up to support their feuhrer^?.

Hitler was making frequent public appearances, working himself and his people into a fury against the enemies of the fatherland. He was promising to build a thousand year Reich and the people were anxious to believe him. They had learned to love their feurhrer^? with a passion enjoyed by very few leaders and they were ready to follow him anywhere. Anything he said or did, or so it seemed, was greeted with cheers of approval, even his most criminal acts, but he still seemed to crave a cloak of legality. He had laws passed by the rubber stamp Reichstag, or by decree of the Feuhrer, that made mass murder, enslavement of millions and the invasion of other countries, legal acts under German law, and it was all alright because it was neat, tidy and 'legal’.

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It was much like Alice in Wonderland and her fall through the looking glass. Germany was being ruled by an evil, perverse madman and the Germans loved it. Freedom was being stripped away, her citizens were becoming tools of criminals and they thrilled to what was happening. Meanwhile a good part of the rest of the world watched with indifference, while others, the Poles in particular, tried to emulate Germany’s anti-Semetic policies.

When General Pilsudski⁴² died in 1935 his enemies charged back into power. Hard hit by the depression and unable to extricate itself from its financial woes the new government turned to the ancient ploy of diverting the peasant’s attention by blaming all their troubles on our people. Dmowski⁴³ and the anti-Semites who surrounded him pointed to the oddly dressed Jews living in their tight little communities, accepting unfair taxation and the threat of pogroms without fighting back. It had to be, the demagogues⁴⁴ claimed, because the Jews knew they were the cause of the troubles.

The danger signs were obvious. The pogroms and oppressive laws were real. The Jewish leaders were neither stupid nor blind, but what could they do about the threat that grew more serious by the hour? Times were hard for everyone and the fact was even those who could run found few places where they could go. The British, never friendly toward Jewish immigration, were becoming more restrictive in Palestine. Jewish immigration had been slowed until it was legally almost non-existent and those who were caught entering illigally were dealt with harshly.

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The Grand Mufti, the leader of the Arab world, backed by the British and befriended by the Germans, had rejected Jewish claims to the Holy Land and vowed to wage a war of terror until all the Jewish settlements were destroyed and the Jews driven from the land.

With the British doing everything they could to hinder Jewish attempts at self-defense the Jews of Palestine were having a difficult time. It meant only the hardiest, strongest pioneers could even consider trying to make the ardorous journey. This eliminated most of the sheltered Jews who inhabitated the small Polish communities where they had been brought up to honor piety, scholarship and study and to abhor violence.

Other countries, the United States in particular, also discouraged immigration and refused to grant European Jews a haven, even when it was a matter of life or death. Officially the government claimed that if they allowed the German Jews to enter America in large numbers they would be aiding the Nazis by helping them rid Germany of her Jews, and if they allowed large numbers of Jews from other countries to enter it would be unfair to the German Jews who had been refused. It was a smug, cynical subterfuge that remained basic American policy until after the war began and it was too late to help the victims of the Nazis. It was a policy that was enforced even to the point of turning away boatloads of people whose only alternative was to return to Germany and certain death.⁴⁵

And so, Levi, with no place to go and no way to change the situation, our people could only accept and make believe it would   76 all work out. That their prayers would be answered, that G-d's will would be done.

All through the thirties events seemed to be moving faster and faster. Chronic problems at the beginning of the decade suddenly became acute as the forties approached. This was particularly true in terms of anti-Semitism and the plight of our people. The Germans were setting the example, spurred by world indifference. Poland was not too far behind and growing bolder with each passing day.

Toward the end of 1938 the Polish government devised a plan to get rid of several thousand of her Jewish citizens. They ordered all those who were residing outside the country to report to the near[deleted]est Polish consulate for passport re-validation. It was an obvious ploy that would enable the government to strip the Jews of their citizenship simply by not re-validating. Without their passports they could be refused re-entry and would become stateless.

When the Germans learned of the plan they moved swiftly. They arrested all the Polish Jews they could locate, stripped them of their possessions, forced them into cattle cars and dumped them across the border in Poland.

The affair set off a chain of events that had tragic consequences for all the Jews of Europe. One of the families deported wrote to their son in Paris. Their letter, which graphically described the hardships, enraged the son. He went to the German embassy, demanded to see the ambassedor and when he was refused, killed a minor official, Ernest Von Rath⁴⁶ .

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The killing provided the Nazis with the excuse they had been waiting for. In what has become known as "The week of Broken Glass" the SS, the Brownshirts and mobs of civilian hoodlums took to the streets in a week long rampage. In their frenzy the virtually destroyed the German-Jewish community. Synagogues were burned, shops looted and homes broken into and destroyed. There was no place for our people to hide. Thousands were beaten, others were dragged off to the concentration camps and hundreds were killed. The reign of terror made headlines around the world, but for some inexplicable reason the violence was considered more of an internal affair for the Germans to concern themselves with, than an outrage to humanity.

For reasons that are impossible to fathom all during the 1930’s the press seemed to bend over backwards in their charitable reports of what was happening in Germany while at the same time they took a dim view of the same actions by the Poles. It seems that Polish anti-Semitism apparently seemed less justified. An editorial in the New York Times warned, "The spread of racial intolerance alianates from Poland the world sympathy which more than anything else won the Poles their independence.” No one could argue with that fact, but it does seem strange that the evil in Germany was not being attacked as vigorously, especially in the United States.

