1 “Tell Them Not to Hate”: Words of Witness and Sacred Imperatives

 בס”ד

There are many strands to weave, of time and memory, of legacies and life, and we are the weavers. I offer especial gratitude to Professor Stanger-Ross for this opportunity to return to Victoria, to be here among you, to be with old friends and new. It has been a deep and emotional journey for me since that day last August when Jordan came to Boston and we spent the better part of the day in conversation about Holocaust remembrance. Probing my memories and my files, we explored, as we shall today, the early days of the commemorative gatherings in Victoria, so beautifully embroidered now and carried forth, the ways of our remembrance and the people remembered on Yom Ha’shoah^[1] and on the anniversary of Kristallnacht^[2], the night of November 9-10, 1938. I am grateful to all of you, as we wrestle together, well beyond today, to meet the challenge held in the name of this conference and its sponsoring project, “Defying Hatred.” Of lessons learned and meant to be learned, the essence is in the echo of a beloved survivor’s words, “Tell Them Not to Hate.” In the inexorable turning of time, their words of witness become as sacred imperatives in our lives as we become the witnesses, we who heard their stories and held their tears, we who were touched by the strength of their souls. Thinking that we were comforting them, we were the ones so often comforted, given strength and hope. In this place, where mountains rise from sea to sky and eagles soar, they found peace, but the trauma was never far away, as we came to know. “Tell Them Not to Hate” — Words of Witness and Sacred Imperatives: How then to remember and respond, and yet to live with hope?

Living in this world of so much beauty and so much horror, how to hold them both and walk the fine line between? In introducing our children to the Holocaust for the first time, that was the unique challenge in speaking to the most innocent of those who would hear the survivors’ words. In the tension between remembrance and hope, the beauty and the horror, innocence was gently opened to the world as it is, while envisioning together and allowing in the sunshine of the world as it might be. In the eye of heart and mind, hold an image, please. There is a large square of tables set as one in the back of the old shul, subdued light and mood. In the middle of the table, there is a single rose in a simple vase and a yahrzeit^[3] candle with a flickering flame. Children are sitting all around the large table, uncharacteristically quiet, gazing at the flower and the flame, and at the woman with a warm smile who is sitting next to me. The children are welcomed and told how special they are, simple words offered by which to soothe and frame. Why such simplicity, we wonder together, why the flower and the flame, why no food? Thoughts and feelings are elicited, speaking then to the children of the beauty and the horror, some of the painful tale, and in our being together, reassurance.

The woman begins to speak, her voice ever so gentle, quavering, telling of her Warsaw childhood and of life turned upside down, avoiding the horrifying details. She tells them everything in a way beyond words, transmitting memory by her presence. Somehow she kept at least the outline of a smile, wary of how her words would affect her young listeners, her greatest fear not to scare or scar them. A flower and a flame, seeds of memory planted, children empowered with hope and with knowledge of their ability to act for the sake of goodness. Words of witness and sacred imperatives, touched by the woman’s love, children learned the lesson that is for all of us, defying hatred cannot be abstract. Each of us is called to deeds of love and compassion if we would make of the world as it is the world as it might be.

It would be several more years before Rysia Kraskin, (zichrona liv’racha/her memory be a blessing) would speak at the community Yom Ha’shoah gathering. It would be several more years before she would find the strength to share her story more fully, more publicly, beyond the tender, supportive embrace of the children’s innocence. It was only after the deaths of her dear friends, Willie and Helen Jacobs, who died less than two months apart from each other in October and December 1993, that Rysia found that strength. When Willie died, Rysia lamented, “We lost a man who did a lot for us, who educated non-Jewish kids about what we went through. I don’t know who will do it now….”

For Rysia and for others, new strength was found in a context in which their voices were needed. Without any sense that he was empowering others, Willie offered humble leadership in creating the Holocaust memorial in the Jewish cemetery, a matzeyvah, a memorial stone for the Six Million, a marker for all the graves they did not have. It was built to the left, just beyond the gate and the two stone entrance columns. At the top of each column are hand-chiseled two Hebrew words in the rough, beautiful hand of an old time artisan, Beys Ha’chayyim / House of the Living / בית החיים.

Beys Ha’chayyim is one of the traditional Jewish terms for a cemetery, emphasizing not death, but the ever unfolding cycle of life that death is a part of. It is meant to tell of death that comes in the fullness of years, of people brought home to sleep with their ancestors, not of lives taken with unspeakable cruelty, gassed and incinerated, and scattered on the wind. For the survivors, this became a place to be with loved ones in the way that others could visit the graves beyond, others who could lovingly trace with their fingers a precious name upon a stone. For those named and unnamed among the Six Million, the Holocaust Memorial became their stone, their matzeyvah, a place in the House of the Living where their loved ones who survived could come and remember them.

