The Road Not Taken

We all take decisions in our lives. Someone like me (i.e., a very old person) has had to take decisions at many points in my life – what to study, whom to marry, where to work, where to live, whether to have another child, what to cook for dinner, etc., etc. I’m sure that many other people have had to make similar decisions, and they have all helped to weave the fabric of life.

But today is Holocaust Memorial Day here in Israel, and my thoughts automatically turn to wondering how I would have fared at that fateful time, and also how the relatives I lost dealt with their situation. I know for a fact that after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany Jews there were faced with almost insurmountable difficulties if they sought to leave the country. For many, including both my maternal and paternal grandparents, this involved leaving behind the homeland and country they loved and for which – in the case of both my grandfathers – they had fought in the First World War.

In the memoir my late father wrote about his life he states that as a young married couple his parents “had been very enthusiastic about Zionism and Palestine. They had been among the few Jewish residents of Hamburg to attend the 9^th Zionist Congress held there in 1909. They told us children later that as a result of this they were ostracized by their family, friends and fellow-congregants, and that it took many years before their lapse was forgiven.”

Oh, if only the Jewish community of Hamburg had not been so anti-Zionist! Who knows? Maybe my grandparents could have been among those brave Jews who came to live in what was then Ottoman-controlled Palestine, making a very different life for themselves and their descendants. But Hamburg was a thriving metropolis, with a rich cultural, social and commercial life, and would have always been a more attractive place to live in than a barren desert in the Middle East.

I take my hat off to all those Jews who did come to live here in those early years, starting with the intrepid few who left Romania in 1882 and settled in Zikhron Yaakov under the aegis of Baron de Rothschild (among whom is the family of my dear son-in-law). Knowing what we know now, we can only shake our heads in sorrow as we look back at so many missed opportunities, at the hundreds, thousands and millions of Jews who did not leave their homes and set out to build a new life for themselves in all those years when it was possible to go to live in Palestine.

Although antisemitism has always been with us, the Holocaust was an event that had no precedent in history as regards its extent, brutality and the industrial efficiency with which it was executed. It was not something that anyone could have foreseen and been prepared to forestall. Despite the terrible toll it took on our nation, some Jews managed to survive, whether by an act of providence, taking wise action or having managed to escape.

What it all boils down to, when all is said and done, is that we cannot always predict the results of our actions and the decisions we take, though we always hope that what we do is for the best. We cannot go through life saying ‘if only I had done things differently,’ though for the six million victims of the Holocaust they may well have thought that as they perished.

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From Broken Glass;

A Story of Finding Hope in Hitler’s Death Camps to Inspire a New Generation

This book by Steve Ross is truly an inspiring story. Interspersed with the author’s vivid recollections of being incarcerated from the age of eight in a succession of concentration camps are accounts of his interaction as a social worker with deprived and even delinquent youngsters in Boston’s worst neighbourhoods.

Torn away from his home and family by the invading Nazi troops, young Steve (then known as Szmulek) managed to survive the endless starvation, brutality and slave labour in ten different camps. His account of the brutality to which he was subjected and which he witnessed is enough to turn the reader’s stomach, and would be depressing if it were not for the way he describes how he used the lessons learned in that terrible time to encourage, inspire and motivate youngsters from deprived backgrounds to remain in the education system, and even go to college, in order to attain a better future than that which would otherwise have been their fate.

The accounts of the author’s encounters with the youngsters in Boston and the way he told them about his experiences in the camps and the lengths to which he felt forced to go in order to evade first being captured and then being killed provides an interesting insight into the workings of his mind and his later development. Maintaining that without the occasional small acts of kindness of other concentration camp inmates or glimpses of humanity from fellow human beings he would not have been able to survive.

The author describes the phenomenon of ‘musulmen,’ concentration camp inmates who seem to have become detached from reality, not caring whether they live or die,and explains it as the indication that the individuals concerned have lost hope, and that it was only the faintest glimmer of hope – that he would be freed, that he would be reunited with his family, that he would regain his home – that kept him going. He was, of course, eventually freed, but only one other member of his family survived, and after release from the camp he was sent to America and placed in an orphanage

In the orphanage he was told that the only way to advance in America was to study, and this he did. He worked to support himself and pay tuition fees, sleeping in his car and enduring all kinds of hardships. But he was not brutalised and he persisted in his studies, realising that only by the strength of his spirit would he be able to reach his goal of helping other youngsters achieve a better life. He seems to have been unusually successful in his endeavours, as the mayor of Boston sought a way to honour him, and Steve asked for this to be done by erecting a Holocaust memorial in Boston.

The New England Holocaust Memorial was built as a result, and now stands in an important site in Boston, near other memorials to important figures in American history. Although the building was vandalised in 2017, the local population came out in force to demonstrate against the prejudice and hatred it revealed, and Steve found solace in that. The Holocaust memorial, his two children and his grandchildren are a testament to his endurance, strength of mind, and nobility of spirit.