Of course, many in America felt could and would stay out of what was happening in Europe. The oceans gave her a sense of security. She felt because of them she could control her own destiny. The same arguements were being heard from the "America Firsters" and other   78 non-interventionists as had been heard before the First World War.The rabblerousing Father Coughlin⁴⁷ , public figures such as Charles Lindbergh⁴⁸ and Senator Burton Wheeler⁴⁹ and many others were stumping the country warning about the might of Germany and how wrong it would be for America to once again go to war in Europe. They were well meaning in most instances, but their cause was being ably supported by the large German-American community and this created an atmosphere that clouded the issues.

If you want to turn your back on injustice, Levi, first cloud the issues. The Nazis proved that if you can, even in some nebulous way, plant a seed of doubt and make people wonder if somehow the victims did not deserve their fate, the world will clutch the straw and turn its back. Anti-Semetic governments refused to hear that the victims were blameless. When they could they ignored the situation, when they could not they shifted the arguement into a debate over whether the punishment fit the crime or was too harsh.

When the United States government finally roused itself enough to protest to the German government Germany offered to release our people for large sums of money. The American government rejected the offer saying that to pay ransom would enrich the Nazis for their cruelty and set a bad example. They chose instead to take a self-righteous stand that permitted the Germans to continue to persecute with impunity. All that could be done, they said, has been done and the blood of the innocents caught in the trap was strictly on the hands of the Germans. But blood is blood, Levi, and dying is dying   79 and for the Jews of Germany placing the blame was academic. With no place to go they were doomed.

For the French and British the problems caused by the Nazi regime were much more complicated. Both had defense pacts with the countries bordering on Germany which they had signed shortly after drawing up the Versailles Treaty. The British had entered into these pacts more as a political gesture than with any thought that they would be needed to protect her sovereignty. They helped her maintain her pose as a world power, but it seems obvious she never expected to be called to protect the others who had signed or thought she would need them for her own defense.

The French, on the other hand, saw the pacts as vital for her defense. France had lived for too many years with a terrifying fear of German aggression to easily put her fears aside. For the most part it paralyzed the French both politically and militarily.

When Hitler began threatened all of Europe the British seemed reluctant, or at least unconcerned. He blatantly violated the terms of the Versailles Treaty by forming military ‘clubs’, by building an air force, by secretly manufacturing munitions, by harrassing the Poles in Danzig and demanding the return of the St. Miheils Basin and the Rhur Valley from the French and by letting its other neighbors know that their term would come. These moves terrified the French, but they felt powerless and compelled to follow the British lead and policy.

The policy seemed simple. Discourage Jewish emmigration from any   80 European country, discourage immigration to Palestine, ignore the violations of the Versailles Treaty by Germany, Give in to Hitler’s demands in the hope that each would be the last and reassure the French, Poles and the others that all treaty obligations would be honored.

All through the middle and late thirties the British prime minister, Sir Neville Chamberlain⁵⁰ , with his rolled up umbrella, was a familiar figure in the newsreels as he hopped from European capital to capital convincing his allies that it was prudent to give in to Hitler’s demands and then telling the world that there would be no more compromise.

In each instance Hitler played the game and assured the press that Germany would make no more demands, but that meant only until the next time and they all knew it. Down through history individuals have had their names linked with events that made them synonomous with their actions. In America a 'Benedict Arnold’ is a traitor. In the same vein no one can hear the name Neville Chamberlain without thinking of an ineffectual appeaser.

These were all dramas being played outside her borders, but they had a profound affect on Poland never-the-less. Germany was threatening her from one side and Russia from the other. She did not know exactly what either had in mind, but the fact that they meant to harm her was obvious. Poland tried to delude herself about the possibility of dealing with Hitler in 1936 and 1937, but she harbored no such delusions about Russia. This may have been the root cause   81 for the stringent anti-Semetic laws adopted by the Polish government. Thinking her only hope of escaping the dual threat lay in the signing of a mutual defense pact with the Germans, Poland may have been trying to show where her real sympathy lay. It was a futile delusion that impressed no one, but our suffering people.

Hitler had marked Poland for destruction. In total command of his people and his nation and certain of his cause, he felt he could do anything he pleased and he was right. There was no combination of powers willing to try and stop him and no single nation with the power or will to even try. The only possible exception was the Russians and Hitler knew this better than anyone. He was certain he would be able to defeat the Russians when he was ready, but he wanted to pick his own time and place and until then he was willing to make a pact even with the Devil.

Despite all the talk of German pride, lost honor, the disgrace of Versailles, the need for 'liebenstraum' (living space) and the need to establish the thousand year Reich, Hitler’s deepest motivation came from his racial theories and his hatred for our people. To his way of thinking the communists and bolsheviks were the greatest threat to his plans and, despite the barbaric Russian pogroms in which hundreds of thousands of our people were slaughtered by Stalin and his henchmen, to Hitler the words communist and Jew were the same. In Mein Kampf he stated this publicly. In a section titled "Jewish Tactics" he promised to pursue the Jews relentlessly because, "...Now he hopes to find the road to his own domination in the   82 worker’s struggle for existence...” According to Hitler the ultimate goal of all Jews was world conquest. He wrote, "He approaches the worker, simulates pity with his fate...he takes pains to study all the various real and imaginary hardships of life...he fans the need for social justice...he establishes the Marxist doctrine..."

