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My friend Sol is a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor. He turned 94 on April
11, the same day on
which he was liberated
from Buchenwald, on his
15th birthday, in 1945.
A few years ago, on my
weekly Meals-on-Wheels
route, when Sol told me he
was a survivor he sat me
down on a chair in his
driveway, pulled up his
sleeve and showed me his
tattoo from Auschwitz.
Originally from Lithuania,
Sol had been imprisoned in
a number of camps before
Buchenwald.
With his five-digit
branding an emblem of the
barbaric atrocities we are
still grappling with
today, Sol began to
unravel stories of the
camps, painting scenes
that defied belief,
describing the gas
chambers and his
day-to-day subsistence on
a piece of bread made of
flour and sawdust.
When I asked him how he
wound up at Buchenwald,
Sol told me of the
infamous Death March from
Auschwitz. With Soviet
troops closing in, the
Nazis evacuated tens of
thousands of prisoners
from Auschwitz and its
sub-camps during the
brutal Polish
winter—January,
1945—on a days-long
march into German
territory to board
transport for other camps
like Buchenwald. It was at
least a one-hundred-mile
trek. Thousands, clad only
in their camp
“pajamas,”
perished in the below-zero
weather, or were shot for
being too weak to go on.
Somehow, Sol was one who
made it out alive. Elie
Weisel, the future Nobel
peace laureate, was
another.
Sol’s stories were
not conveyed to evoke pity
but, in a curious way,
gratitude. Aware that I
was Jewish, I think Sol
wanted me to know that,
with it all, “this
little Jew,” as he
called himself, had had
the wits, courage and
faith to survive. In his
own way, he was saying,
they couldn’t kill
us all.
Then, as though lecturing from a bimah,
Sol spoke about God and
fate, life’s twists
and turns, in plain
language, unadorned by
liturgy. I listened
intently, holding back
tears.
Jews weeping: it comes
with the territory. We
wept over Pittsburgh. We
wept over Oct. 7. In light
of Gaza, we weep now, in a
blizzard of confusion over
where our greatest sorrows
lay, what will become,
what it means to be Jewish
in a threatening world.
After the unspeakable
brutality perpetrated by
Hamas on Oct. 7, the
language of the
Holocaust—“gas
chambers,”
“death camps,”
“crematoria,”
“mass graves,”
“Zyklon B,”
“Kristallnacht,”
“Babi Yar,”
and all the rest—has
drifted much closer.
Until then, we could try
and avert our eyes when
confronting the
catastrophe, as when the
iconic photos of emaciated
camp prisoners pop up
again and again, signaling
a hopelessness that cries
out for an answer to
whether good can conquer
evil.
In the last eight months,
the Holocaust, to me and
so many others, has felt
like a haunting shadow,
the devil’s work
again at our front door.
While I have often
immersed myself in
Holocaust
memory—reading
numerous volumes, visiting
the remains of European
ghettos, attending
services at historic
synagogues, viewing
Holocaust memorials and
museums worldwide, even
making what I would call a
“pilgrimage”
to Auschwitz
itself—the tragedy
of the six million always
seemed out of reach, a
history on the edges of
reality, too traumatic to
bear without a personal
connection that would
humanize it for me.
I knew the trauma would
always be there, lurking.
Now, at least, I could put
a face on it. Sol touched
me with the intimacy I
needed. He gave me a stake
in our history.
The conflict over
emotional
proximity—to be
close enough to fulfill a
“duty” but at
the same time far enough
away for some
“protection”—was
explored by the scholar
Daniel Mendelsohn, in his
brilliant work, “The
Lost,” in which he
investigated the deaths of
six relatives who perished
in the War.
In a quest that took him
to Israel, central Europe
and even Australia,
seeking shards of
knowledge from survivors,
Mendelsohn observed that
the Holocaust was so
“gigantic”
that it was easy to think
of as
“mechanical”;
however, posed Mendelsohn,
everything that happened
did so because, one by
one, “somebody made
a decision.”
Mendelsohn acquired an
intimacy with the family
he never knew but went to
“find,”
learning heart-breaking
details that satisfied his
intellectual rigor but
took him far out of his
comfort zone. Since the
Holocaust presents the
unanswerable, Mendelsohn
attempted to find some
biblical coherence
straight out of ancient
texts.
I have had my own version
of “survivor’s
guilt”: mourning the
Holocaust victims while
reciting Kaddish in something of a ritualistic vacuum. Sol’s embrace has allowed me permission, if you will, to take on a bit of “ownership” in which, perhaps perversely so, I could share as witness to the Jewish tragedy.
As with Mendelsohn, I
wanted my connection to
what happened to be more
authentic. Not just in
books and old cemeteries,
not just in the bracing
sterility of the Auschwitz
crematoria and the encased
displays of victims’
eyeglasses, but in a person who was there,
who went through it, the
little Jew who could
testify.
My friend Sol.
To this day, I am not
aware of any personal
family member lost to the
War, or one who survived
the camps. I grew up in
the nineteen-fifties. The
events of the Holocaust,
merely a decade old, were
barely whispered in my
household: they were too
raw to touch, too shameful
to admit, too catastrophic
to accept. Better left
unspoken. All I heard was
that my mother’s
best friend’s family
“was wiped
out.”
