Areivim – B”H my delicious ainekel gave us MORE than a run for our money. Both he and WE ended up snoozing this afternoon. Kinehora, he is a little honey, but two and a half is still two and a half 🙂 and i think I burned up enough calories to entitle me to some cheescake later… Thank you for asking.
Also, since you have asked, I am going to try to recount a little bit about my dad O”H, and the miracle that was his entire life. Warning, this is a bit lengthy. I did not know about some of the things that happened to him until I was an adult. He rarely spoke about his army life. There is also another frum man who experienced some similar things, and wrote a book about his army life (I think his name was Birnbaum), but my dad’s war experiences were never written down, though we have the primary sources for them, through aritifacts,etc.
For obvious reasons, I am not going to reveal any names in this post, except for people who are known to the world. My dad started off his life in a miracle. he was extremely premature, born to my grandfather a kohein and rov/shochet, and grandmother who was in the beginning of her 8th month. he was born on Purim and became a bar-Mitzvah on Shabbos Parshas Shemini, the parsha dealing with the induction of the Kohanim. The number 8 will feature prominently in his life,as you will see. The birth took place in a European village, where the only method of caring for a preemie of 2 and a half lbs. was to shecht a cow and put the newborn in its stomach (primitive form of incubator), to warm him up. My dad B”H survived his infancy, though he was small, so small that when his parents ran to America to escape the pogroms, which had already affected the family, he appeared to be much younger than he was, and was therefore allowd to leave with them.
He grew up here in the States and enlisted in the army, though a bit underage (don’t ask me how he managed that, I have no idea. We did not know until after his death what his real age was). because my dad spoke 13 languages fluently and with the proper accent, he was recruited to serve in teh Army Intelligence Corps,a nd sent undercover in Germany to walk amongst the German citizens and gather intel. he did his job so well that he was promoted to Lieutenant and assigned to capture a Nazi gauleiter who had given orders in his town to begin what came to be known as Kristallnacht. he went with a retinue of men, including a burly Irish sergeant, who developed a great affection and respect for this Jewish guy who never slacked off, though he lived on cans of tuna, sardines,vegetables,and fruits.
They went to the villa of the nazi and demanded entry. They found him cowering in the closet in his library, a room filled with portraits of the man and his wife and children, in pastoral outdoor scenes. As leader of the group, my dad began to interrogate the man before bringing him in, and he noticed out of the corner of his eye that his Irish sergeant was trying to break the nazi’s painting. Without going into the rightness or wrongness of doing that (the man wanted to give this nazi a taste of his own Kristallnacht), my dad stopped him and took a look at the painting, which didn’t tear when the glass broke. He took it out of its backing and turned it over, and in the next moment went berserk, as he realized the protrait had been painted on a Torah Klaf. If that were not enough, he was able to clearly read the section of Torah and realized it was his own Bar-Mitzvah Parsha, Parshas Shemini! As I said, the number 8 figured prominently in his life. He started pulling at all the paintints, and realized that two others were also painted over klafim, all three were from separate sifrei Torah. My extremely gentle dad, who could barely bring himself to potch us when we deserved it, began to pummel this nazi. His sergeant had never heard him raise his voice, much less display any violence, and he stopped him by saying, “Lieutenant, I’ve never seen you get so angry at anyone, so I know if you are this upset there’s a good reason. Let me take over, I’ve had more experience fighting and I’ll do a better job!” Of course, at this point, my dad had calmed down a bit, and they took the man into custody, where he was later tried at Nuremeberg. Meanwhile, my dad took custody of all three klafim, to safeguard them. The other two parshios were Pikudei and Acharei Mos. The fact of the matter is that all three of these parshas including his own of Shemini, are the Bar-mitzvah parshas of ALL of the grandsons in our family who have at least one grandparent (on the toher side of the family) who were Holocaust survivors. And although we do not celebrate Bas-Mitzvahs per se, had my two March-birthday daughters been sons, their Bar-Mitzvahs would also have been one of those parshas. In fact my youngest daughter turned bas mitzvah bo bayom on Shabbos Parshas Shemini, her Zaydy’s parsha. My mother, O”H was born on the Shabbos of Acharei Mos, and was nifteres on Shabbos Parshas Shemini.