Communism was a Jewish plot for world conquest. In his own mind Hitler was the only world leader with the insight, strength and power to stop them. That was his justification for anything he did.

If there is one clear message in Mein Kampf it is that Hitler could go after what he wanted with an unswerving dedication that left nothing sacred. He truly believed that anything justified the means when he had a goal or purpose. That was why he could temporarily forget what he had written in 1924 when he signed a mutual defense pact with the Russians in 1939. It was ironic, while the world waited for the two villains of the twentieth century to destroy each other, they agreed to agree.

There is no doubt that when Germany and Russia signed their treaty on September 28,1939, both were serving their own interests. They knew they would eventually fight each other for the total domination of the continent, but neither felt strong enough at that time.

Still, Levi, they were strange bedfellows. Two evil forces preparing to play a deadly game with the lives of millions of innocent people. Perhaps Hitler slept better the night yt signed their pact and Stalin dreamed sweet dreams of world conquest, but no one slept well in Poland. There everyone knew they were doomed, particularly   83 our people.

We do not control our destiny, Levi, not even when, like the Jews of Me i dzyrzec, we only want to practice our religion, do our jobs and hope for better lives for our children. It was at the Yom Kippur services at Ellsworth Air Force Base that we read the words of Ezekiel.

He said, "One third of you will die by plague or be consumed by famine among you, and one third will scatter to every wind, and I will unsheathe a sword behind them.” 5:12

"Moreover I will make you a desolation and reproach among the nations which surround you, in the sight of all who pass by.” 5:14

"Moreover I will send on you famine and wild beasts. And will bereave you of children; plague and bloodshed also will pass through you, and I will bring the sword on you. I, the Lord have spoken." 5:17

But according to Ezekiel the Lord’s anger was only temporary. He did not plan to destroy the people of Isreal, but only to bring them back to the path he had ordered them to follow.

In 39:25 the Lord relented. "Therefore thus says the Lord G-d, 'Now I shall restore the fortunes of Jacob, and have mercy on the   84 whole house of Isreal: And I shall be jealous for my holy name."

"And they shall forget their disgrace and all their treachery which they perpetrated against me, when they live securely on their own land with no one to make them afraid.” 39:26

"Then they will know that I am the Lord their G-d because I made them go into exile among the nations, and then gathered them again to their own land; and I will leave none of them there any longer.” 39:28

"And I will not hide my face from them any longer, for I shall have poured out my spirit on the house of Isreal.” 38:29

In 1939, Levi, there was no question, famine and wild beasts, plague and bloodshed, were waiting in the shadows, so close their presence could be felt.

Why did they choose Ezekiel? Was it a message from an unknown teacher, one of those whose ashes became part of the Polish countryside, a message of hope for the soon to be victims? Could it have been a coincidence that the teacher chose Ezekiel as the class play at that particular time? Perhaps, Levi, but it does not seem like coincidence, particularly in retrospect.

As a boy your grandfather loved to sing and act. He enjoyed and played all the sports, attended the movies regularly, was active in many school activities, but the school plays were special. "I participated in one hundred percent of them,” he said, "And I usually took the lead part."

By the time graduation came around it did not seem that the   85 your grandfather, or any of his classmates, had much to look forward to. Times were bad and the Polish government was doing everything possible to prevent Jewish students from attending universities, but somehow, the young do not become dispirited easily and your grandfather was pleased to play the lead role of Ezekiel in the graduation play.

The story was a reenactment of the Phrophet restoring the people, giving life to the dried bones and returning them whole to the land. It was performed in Hebrew, rather than Polish, probably to give impact to the message. When the curtain went up students, dressed in white shrouds, were piled in a heap on center stage, piled like a heap of bones. Your grandfather, wearing a fake beard and a long robe, stood off to one side, motionless. He stood there as the seconds ticked away, waiting. Finally he began to sway, moved his feet and began a dance circling the bones. As he did he chanted the words from 37:1, "The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; and it was full of bones."

The tempo increased. Ezekiel's voice rose as he spoke to the dry, unmoving bones. "So I prophisied as I was commanded; as as I prophisied there was a noise, and behold, a rattling and the bones came together, bone to its bone.”

The pile began to move, to stir and awaken. Arms stretched while Ezekiel continued to dance around them. "And I looked and behold sinews were on them, and flesh grew, and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them."

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Then the Lord commanded Ezekiel to say, "Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain that they come to life."

And suddenly the stage was alive. The heap of bones separated and began to circle the stage in a dance of life. They were, "The whole house of Isreal." It was a dance of joy. Our people were restored to the Lord their G-d. Once again Isreal lived.

The curtain came down. The parents applauded and for a little while the actors and actresses basked in the limelight and then life went on.

By early 1939 the lumber mill was closed for lack of business. Like most of their neighbors on Lubalska Street, and elsewhere, the family was suffering from the bad times and sensing the danger that threatened them all. There was much talk among the family members about emmigrating, but no one knew where they could go.

With all the restrictions and foriegn quotas leaving legally was almost impossible. They gave some thought to leaving anyway they   87 could and making their way to Palestine, but the ordeal seemed too formidable for the elders. Perhaps, they reasoned a few of the younger ones might make it, despite the British and the odds, but the rest would not and the family, as a unit, would be destroyed. It seems ironic, Levi, that that was their fear, ironic in terms of what actually happened in the future, but in 1939 they still felt they had some viable options. For a while they discussed the possibility of buying a distillery in Australia, but that also fell through and after that dissappointment they were all hard pressed to come up with another plan that would at least allow them a glimmer of hope.