Telling of our gatherings in this sacred space, in a photograph carefully held in my files through the years, people are gathered around Willie, his broad shouldered back to the camera. The monument is behind us, though we seem not to have approached it yet, preparing, perhaps reviewing program details, but most of all in those moments it was just being with each other that mattered, asking of feelings, of emotions, quietly grateful to be together. Even before each year’s ceremony began, being together in that place was a time to be with many of the survivors among us, to hug, to hold, to cry with them, though they were often the ones to comfort us, and now they are gone and we comfort each other. The Yom Ha’shoah memorial gatherings emerged from a desire to honor the survivors, to give them a place to remember and to mourn. More than remembering the magnitude of the Holocaust and its decimating impact on the Jewish people, more than horrified recognition of the blot on the pages of human history, it was a time to remember the personal sorrow and suffering of our own dear ones, the individual losses, the loss of real people, the deaths of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, bubies and zaydes, great grandparents, aunts and uncles across generations, nieces, nephews, and cousins, friends and neighbours, all without graves, their bodies as ash scattered on the wind, their souls gathered here among us in the House of the Living.

As in the ways of personal mourning and cycles of grieving, so in the ways of a people’s remembrance, of holding collective grief. There are times when we turn inward and times when we turn outward, times when we just want to be alone. Although in each of the first two years there was a non-Jewish speaker, deeply caring university chaplains, the Yom Ha’Shoah observance was from the beginning primarily a time to turn inward. Perhaps in the way of shiva, or more aptly as a yahrzeit gathering, it was a time for the family to gather, to listen, to grieve, to cry, to sing. It was a time to transmit memory and to uplift the souls of our dead. As to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose, there are times to grieve among ourselves, to share within the family, with those closest, with those who carry the same psychic scars of a particular suffering and its legacy. It was a time for survivors to tell their stories, fifteen of which were lovingly gathered by Rhoda Kaellis, of blessed memory, to form her book, “Keeping the Memory.”

Of memories transmitted, words of witness meant to become our own, Willie Jacobs was the survivor to speak at the first Yom Ha’Shoah commemoration at the monument on April 21, 1985. As was his manner, Willie spoke with a steady voice that belied the vortex of pain that churned within him, that woke him up screaming at night. His words were raw, as though from beyond himself, haunted verbal messengers that became triggers for our own nightmares, as he told of all he had seen and experienced; from Belchatow to the Lodz ghetto, six years in the hell of slave labor and death camps; the rabbi, the baby, his brother. His brother with whom he was a slave laborer building the autobahn, his brother who collapsed while working and was killed by a guard and buried right there in the road, Willie often spoke of his brother, bitterly reminding us that the autobahn is a Jewish cemetery.

The survivors who spoke with us were often very different from one another, different in their stories and experiences, different in their ways of being, as Jews and as people, different in their ways of speaking to us, words from some pouring out as a torrent, from others coming slowly and haltingly. Some told of the horrors of the camps, some of living on the knife edge of uncertainty in hiding, some of fleeing and flight, of living as human prey. Staying one step ahead of the hunters, at times caught in snares, Edith and Henry Sitwell made their way from Poland to Tashkent, an Evangeline tale of separation along the way, as told by Edith in 1989, lovers in the end reunited. There were those who had been religiously observant before and those who had been secular, those who found faith and those who lost faith, those who experienced God’s presence in the camps, those who searched in the years beyond and never found.

As musical notes in a whirlwind flung from the staff, Peter Gary sought to raise back up to the staff of life the fragments of his own faith, dissonance always remaining. An expression of his quest, he composed an oratorio, “An Old Jew in Search of God,” touchingly dedicated to me. Tirelessly speaking with students across Vancouver Island and beyond, he spoke at the Yom Ha’shoah gathering in 1992. A ceremony in which faith was implicit, in the words of Kaddish^[4], in the singing of children, in the words of Anne Frank; a note to myself before he spoke: “be sure Peter Gary is comfortable.”

Reminding us in their presence that the Six Million were not an amorphous mass, the survivors reflected in their own diversity the diversity among those remembered, among the Jewish people then and now, among us. Unique for the language of his sharing, in 1986 our speaker was Mr. Marcus Gutwein, a newcomer to Victoria who would only be among us for a short time, who would die later that year. Born in Poland in the town of Nowy Sacz, the seat of the Sanzer Rebbe^[5], his own family were Belzer Chassidim^[6], his father the head of a yeshiva^[7], a wise man who could recognize that his son would take a different path. With honesty and foresight, his father sent him to live with uncles in Belgium, and so he became the only one of his family to survive. Escaping a labor camp, he became a Belgian partisan, later honored by the Belgian government. Mr. Gutwein, as he was always called, spoke to us in Yiddish, his words translated by Jack Gardner, of blessed memory, a special bond forged through the language of those whose memory he very simply asked us not to forget.