Tradition

As Passover approaches the word ‘tradition’ assumes increasing prominence in the lives of Jews – and Israelis. Each ethnic group, and each family, has its own traditions regarding the way the festival is celebrated (cue musical interlude ‘Tradition’ from ‘Fiddler on the Roof’).

This was brought home to me with added intensity when the Israeli millionaire in space (he is not an astronaut), Eitan Steva, was interviewed on TV. When asked how he was going to celebrate the Seder in space he replied that gefillte fish is being provided for him. Gefillte fish? Where in the Bible is gefillte fish mentioned? Not at all, of course. In fact, in the orthodox German-Jewish (‘Yekke’) family of my birth no such dish was ever served at the Seder table. When I married into a family originating from eastern Europe it transpired that that particular dish was considered an essential, if not vital, part of the Seder meal. The centrality of that item was presumably connected with the nature of the food available to the residents of that region, but how and why it came to constitute a universal and basic necessity of the meal is beyond me.

Other traditions have become embedded in the life of Jews from different parts of the world, and this is particularly evident when it comes to rituals associated with religious observance and ritual. And so the (orthodox) Jewish world is divided into two groups: those (of Sephardic origin) who eat pulses on Passover and those (of Ashkenazi origin) who abjure all pulses on Passover. This rift goes back to rabbinic rulings in ancient times, and one might have thought it would be possible to find a solution for overcoming it. But so far no rabbi has dared to venture into this legalistic minefield. Thus, observant relatives of offspring who have married someone whose Passover meal tradition allows pulses will eschew those homes during the festival. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear about these traditions, but it strikes me as unnecessarily divisive in these modern times.

Another tradition – and thankfully one not associated with religious practice – struck me last week when I took my adult son and his six-year-old daughter to a performance of the Israeli musical ‘Utzli-Gutzli.’ The text of the play, which is based on the Grimm Brothers’ fable, ‘Rumpelstiltskin,’ was written some sixty years ago by Avraham Shlonsky, one of Israel’s leading literary figures, with music by Dubi Zeltser. Shlonsky’s grandiloquent rhyming couplets in not-always-accessible Hebrew might be considered too difficult for Israeli children, but the colourful set and costumes together with spirited acting and singing by the cast of the Cameri Theatre enabled the audience to grasp what was happening and to enjoy the pranks and jokes, as well as to participate in the singing when encouraged to do so by the actors,

There wasn’t an empty seat in the auditorium, which consisted of children of all ages, accompanied by parents and grandparents who doubtless themselves had seen the play in the past – when they, too, were children. I remember taking my daughter to it over forty years ago, when she was at the age my granddaughter is now. And although I was familiar with the general idea of the play, I wasn’t bored for a minute on seeing it again. The originality of the text, the virtuosity of the acting and the general joie-de-vivre of the production made the whole experience an enjoyable one (though my granddaughter was afraid when things didn’t seem to be going well for the poor baker’s daughter, who was required to spin straw into gold).

Another tradition, and one which, I hope, will not serve to create division among Jews in Israel.

The Irony of it All

Whether you call the city Lvov, Lviv or Lemberg, the place that was once a centre of culture and commerce in Ukraine is currently the scene of destruction and devastation. Now that the whole of Ukraine is being subjected to attack by Russia, I am reminded of the book East West Street; on the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ which I read and reviewed here recently. The author, Philippe Sands, a renowned expert in international law, investigated the origins of those two seminal legal terms. However, the book is no dry-as-dust academic study as the author has managed to introduce the human element in the form of the two Jewish legal experts who originated from Lvov, just as his own family did.

Those two legal terms were employed in the 1946 Nuremberg trials of a number of Nazi leaders who were held accountable for the atrocities inflicted on the populations of the countries their regime invaded, occupied and plundered, and whose Jewish populations they systematically murdered.

The two Jewish lawyers whose efforts culminated in the introduction of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ were originally from the Ukraine and both studied law at Lvov University, although not at the same time. Hersch Lauterpacht, who coined the term ‘crimes against humanity,’ managed to leave Ukraine, ending up in the UK, where he was given a prestigious academic position at Cambridge University. Rafael Lemkin, the other Jewish legal expert, made his way to the USA in 1939 and forged a distinguished academic career for himself there.

The two men never met in person, though doubtless knew of one another’s work. But the inevitable conclusion that the reader cannot help drawing after reading this book is that fate happened to bring two men of intelligence, insight and understanding who were also Jews to reach conclusions that have had a lasting impact on international law.

There is talk now of bringing those involved in the current war in Ukraine to justice at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. That court was founded as a direct result of the work of Lauterpacht and Lemberg. Whether anyone will ever actually be put on trial is doubtful, but there is no escaping the irony of the situation that draws together the fate of Ukraine with the work of its former citizens. And, of course, through the convoluted course of history, combines the effect of Nazi crimes with Jewish intellect on world events.