Meanwhile the flood of German refugees continued to increase and their stories of German brutality and terror left no doubt about what lay ahead. Finally, Mala and Hershel decided to try and save their sons. On April 20,1939, they wrote to her cousin in Alliance, Nebraska.

Our Dear Cousins,

Your dear letter and also the money was just received and we thank you very, very much. We hope you all stay well and do well in your business. You asked if we would prefer to stay in Poland or come to the United States to be with you. Certainly we know the situation and what is happening here at this time. We are sure you are more informed about everything than we are. ...It would be a great help if we could send our boys to America. The two of us would be happy and would be able to get by. It would   88 give us peace of mind knowing that our children have a future...Especially our son (Isreaael), he is an able, healthy youngster. He is capable of doing anything. We would like you to write in detail about everything. We cannot describe our happiness when we received the letter from you and the financial help.

Best wishes for health and happiness,

Your cousins,

Mala and Hershel Szapiro

Our children send their regards, much love to you and your family.

(It must have taken all their strength and courage to write, "It would be a great help if we could send our boys to America,” but what else could they do? There were no jobs available. Isreaael, their eldest was out of high school and could not get into a university because he was Jewish. There was no way to build a future and the refugees were coming in ever increasing numbers. Beaten people, bewildered, uprooted, everything taken from them; homes, families, friends, businesses that had been built over several generations. Their way of life was gone. For some it was a life they could trace all the way back to the 1600's when their ancestors had emmigrated to Germany. All of it was gone and in its place was the horror of the "Night of Broken Glass”, the midnight raids by the gestapo, the memories of relatives who had vanished into the concentration camps, beatings and death. They were a saddened, maddened people with a   89 compulsive desire to warn their Polish brothers before they continued their flight to the east. Most were heading for Russia compelled by the need to put as much space as possible between themselves and the Germans.

For the Szapiros it was a time of helpless waiting. If their only hope was that the boys would get to America, then it was also their trap. They had to stay where they were while they waited for word from Alliance. In the meantime they tried to continue to live as normally as possible. They attended the services at the besmedrish⁵¹ . They brought home the pathetic victims of the Nazis to share their meager meals, ate quietly and listened to the stories of Nazi torture, of young boys being put to work in the coal mines and iron works after their eyes had been gouged out. Their guests heaped horror upon horror until Mala and Hershel exchanged pleading looks with each other asking, are they telling the truth? Can such things really be happening? But it really did not matter because there was nothing they could do to change the situation, nothing but pray even when prayer did not seem to work.

In August Hershel, over forty and suffering from chronic arthritis, received a notice ordering him to report for induction into the Polish army. While he was still debating with himself over whether he preferred to be killed as a soldier, or shot by the Poles as a traitor, the argument became moot.

On September 1,1939 Germany launched a massive invasion of Poland. After faking an incident on the border the Germans retaliated by   90 Xswarming across a broad front. The Poles tried to defend their land, but their cavalry was no match for the German tanks and strafing dive bombers. In some instances they managed to put up stiff resistance, but with their air force destroyed in the first day of fighting the situation for the Poles was grave.

For two weeks the Russians remained poised on Poland’s eastern border waiting to see if the Poles could manage a counter-attack. When it became obvious that the Poles did not have the resources to resist the Germans and that the war had come down to little more than mopping-up actions by the Germans the Russians moved in. On September 17, 1939 their troops poured across the eastern border, crossed the Bug River, drove several miles beyond Me i dzyrzec and stopped just short of Warsaw on the eastern bank of the Vistula River. It was the line that had been agreed upon when the Germans and Russians signed their non-aggression pact.

In Me i dzyrzec, which was sixty miles due east of Warsaw, and well within the Russian zone, there had been little fighting. The Germans had come first. They showed up one morning in their tanks and headed straight for the brewery where they loaded up with cases of wine and then left.

Your grandfather remembers how they were all hiding. "We were looking through the windows in our house. I saw a priest walking down the street and they were yelling at him in German to get off the street."

The Germans were gone a day when the Russians arrived and the   91 difference between the orderly, disciplined Germans and the rag-tag Red army was statling.

The day Me i dzyrzec became German instead of Russian remains vivid in your grandfather’s memory. "The Germans had cigarette packages all made real fancy," he said. "The Russians used newspapers, three or four months old, to roll their cigarettes. The Russian soldiers were trying to buy watches from us, anything that looked like a watch. When you took an alarm clock with a chain on it to them, they would put it in their pocket and pay you anything you wanted."

It was a strange time for the people of Me i dzyrzec. Having heard the stories of the German Jews and knowing so many of them had gone on into Russia, they did not fear the Russians or see them as oppressive conquerers. Most of the townspeople were ready to greet them as liberators. Anyone, they reasoned, would be preferable to the Germans, but it was a short-lived relief.

The Germans were upset by the Russian’s timidity. They had expected the Russian army to invade Poland at the same time they did so that the Poles would have to fight on two fronts. When the Russians stayed back Polish resistance stiffened and many Germans died in the weeks of fighting. When the Russians finally made their move the Germans viewed their contribution as too little and too late and Hitler demanded a larger share of the Polish spoils. Russia agreed and pulled back to the eastern shore of the Bug River. )

After only ten days of Russian occupation Me i dzyrzec was in the hands of the Germans. Our people were understandably frightened.