Of one who came forward slowly, haltingly over time, seeking to re-embrace her Jewish self, there is in my files a small note with an arrow to give emphasis pointing to a few words, “try to get Jannushka to open up… A child survivor, born in Paris of Polish Jewish parents, caught throughout her life in the tension between child and survivor, so fragile and so strong, Jannushka ran from being Jewish until she could run no more. She would say later that we told her then, “you are precious, needed, and cherished.” As she found the strength to open up and tell her story, Jannushka Jakoubovitch spoke for the first time at the Yom Ha’shoah gathering in 1987. Her remarks were brief, one paragraph, telling in one sentence of her story in its essence, “I have suffered as a very small child of beating, persecution and fear… She spoke again in 1994, her remarks now filling three pages, expanding upon the essence of her story, a little girl in hiding, a safe-house through which members of the resistance would pass, expressions of caring from some of them, each one in turn betrayed, and so the heart of the little girl.

Jannushka died just over a month ago, on the eve of Chanukkah 2019, the flame of her soul joined with the flower that yearned to grow in her heart. We had corresponded regularly for about the past ten years. The subject line of her last email, written to friends just before she died, was ever so simple, au revoir. So you remain, Jannushka, precious, needed, and cherished.

A presence larger than life, Jack Gardner [Jacob Gurtner], zichrono livracha/his memory be a blessing, spoke at a number of Yom Ha’shoah gatherings, both formally and informally, and at so many other times, whenever there was a moment, an opening in which to remind, whether opportune or not. Ebullient, irrepressible, so filled with life, “I am a survivor,” he would begin, having lived to tell the tale of those who didn’t. Jack was unique in his knowledge not only of what happened to him and those he loved, but in his knowledge of the larger social and historical context that framed his own experience. Having joined the Russian army to fight the advancing Germans, Jack was wounded and sent away from the front, so his path to survival, making his way to Uzbekistan, meeting his first wife, Rae, and journeying together. In addition to reminding us of the horrors, Jack lovingly told of the worlds that were destroyed, that we would better understand the magnitude of the Shoah.

With a remarkable memory for detail, he told of people and politics, of professions and places, of his shtetl,^[8] Stary Sambor (Sambir), and its people and ways; of his father the pious shoemaker, of Boruch Shammes and Yona Pillisdorph; of beer making and of the pastries in the bakery window; of the shuls and shtiblach, of the T’hilim Kloyz and the G’morrah Kloyz^[9], and even of the tensions among them, as in all the fullness of life lived with people. When the war ended, Jack and his wife made their way back to Stary Sambor. Realizing that he was the only survivor from his family, they stood in front of his family’s home, vowing to leave that “bloody land” and give laybedike matzayvos/living memorials to their parents, children who would bear their names. Of responses to hate, Jack would tell of the time in the Displaced Persons camp, Foehrenwald, near Munich, when an American soldier offered him and others a gun to go into town and take revenge. With a depth of feeling, pride and pain welling up, Jack recounted their refusal, not a one would take the gun, for that was not the Jewish way, not the way to begin again, not the way to raise up living matzeyvos.

In my yellowing files, another note: “Rysia — visit Tues. (set time) — have her speak and I write/edit…. — work with themes of human kindness in the hell of the camps…. — Helen toward her… — the water — (the lipstick?) — Rysia’s effort to protect her bunk mate….”

For some reason a question regarding the lipstick, perhaps seeming too close, too personal, but so important, in time to be told and ever retold. Sitting at Rysia’s kitchen table, she spoke and I wrote, words flowing, slowly at first, and then as though a floodgate had opened. I wish that I had recorded her, that I might have her words in her voice, though in the moment it somehow seemed more fitting, more respectful, to quietly write, and through my fingers a way to channel my own emotion, hearing her voice nevertheless. We called her talk “Acts of Kindness in Hell.” Held earlier in the innocent embrace of the children, the memory of her beloved friends inspiring her now, Rysia spoke at the Holocaust Memorial for the first time, sharing the words now typed and held in shaking hands, on April 14, 1996. She told of her Warsaw childhood, an only daughter with three older brothers, attending a Jewish school, graduating from high school in 1939, her parents’ desperate attempt to get her to safety, sending her to friends in the countryside as the ghetto was sealed, and the fates of all within. Taken from the street in the summer of 1942, she began her journey through five camps, Skarzysko, Czenstochowa, Ravensbruck, Burgau, Turkheim. With quiet strength, she taught us of kindness in hell and of the meaning and mark of human dignity: “Even as we went through hell, even amidst the horror of this terrible time, we didn’t forget that we really were human beings and how to care for other people in need…. The girl who was sleeping with me in one bunk got sick. I knew if I would leave her and go somewhere else because I would be afraid to catch it, they would take her away. I stayed with her although I was sure I would get typhus, not to let the Germans know that she was sick. I stayed with her, and her aunt who was also there helped her until she got better. She is still my friend and lives in Israel….”