My dad also had an experience that I was very happy to have not learned about until I was well into my adulthood. When he and five of his men went out on a mission in their jeep, the driver unfortunately went over a land-mine, blowing the jeep and its occupants to bits. All except for my father, who landed many yards away from the explosion, completely unhurt but for his clothing being in disarray. He described the incident as if he had been plucked out of the car and gently set down in the field. He was very fortunate not only to have survived, but to have been able to safely make it back to his camp without stepping on another landmine.
Last, but not least, the Great Synagogue of Frankfort had been turned into a stable by the Nazis. Then came the liberation, and it was coming close to Rosh Hashana time. My dad was involved in helping displaced persons, but when he saw how many frum Jews there were, he realized they were going to need a shul to daven in for yom tov. The Great Shul was in ruins, but he commandeered the Germans in the city who by now were so terrified of the Americans they did anything he asked of them. He got them to clean up the Shul, and they removed the theater seats from a local movie house, and brought them to the shul to make pews. Thus, the very Germans who had made a pigsty of a beautiful shul, were now forced to clean it up and bring it back to life.
My dad was also a chazzan with a beautiful voice, and as such he was asked to being the shaliach Tzibbur for the Great Synagogue when it was readied for the Yomim Noraim. Because of the magnitude of the work involved in getting the shul ready, it attracted a lot of attention from the higher ups in the army, and as a result Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and (I believe it is) MacArthur were in the front pew. I have the picture of them, and it is a really historical bit of evidence. After the davening, General Eiswenhower came up to my dad and told him, ” Cantor, I really liked those pretty tunes you sang.” This too, I didn’t know until later in my life, before my dad died. he virtually never spoke about himself, with the exception of going from school to school and shul to shul talking about the story of the klafim that he rescued. This he did at around the time of Yom Hashoah every year. we had debated (my siblings and I) about donating the klafim to the Holocaust museum or Yad Vashem, but we have ultimately decided that we want to keep it as a part of our father, and eidus to what he did in the war.
There is one other story from the Great Synagogue, it actually happened when my dad was davening Unesaneh Tokef. He noticed on the side, that a man was completely encased in his tallis and sobbing bitterly. After the davening the man approached him for one second, and my father saw a living skeleton before him. Before he could ask the man anything, he quickly disappeared. My dad asked the Army Chaplain who was conducting the rest of the non davening services in the Great Synagogue, if he knew the man. The Rabbi told my father the man’s name and explained to him that this man had lost his entire family and was given the gruesome task of shoveling gassed bodies onto the trucks going to the crematoria. He did this job devoid of all feeling, until the moment when he realized he had just shoveled his own daughter’s body onto the truck, and he convinced himelf that he had seen eher hand move as the truck drove away. He wanted to kill himself, but somehow managed to simply exist until the liberation. My dad never saw him again during that time.
Fast forward a decade or so. My dad married my mom, and was busy raising a family in Brooklyn. We davened in a little shul in East New York, and my dad waas often asked to daven for the omud. One Shabbos mevarchim after being shaliach tzibbur for mussaf, someone came up to my dad and said good shabbos. My dad smiled at him and replied in kind. The man asked him if he knew him. My dad said he looked familiar but couldn’t place him. The man said to him, “You don’t know me, but I know YOU!” And he proceeded to remind my father of the half-dead man whom he had encountered in the Great Synagogue that fateful night. He told him his name, and it was the very man whom my father remembered from that time. He explained to him that at the end of the war, when he realized exactly what he had lost, his wife, his children, his health, his hope for the future, he had really despaired that he would ever be able to live again. “Then, “he said, ” I heard your beautiful Unesaneh Tokef, and I realized there was something the nazis had not been able to ever take from us. Your voice and words of the machzor gave mea reason to live, that I knew there was hope for the Jewish people. we were not destroyed, and the Aibeshter would never let them get us. I prayed all these years to hear that beautiful voice again, and The Ribbono Shel Olam answered my prayers.” He had come to America after the war and started his life over, married again and raised a new family. People in our Shul in those years used to talk about this as they met the man,but I never knew what they meant until I was older.
I really apologize for going on and on. I actually gave you the capsule summary. I have often been told that our family should write a book about this, but without my dad or any of the family members who were alive then, to enhance my meager knowledge of what happened, it is only half a story. We have the klafim to stand in eidus for my dad, and it is in my brother’s possession. But all the principal characters in the story have died, as far as we know. I do enjoy looking at the picture of Eisenhower and MacArthur, in the front row of the shul, though. Eisenhower was a very dignified looking man, and he was very respectful of the Shul and the Jews in it, at that time, by all accounts.