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XThose with young sons were particularly so because their minds were filled with the horror stories of the German refugees. Feeling they had no choice, most decided to send their sons to the Russians.

Your grandfather was given a knapsack with bread, meat and a change of clothes, told to look after his brother, Abraham, kissed goodbye and told to make his way to the other side of the Bug River, to the territory occupied by the Red army.

The boys walked the forty miles to the river, joined by an ever increasing stream of refugees, mostly young men like themselves, until they reached the river crossing and became part of the huge crowd that could go no further. The Russians had set up a roadblock at the bridge and were turning away all but their own agents and known communists.

,Above all your grandfather remembers the crowd, the chaos and how pleased he was when the Russians refused to allow him to cross, which meant he had no choice but to return home. Despite the threat of the Nazis, the thought of being on his own was frightening. He was only seventeen and had never been away from his parents, or his home, except in summer when they took him on vacation.

What would happen to his parents back in Me i dzyrzec was his major concern. Left alone with the Germans and the Polish anti-Semites, facing a hopeless future, your grandfather felt they should at least be together. He had left at their urging only because he had been brought up to obey.

The brothers returned to a tearful reunion and the family took   93 its place in the community.

It was a frightening time for our people. Me i dzyrzec was occupied by a nation whose leader had sworn to rid the world of our people. There was nothing they could do to help themselves beyond waiting, hoping and surviving as best they could by trading with the German soldiers who did not seem as monsterous as had been feared. They were like soldiers everywhere. For the essentials they needed to sustain life the Jews of Me i dzyrzec gave away what in other times had been considered family treasures. Somehow it did not seem to matter so much. At least, they reasoned, we are still alive.

But always, hanging over them like an avenging angel, there was Hitler’s threats and the stories of the atrocities committed against the German Jews. No matter what they were doing they could not escape the fear and nagging doubts and it was not long before their fears became reality. Shortly after the occupation the Germans forced the Jews of Me i dzyrzec into a ghetto.

That fear, by the way, was not a haphazard by-product of the terror, but a calculated part of the Nazi plan. Hitler had once said, "I use my intelligence to help me manoeuvre him (Jews) into a tight corner, so that he cannot strike back, and then I deliver the fatal blow.”

The ghetto was a corner. The family was forced to leave their home on Lubalska Street with nothing but the clothing on their backs and the few small things they could carry. They were sent to the section set aside for the Jews and felt themselves lucky when they   94 found quarters with another family.

It was a terrible shock, but at least, as your grandfather said, "...the family was still together. They chased us from our house. We went to live with somebody else, but we were still together. I’ll tell you what the feeling was. At that time the United States wasn’t in the war yet, but we heard rumors that they were going to come in and we were saying that as soon as they did it would take two days and the war would be over. That was our feeling at the time. It took the British a couple of weeks, or something like that, to get into the war, so first we were saying that when the British came in it would be over in no time. Then we saw the British got into the war and it didn’t get over so we were counting on the Americans. We lived with great expectations and great hope for somebody to come in so it would be over before they had a chance to do away with us. That’s what we were living for."

They were sustained by hope, Levi. They were able to put up with anything just as long as the hope remained that they would be rescued before it was too late.

Somehow they managed to make it through the winter and spring   95 (as they settled into a routine of bare survival, but then the Germans shook the community by increasing their demands. It was another step toward the Final Solution.

The Jewish Council which had been appointed by the Germans to adminster Jewish affairs, at their bidding, was ordered to gather a work detail that would be sent out of the city to dig irrigation ditches. Your grandfather was one of the four hundred young men ordered to join the crew.

Again he faced a separation from his family, but they were not particularly alarmed or concerned that they would not see each other again. People were being shot on the street for no reason and some were being grabbed and taken to the synagogue where they were held for ransom, but the promises made to the work gangs were being kept. The systematic extermination had not begun, although the machinery had been set in motion.)

Hitler had ordered Heinrich Himmler⁵² to begin to plan for the Final Solution. He claimed that the task seemed so horrendous that he was not sure he could ask his loyal SS to attempt it, but then he realized it was a "Feuhrer Order” and had to be obeyed. He began talking to the experts about gas chambers. They seemed a logical method of execution and had been used effectively when the inmates of the German insane asylums and hospitals for incurable diseases had been eliminated. He talked to the builders of the crematoriums, discussed the logistics of transporting large groups by rail and recruited his executioners. He organized the Eisengruppenstadt, the   96 killers who swept in behind the army that invaded Russia and the SS guards who would run the camps. While our people did their best to stay alive one day at a time, the aAdolph eEichmanns, the Reinhard Heydrichs⁵³ and others like Hans Frank⁵⁴ , the Governor-General of Poland, Eric Koch⁵⁵ , who became commandant of Buchenwald, Rudolph Hoess⁵⁶ , the head of the Auschwitz complex, the chemists who formulated Zyklon-B and the oven makers who proudly produced the crematoriums; all were hard at work.

Still there are 'revisionist’ historians who argue that the death camps were not part of a master plan, but something that simply evolved. They claim that they were actually the brainchild of Himmler and were built and operated without the Feurhrer’s knowledge. The point is argued as if it really matters whether Himmler was following a "Feurhrer Order” or was acting independently. If the 'revisionists’ are correct then Hitler was one shade of monster, if they are wrong he was another. At best it is an arguement of degree.

