I am nearing the end of my postings about my recent trip to Israel where I met Moshe, a Holocaust survivor who was sheltered by my grandparents.
Today, I am writing about some of the "human" or "personal" costs of Moshe's experiences during the Holocaust, which I witnessed during my time with him in Israel; impacts that were deeply moving, and deeply saddening as well. It can be easy, sometimes, to separate ourselves from news stories and historical descriptions; to create an emotional distance that diminishes the impact substantially. But when you sit in front of someone who has LIVED it and you hear their story, that distance evaporates.
Moshe shared very openly with us about his experiences, and for that I am thankful, because it truly created an intimate space, and allowed us to get at least some small sense of what it may have been like for him, and what my father and his parents did to help Moshe. Given the intimacy he honoured us with, I am trying to be very careful here about what I share, because I want to respect Moshe's privacy, while at the same time I want to share with you some of what I learned from this. Why? My hope is that some additional good can come from the tremendous pain and suffering that Moshe and so, so many others have endured, during and after this awful period in our collective history.
Hearing Moshe talk about his experiences during WWII truly drove home the horror and paralyzing fear that so many Jews must have felt at that time. Moshe was only 8 years old when it all began. Imagine the fear and confusion you would feel if this kind of thing happened to you at such a tender age. One late night while Moshe and I were speaking alone, he told me about the day the Nazis took his father away. Moshe was at home when the soldiers came, and he witnessed everything. He described to me how the soldiers' eyes were steely blue, stone cold, almost emotionless, as they swooped in and took his father. To this very day, Moshe told me, he can see their eyes. How haunting. You are 8 years old, and you watch your father being taken away, never to see him again – only because of your family's origin. How does one come to terms with this kind of experience?
At that point, Moshe was sent to live with family friends (still in Amsterdam for the time being), and his mother went into the underground. Some time later – I don't know exactly how much later – while still living with the family friends, Moshe learned the terrible news that his mother had been taken as well. He was told that an informer had given up the location of 12 members of underground – 9 men and 3 women. The men were lined up and shot on the spot, and the women were taken away to the camps. Upon telling us this story, Moshe broke down into tears, as did we.
As if losing both parents was not already awful enough, this was only the beginning of his ordeal. Over the next 5 years, Moshe was to live in constant fear for his life. I will describe more of his experiences in my next posting.
May we always be mindful of our own negative stereotypes of others, and vigilant against our propensity to lump people into categories and assign them a fixed set of characteristics. It was this, I believe, taken to the extreme, that helped fuel the Nazi extermination campaign.
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