Set Free to Suffer

The Allied invasion of Normandy and the Russian victories on the Eastern front signaled the coming demise of the Nazi war machine in World War II.  Hope began to stir again in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of Jews imprisoned in concentration camps.  Unfortunately they would discover that their freedom would be more costly than they had imagined.  It’s part of the untold story of the Holocaust.

The Death Marches
As the Russians advanced, Himmler issued orders to evacuate the concentration camps.  The troops were to march the inmates westward so as to be able to continue to “exploit the Jewish labor force until the last possible moment.”  For the Jews who walked out of the gates and from behind the fences, it may not have represented complete freedom, but it provided at least a small taste of it.

Unfortunately, the annihilation of the Jews was still part of the Nazi plan.  The Jews were forced to march without food or drink.  To make matters worse, the guards who escorted the Jews were in a hurry to get as far away from the Russian army as quickly as they could.  Therefore they had no problem shooting and killing those prisoners who lagged behind, or just shooting them en masse.  Some 200,000 to 250,000 inmates died during the marches.  Yad Vashem reports that “After the war, hundreds of mass graves with the corpses of tens of thousands of inmates . . . were found along the routes of the marches.”

The Surviving Remnant
Those who made it through the war, whether released from the camps or coming out of hiding, began the process of returning to their homes or emigrating to Aliyah Bet or elsewhere.  Around 100,000 chose to relocate to North America, Latin America, and Australia.  Those who chose to repatriate to Russia and Poland were in for a big surprise.  Their dreams of a friendly welcome faded into a reality of rejection and hostility.  Many of the residents of their old communities feared that the Jews would retaliate when they found that their former “friends” had sacked their homes and stolen their property.

They also soon discovered that the end of the war did not spell the end of anti-Semitism.  Some 1,500 Jews were murdered by anti-Semitic gangs in Poland in the first few months after the war.

Officially known now as Displaced Persons (DPs) with no homes to return to, hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors were sent to DP camps, right back into a stark lifestyle, as it were, of imprisonment, except without the killings.  There, however, they were able to create a sense of community until places could be found for them to live.  There was even a quota on how many were allowed to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine.  As horrible as it sounds, the fact is that 52,000 who had managed to make their way to the future Israel were rounded up and deported to detention camps in Cyprus where they once again found themselves fenced-in and waiting to be released to legally return or arrange to find a home elsewhere.

Even in the face of fresh freedom the Jews were still considered a problem.  Even today, the world in general looks at them no so much as a nation, but as a nagging problem.  Governments either want to pressure them into an untenable peace or to annihilate them.  Yet the Bible indicates that God wants us to bless them (Genesis 12:3) and to pray for them (Psalm 122:6).  It sounds like He wants us to love them.  We at the Jerusalem Prayer Team do.  We will continue to stand and to pray for the state of Israel and the peace of Jerusalem.  Will you join us?

Source material for this article is available at Yad Vashem.

All I Remembered Was My Name

Hitler’s armies had not yet reached Hungary.  But he had sworn to destroy every Jewish man, woman and child who lived on the face of the earth.  My mother was young, not much more than a girl, and I had just been born.  Forgetting all her troubles, she waited eagerly for the nurse to bring me to her.

A nurse delivered me to her.  “Oh, give her to me!” my mother cried. “Please, let me hold her!”

“Take her,” she said, dumping me roughly at the end of the bed. “I don’t know why we have to bother with these Jewish brats.  They are a waste of time and money.  Hitler will take care of all of you before the year is out.”

My mother couldn’t answer her. She just held me tight in her arms and cried
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The woman in the next bed said, “Honey, don’t let that old witch upset you.  Let me take her. Why should she die, the innocent babe?  I swear to you, I will care for her as if she was my own.  I never had children.  Give her to me.  That poor babe hasn’t got a chance.  There won’t be any Jewish kids left when Hitler gets here.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Mother answered uncertainly.  ”This is not the first time they have tried to destroy us.  In every generation they have risen up against us to destroy us, and God has always saved us from their hands. And He will again!”

When my father came to visit that afternoon her first words to him were,“Avrom, I know what our baby’s name will be.  She will be Esther, Esther Malka.  God will surely help.”

By the time Esther was two years old, her family was forced to leave their home, and live in the ghetto.  Young men like my father were marched out at gun point to work for the Nazis.  Otherwise no Jew was allowed to leave the ghetto walls.  Inside those walls we lived, crowded together – many families in one apartment.  We lived with cold, hunger and fear.  Many became sick and died.  Others were taken away by the Nazis and were never heard from again.

Then, every few days, German soldiers rounded up many of our neighbors and forced them into cattle cars.  They never returned.  My mother and father soon realized that they had to send me away to protect me.  They planned to smuggle me out of the ghetto and send me far away to the countryside to a little village so poor and small that it was important to the Germans. I was to live with a peasant family until the war was over.  My parents paid them with the last money they had, paid them to keep me.

After the war my parents my parents set out to find me.  They walked ten miles by foot.  As they walked, they prayed.  They knew that many villages had driven out the Jewish children that they had agreed to shelter.  Others had handed them over to the Nazis.  Some villagers had grown to love the children in their care and did not want to give them back to their parents.  The children themselves were often too small to remember that they had Jewish parents.

Suddenly, they caught sight of a child, a small, sunburned girl with matted brown hair and bare feet. She was playing in the dirt in front of a house. Their hearts leaped. “Little girl,” my father called in a trembling voice, “come here.”

“Ester’ke.  Esther Malka.  It’s Mommy and Daddy!  Don’t you remember us?”

I stared at them without moving.  Suddenly, it was as if I had awakened from a dream. Yes, I did remember!  With a little cry, I ran into my parent’s arms; the arms that longed to hold me tight.

I asked my mother, “How come I forgot everything – you, and father, and being a Jewish girl? I remembered only one little thing: my name!”

Later during Purim my mother was making preparations for our celebration. She rose to take out the spices, the Havdalah candle and the wine cup. “I guess,” she said, “I guess because a name, a Jewish name, is not a little thing after all.”

Just as Haman met his fate at the gallows which he planned for Mordecai (Esther 7:10) “So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then was the king’s wrath pacified”, so will those who seek to destroy Israel meet their destruction. The Jewish nation will never be destroyed or driven from her land again.  Let us pray for the peace and protection for Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6).

Excerpts for this article may be found in Chabad