In a sense to even discuss the point seems wrong because it seems to attempt to reduce the horror to a matter of blame and to move the dead one step further from the reality of their death. The whole discussion brings us back to the Nazi’s compulsive need for 'legality'. Their crimes had to clear through channels, the channels created by their demented, twisted logic. When the war criminals were brought to trial they all defended themselves by citing the 'law’ and said, "I was only doing my job.” They said,   101 they had to be destroyed. Who can doubt this was the singleminded purpose of the man who wrote in Mein Kampf, "No persecution can deter him from his type of human exploitation, none can drive him away; every persecution he is back again in a short time, and just the same as before."

In that, Levi, Hitler was wrong. Our people have not returned in any number to Germany and she is a poorer nation, spiritually and intellectually as a result. The Jews have not returned to Poland either, and while it may be coincidental, there is no more beaten, downtrodden country in Europe, or one with less hope and less future. Poland, now a Russian satelite, is struggling to retain its national identity and is failing because it has no valid reason to exist and no nationalistic spirit to sustain it. The Polish soul died in the gas chambers and burned in the crematoriums along with our people. Poland is still an anti-Semetic nation, but now it does not seem to matter. The Jewish survivors did not choose to return. Before the war there were three and a half million Polish Jews. There are less than ten thousand living there now. Poland is a ghost haunted by her own guilt.

The Nazis invaded many countries, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Yugoslovia, Belgium, France, Norway, Denmark and others. All lost, but only those who abandoned their sense of morality, who went over to the enemy, embraced the Nazi philosophy and helped exterminate their fellow citizens, did not recover. They simply lost their reason for existence.

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Levi, there is a moral force that transcends man's machinations. Palestine became Isreaael. Isreaael exists. It has problems and has been at war, for all intents and purposes, since its inception in 1948, but Isreaael exists and will continue to exist until, and unless the whole world ends in a Final Solution. Future Hitlers must never be allowed to forget this, not even for a moment.

Believing, as he did, that that our people were a plague that would continue to contaminate as long as the Jewish 'race' existed, it seems obvious that he never considered resettlement as a solution to the "Jewish Problem”, no matter what his propaganda machine told the world. The Nazis spoke about resettlement to buy time to build their killing centers and the world listened complacently.

If any government had cared enough to ask where the settlements would be, what could the Nazis have answered? The east? The east meant Russia and that myth was destroyed as soon as the Germans invaded and sent their murder squads, the killers of the Eizengruppen to destroy the Jews in the captured territory. They were hand-picked, unique men, these cold-blooded killers who could murder with impunity. Driving trucks specialy built so they could be loaded with people and destroyed by the gas from the engine exhaust, manned with roaming squads of executioners willing, as they were at Babi Yar, to shoot one hundred thousand or more innocents before moving on, they proved that the Final Solution meant no more or less than the death of every Jewish person on earth.

Murder was a policy of the German government, murder in such   103 huge numbers that the problems of logistics were staggering. The victims had to be transported to the staging areas, the methods of killing and then disposing of the parts of the bodies that could not be 'used', the hair, the gold in the teeth, all had to be considered and resolved before the mass exterminations could begin. To speed the process the Germans assigned men with a genius for that sort of planning, men who had displayed unusual loyalty and proven they would not cringe at the thought of mass killing or be bothered by conscience, men like Adolph Eichmann⁵⁷ and his immediate superior, Heinrich Himmler⁵⁸ .

Still the planning took time and while they waited for rescue or death the Jews of Europe were herded together in the Polish cities ringing the death camps. The Nazis had decided that the killings could not take place on German soil. Whether that was in deference to the sensibilities of their people, the preparation of a defense in case the invincible thousand year Reich proved vunerable or the result of some aryan concept beyond comprehension, is difficult to say. It seems foolish, Levi, to even try and guess. What matters is that as our people were brought together they were already dead as far as the Nazis were concerned. They were no longer human beings with needs and feelings, but a commodity to be used and discarded.

This concept enabled the Nazis to inflict the most horrible cruelties in a calculated, dispassionate manner. It enabled them to ignore the basic needs of millions of people and to systematically rob them of everything needed to sustain life. The stories of babies   104 being snatched from their mother’s arms, smashed on the ground or tossed into boxcars like so much cordwood are so common and numerous that they cannot be doubted. That, if for no other reason, Levi, is why each story must be recorded, told and retold in every city, in every place where two people gather, told so the world will remember and know.

(So the belly of Poland became swollen with displaced Jews. In Me i dzyrzec most of the Jewish people were routed from their homes and forced to crowd into the small section allowed them. Your grandfather and his family had to give up their home at 65 Lubalska Street, give up all their possessions and crowd in with a family living in a small apartment at 12 Gerasna Street. They had to learn how to live behind stone walls and how to live with or evade the harsh rules the Germans enforced with their guns and terror tactics.

Shortly after the ghetto was formed the refugees began arriving. They came in trucks, cattlecars and boxcars. By April, 1940 over ten thousand had been brought to Me i dzyrzec and forced to live in the tiny section that could barely hold them. They came from Poznan to the west, Bialystok to the north and Cracow to the south. None came from the east because the Russians controlled the area beyond the Bug River until the Nazis broke their treaty with them and invaded and pushed the Red Army back and then the Eisengruppen made transport unnecassary.