My fears and bewilderment
of being kept in the dark
were baked into my tender
childhood psyche one year
on the High Holy Days when
I accompanied my maternal
grandfather--who’d
come from Poland and spoke
only Yiddish--up the
stairs to a walk-up shul
in Boro Park to daven with his congregation. It was there that I witnessed my first inkling of the grief conferred by my heritage—old, haggard men, swaying mournfully in prayer, with numbers visible on their arms.
One day I was rejoicing
over the Dodgers’
first World Series win
against the Yankees, the
next I was shaken as a
witness to the symbol of
hell endured by my
forebears, a hell that
seemed to mandate a
lifetime of wrenching
sorrow.
Like others, I worry that
the Holocaust has become
commodified, and the camps
trivialized like theme
parks. When I visited
Auschwitz years ago, I was
disturbed by what I
considered the vulgarity
of a shop outside the
premises selling photo
albums and other
souvenirs.
Auschwitz! Auschwitz! Get your Auschwitz tchotchkes! Never forget!
Is renewal possible if one never forgets?
In Vasily Grossman’s
World War II masterpiece,
“Life And
Fate,” about
Hitler’s fight
against Stalin’s
Russia, and the
concomitant Holocaust,
Grossman depicted kindness
and grace in the midst of
cruelty, holding fast to
the “stubborn
beauty” of
man--paradoxically
perhaps--to overcome the
inhumanity of man.
Grossman wrote:
“Human history is a
battle fought by great
evil struggling to crush a
small kernel of human
kindness.”
As always, I took Sol out
to lunch on his birthday.
Physically, he can still
get around. He is twice
widowed and lives with a
daughter (Sol has two
daughters, a son, one
grandchild and five
step-grandchildren) in New
Jersey. When I see him
weekly, Sol likes to joke
around about
“chasing
girls” in his
community. He pronounces
girls “goyls.”
Who knows what torment
still stirs his heart?
Better to try and laugh
than remember images of
innocents shot to death
and thrown into vast pits,
the earth moving for days
after.
Originally from the city
of Kovno (now Kaunas),
once the Lithuanian
capital, Sol is a member
of an exclusive club,
known as “The Boys
of Buchenwald.”
These were the young male
Jews numbering about
one-thousand who survived
the horrors of Buchenwald
and were liberated by U.S.
troops that April day of
1945.
After liberation, Sol,
along with Elie Weisel,
were among more than 400
boys from Buchenwald taken
to a Jewish humanitarian
organization in the north
of France, Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants,
essentially an orphanage.
The center was in the
Normandy region where the
D-Day battle between the
allies and Germans had
been fought a year earlier.
During the War, ninety-six
percent of
Lithuania’s Jews, or
212,000 out of 220,000,
died at the hands of the
Nazis. After liberation,
Sol learned that his
mother had perished in an
allied bombing and that
his father along with his
brothers had survived a
Death March of their own
from the Dachau camp.
As though to bear witness
in my own
way—reconciling
closeness with
distance—I keep
scrapbooks of news
clippings with obituaries
of survivors and rescuers,
as a collective document
of testimony and honor, Kaddish on newsprint, photos included, so to speak.
One survivor story in
particular is close to
home—that of the
cantor David Wisnia, the
father of our former rabbi
at the synagogue where my
wife and I are members.
Titled “Lovers in
Auschwitz,
Reunited,” the
piece, from The New York Times, told of Wisnia’s clandestine rendezvous with a female inmate within steps of the crematoria, and has since been expanded into a recently published book.
In 1947, while still in
France, Sol was contacted
by an older cousin in the
U.S., who made
arrangements for his
passage on a ship to New
York, a two-week journey.
In 1950, Sol joined the
U.S. army, serving during
the Korean War. In 1952,
while stationed in
Germany, Sol, then five
years in America, received
his U.S. citizenship, in
Frankfort of all places.
Before the War, there were
30,000 Jews in Frankfort,
the largest Jewish
community in all of
Germany. After the War,
about 100 were left.
Amid today’s
far-right historical
revisionism, and with the
survivor population
passing on, it remains for
people of conscience to
keep Holocaust memory
alive.
Most studies find that as
many as two-thirds of
Americans know little to
nothing about the
Holocaust. Holocaust books
are being banned by boards
of education in many
states and, a few years
ago a Wisconsin Republican
state representative
offered that the teaching
of the Holocaust should
include “the
perspective of the German
soldier.”
Immersive perspectives of
the perpetrators of evil
reveal that it was not
only the German military
and Nazis that murdered
Jews, but that many
“ordinary
Germans” were
complicit in
“eliminationist”
crimes, spelled out in
copious detail by Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen in his
landmark work,
“Hitler’s
Willing
Executioners.”
Today, perspective is
being toyed with by
Holocaust-deniers, granted
legitimacy by dark
interests and amplified by
media hijackers,
especially in the
aftermath of Oct. 7.
“Memory without
history,” Timothy
Snyder wrote in
“Bloodlands,”
his colossal work about
the War’s mass
murders, “fades into
forgetfulness.”
Sol’s family roots
in Lithuania go back to
the Spanish Inquisition of
the 15th century, under
the rein of Queen Isabella
and King Ferdinand. Jews
fled under threat of
death—and many were
executed—to other
parts of Europe, Africa
and the Middle East.
In Kovno, Sol told me, there was antisemitism, “but everybody got along.”
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