When your grandfather returned to Me i dzyrzec from his ditch digging he was reunited with his parents and brother and they were   105 happy to be back together. Despite the drastic change in their lifestyle and the ever=present danger, life had not yet become impossible for them. There were no jobs, but they could manage by trading with the soldiers, trading black market goods and the products of the cottage industries who made the things the German soldiers wanted out of whatever materials were on hand and by running errands for the officers who staffed the German headquarters.

Some help was received from the Jewish organizations outside Poland. The Shapiros, because they had relatives in Nebraska, were more fortunate in this respect than most. On July 16,1940 Mala wrote her cousins and said,

(Dear Cousins,

Your letter of June 26 was received for which we thank and acknowledge. We are very happy that you are well and all is going well for you. We are well here, but we are puzzled by your mentioning money. We never mentioned any money in our letters and as of today have received none. Our friends received from their relatives food packages...cocoa, sugar, canned goods, and also used shoes and clothing. If you could we would very much appreciate packages of the same kind. You can get information on how to send the packages from the HIAS. We are waiting from you good news. )

Remember, Levi, these were people who were used to lending money to princes and to trading on an international level. If there was   106 anything harder than the threats and hunger, which was not yet acute, it was the loss of control over their own destiny. That is why your grandfather remembers with a sense of pride the times he was able to outwit the Germans and the times they were treated with respect.

XHe remembers the day the Germans took over from the Russians. "On that day," he said, "a German officer came to see my father. He bought lumber from us before things got bad and he was paying his respects. He told us not to tell anyone he had been there, but he had to come. It was only right."

There were other times. "They made us wear the Star of David on our jacket. If they saw you without it they would shoot you dead-no questions asked. Whenever I could I would carry a German uniform like I was taking it to the cleaners and I would drape it over the star."

No matter what the circumstances, what the risk, chances had to be taken, sometimes for survival, sometimes for your own self respect. "When they forced us out of our house we moved in with this family where the man dealt in leather. That was illegal and they were always coming to the house to search under the floorboards or in the attic. I used to bring home with me (from the German head-quarters where I was working) a German uniform to drape over a chair-so they would know I worked for them and not bother us much."

Above all you needed your wits to survive. "When the ghetto was formed you needed papers to get in or out and they wouldn’t just give the papers to anybody. I got mine because of my job at their

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Inwardly they must have known their hopes were built on desire born of desperation, but they had to keep up appearances for the others. Treblinka was a fact of life and death that cast a shadow over their world. The myth of 'resettlement' had been destroyed by the few who had escaped the transports to Treblinka and returned to describe what they had witnessed. They should have kept going, but instead they returned because no one could see the mounting piles of eyeglasses, shoes, human hair, or smell the cloud of death that hung over the crematoriums and not become a zealot dtermined to warn even those who refused to believe. They were much like the reluctant Old Testament phrophets who were forced, often against their will, to carry G-d’s message to the people.

After the deportation of August, 1942, transports became a part of everyday life. There were two in October and another in December. It was obvious that the people were being taken away as fast as the German death machine could absorb them, it all came down to a matter of time. And in the meantime those who remained were forced into a ghetto that grew smaller, and more like a prison, every moment. They were not allowed to leave or enter without proper credentials. Every evening some who were starving, or so sick they knew they would die if they did not get out and get medication, tried to slip away. Few were successful and all who were caught were executed.

Your grandfather still had his job with the Germans as did his father and brother. This made life a bit more tolerable for them and enabled your grandfather to help many of his friends in the ghetto.

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die at the hands of our people. Tanks were stopped by home-made bombs, soldiers attacked from sewer bunkers, cellars and rooftops. Embarrassed in front of the world the vaunted German army began a final action against the ghetto on April 19,1943. It was the first day of Passover.

Each day as the fighting raged from house to house and block to block the ranks of the freedom fighters grew smaller. Some were captured, others shot. Many were blown up in their crude bunkers or killed in a suicidal attack on their heavily armed tormentors. But all who died died hard and the cost to the Germans, in lives, was extremely high.

In all it took twenty-eight days to reduce the ghetto to rubble, to collapse the underground bunkers, blow up the sewers and raze the buildings. It was only then, with practically all the freedom fighters dead, that the fighting ended. Warsaw was 'Judenrein’, but to the Jews of the world, those in the camps and those living safely in America, it was a victory without equal. The razed ghetto was a monument to Jewish courage that surpassed all others.

To the world, although they may not have been aware of it at the time, the uprising was an object lesson never to be forgotten. After Warsaw our people had to be dealt with in a different manner, had to be viewed with different eyes. Having fought we could never again be taken for granted.

All but a hundred or so who made it through the sewers and then successfully evaded both German and Polish searching parties, had

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scientists and manufacturers worked constantly on the development of better-meaning faster-, more efficient methods of killing and disposing of bodies. Because it was a 'Feurher order’ they were filled with a sense of rightiousness. They were drunk on blood, the blood of our people. They were drunk with power and determined to kill.

Auschwitz was the largest of the camp complexes. It had three branches. Number One was the killing camp. Birkeneau, also known as Auschwitz Two, was the basic labor camp, which in no ways means the daily death rate was not horrendously high. Buna, sometimes called Auschwitz Three, was the slave labor camp built to supply the labor for the I.G. Farben plant that was set up to manufacture synthetic rubber⁵⁹ . The factory and camp had been built to utilize the slave labor. The industrialists and the SS signed contracts. Farben paid so much a head for workers who could be worked to death and easily replaced. It seemed of little concern to the industrialists or the SS whether a prisoner died in the gas chambers, on the gallows or was worked to death in a factory. It was only important to the victims.

For the prisoners the one goal was staying alive one more hour, one more day. The goal was to still be there when the Russians or Americans broke the back of the German defenses and freed the camp. Those who could no longer believe ran into the wire or lay in their bunks until the SS came to take them away. No one blamed them for choosing a quick death rather than one of starvation, terror and being worked until you dropped.

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The story of two brothers sticks in your grandfather's mind. He remembers, "...they were eating salt, a lot of salt. They traded everything for salt and when you eat salt you get dehydrated and those two were like skin and bones. One of them I buried and the other one died too. You couldn't exist on a hundred calories a day."

And when he was asked if any of the other prisoners had tried to reason with the brothers or stop them the answer was a terse, "never". With each man living in his own private hell none felt he had a right to interfere with the choice of another. Who could say that he was right to continue the struggle and the musselmen were wrong for choosing a quick death?

Birkeneau became the assembly area for the labor pools of Buna. With the need for slave labor seemingly insatiable the camp grew and the prisoners resigned. With the words "Work is Freedom" above the main Auschwitz gate mocking them, they settled into their inhuman existence. Those who did not choose death did all they could to stay alive. For them nothing else mattered. They made their decision and stayed with it with singleminded determination. Death might have been a release, but it would have also been a victory for their tormentors and for a man like your grandfather that was enough to make him, not only cling, but fight for life.

He said, "...a human being can endure anything. Somehow, you just, you know if get it, you can't, and you just live without it. You know you can't get gloves or extra clothes, but you don't freeze, you just learn to live with whatever you have."

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hung over the crematorium and touched everything and everyone in the camp. The rumors could instill a bit of hope, but they could not still the fear or ease the hunger.

But the fact was the Germans were losing. They were being forced back by the Russians and it was only a matter of time before they would be forced out of Poland. It seems inconceivable that when they began losing the battles they did not abandon the camps to concentrate on the fight, but they did not. The Nazi obsession with the 'Final Solution' grew stronger in adversity and the killings increased as the Russians neared Auschwitz.

Once again your grandfather was forced to work in the bath house, only this time as a sunderkommando, one of those who worked the gas chambers and the crematoriums. As the boxcars arrived an immediate selection was made. A few of the able-bodied were added to the work crews. The rest were sent to their deaths.

Sometimes your grandfather was assigned to calm the victims as they entered the 'showers', a large brick and cement enclosure lined with showerheads. At some of the camps the Nazis added a touch of realism by putting up soap dishes holding bars of soap that were never used. At intervals inside the enclosure there were large metal mesh tubes that ran from floor to ceiling. These were designed to hold the crystals of Zyklon B. When the showers were turned on the crystals dissolved and became a deadly gas that killed the roomful of innocents in fifteen to twenty minutes.

Then the sunderkommandos were sent in to clear the bodies, take   141 them to the ovens and then prepare the compound for the next group of victims. It was a grisly task, unending, unrelenting, heartbreaking. With no other choice but immediate death as an alternative, the sunderkommandos did their jobs. Still, because the Nazis sensed they would do so for only so long, after a short while each kommando group was exterminated and replaced with a fresh crew from the seemingly endless supply. There is no doubt, Levi, that your grandfather would not have been allowed to live for many more days if his ‘luck’ had not saved him once again.

The Germans were running out of time and they knew it. The Russians were moving in and the Americans, with their bases established in England, were fast destroying Germany’s ability to manufacture with their bombing raids.

What had been heady rallies, party picnics, brownshirt parades and news from the front of glorious victories had suddenly become a hell for German civilians as the Americans dropped their bombs on Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart and all the others. They also raided deep into Poland and the other occupied countries by having their bombers fly on to bases in Russia after the missions were completed.

Why they did not use that same striking power to bomb the death camps and put the exterminators of people out of business is a question that has been asked since the war ended. It will continue to be asked as long as the holocaust is remembered, but no one expects an answer.

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Your grandfather tried to get assigned to the nightshift as much as he could. At night, when the bombers were in the area, the Germans were afraid sparks from the locomotive would give away their position, and all work stopped. Sometimes an entire night went by with the men sitting in the tunnel entrances, doing nothing, waiting for the all clear to sound.

By April the Russians were on German soil and threatening to sweep through Berlin. From the Allied point of view the war was all but over, with only the mopping up of small pockets of resistance still to be done. Churchhill, Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had met at Yalta to divide Europe into speres of influence and everything was on schedule.)

With their fate known, the Germans were faced with hard choices. Surrender, particularly for those who would end up in the Russian sectors, seemed out of the question. Russia’s anger and need for vengeance was very real. Having lost over twenty million people in the camps, in the defense of their cities and in the massacres such as the one at Babi Yar, to expect mercy from them was to expect too much.

The Germans could have tried to marshal their forces, the few that remained. They could have abandoned the camps and prisoners and used all their forces in a last-ditch defense of Berlin. That might have given them enough time to trade surrender for some kind of terms, but somehow the twisted logic of the German leaders precluded such action. In retrospect it seems there was no limit to the