“Yom HaShoah Speech, 2020”, Rabbi Brad Bloom
Children are on my mind these days because of the effects of the Coronavirus and its connection to the observance of Yom HaShoah. The children in the Lowcountry like other children across the nation are also living in confinement. They too are getting used to living in their homes with nowhere to go. Of course, one cannot compare this situation of a viral Pandemic with what children experienced in the Holocaust but the ideas of separation from friends, teachers, relatives and society as a whole has got to be perplexing for kids especially the smaller ones. “Why quarantine and what does it mean mommy?” Who is sick? Is grandpa ok? Grandma too?
Separation is hard for children and adults. The zoom lens kids use at school can be a link to the outside world, but digital learning can feel like a cage as well. Children and teachers are confined to that digital enclosure. No one wins when separation happens for kids from their friends and teachers.
I remember that feeling of separation and isolation that afflicted me when I walked through the streets of the infamous Warsaw ghetto this past summer. You can see the memorials molded and hammered in the streets themselves marking where the ghetto walls once stood. One imagines the children confined in a much more horrible way inside the onerous and overcrowded apartments with a few morsels of food, shelter or clothing.
What did parents say to their children as the Nazis guarded the ghetto and practically starved them into death on the streets of a city that once contained 350,000 Jews? Looking out from a dungeon of death had to have been traumatic beyond our imagination. Yes, they faced a pandemic of genocide, a virus of unbridled hatred.
The poems we presented today only scratch the surface of Jewish suffering and courage as well. The separation and isolation that can afflict the mental health of any person, adult or child, is something I still cannot fathom.
Instead of a child preparing for his Bar Mitzvah he is preparing for death. Instead of studying the ancient texts the child is crawling under wooden floorboards searching and gathering morsels of bread for the family. Cramped together in apartments, typhus, typhoid, starvation, and sewage spewing in the streets as well as the bitter winter cold decimated the Jewish community. Yet the amazing story about the Warsaw ghetto is how the Jewish community keep doing the best they could with education and activities for the children. Despite the daily terror, somehow Jewish people never lost their resilience.
There are similarities between the adjustments to protect ourselves against COVID19 and the memories of children fighting for their lives in a Jewish ghetto in Poland. The captivity and confinement of children (social distancing and physical isolation), the hoarding of food and the fear of the virus itself triggered a resurgence of memory for many remaining Holocaust survivors.
From Jewish Forward Newspaper an article recently reported, “It takes me right back to September 1st, 1939,” says Natalie Scharf, a survivor living in Philadelphia. “My parents had a grocery store where we lived in Jaworzno, Poland, right by the German border. They knew the Nazis were seizing all Jewish businesses, so they quietly began to bring sacks of flour, sugar, beans, barley, onions and potatoes home to live off after they raided our storehouses. I’m not comparing this to the Holocaust, but seeing everything shut down, hearing of closed borders, food shortages, no travel, being afraid to go outdoors, see family and even touch anything, it feels like the start of the war. But now you don’t see the enemy.”
Another report from Haaretz newspaper in Israel interviewed Professor emeritus of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University Shimon Redlich. He tells the story about when in the summer of
1943, thousands of Jews from the town of Brzezany in Nazi-occupied Galicia (now in western Ukraine) were herded to a nearby cemetery and shot dead. Among the few survivors was 8year-old Shimon Redlich. He spent the next six months hidden with his mother and grandparents in an attic in the empty Jewish ghetto. When their living conditions became unbearable, they moved to another hideout at a nearby village in the home of a Ukrainian woman, where they spent the next six months. Redlich said, in referring to the Coronavirus experience in Israel, “It throws me back into my childhood in hiding,”
Redlich, 85, attributes this sense of déjà vu to the unpredictability of his situation. “Back then, we didn’t know whether the Germans would discover our hiding place, and that would spell the end for us,” he says. “Now, I can’t say whether I’ll get sick, in which case, given my age category, that might be the end of me too.
The absence of a daily routine, he says, is also reminiscent of those days. “In normal times, the day is broken up into clear segments,” he explains. “That doesn’t happen now. It’s as if time becomes fluid – and that was very much my feeling then, too.” Then, as now, he was constantly surrounded by the same faces. And then, as now, any foray into the world beyond his confined quarters required planning and preparation. “Today, that means putting on a mask and gloves,” Redlich notes.
Who would have imagined how these circumstances of contending with the COVID19 virus would set off in the children of that time who are now our elders the agonizing memories of those dark years? Who could see these similarities between then and now?
It is important that we, the modern-day witnesses of their history, on this Yom HaShoah, listen carefully to their accounts and to their poems and memoirs. Whether they are the children of that generation or the broken fragments of their parents’ generation of writings which have survived their harrowing lives under the Nazis, it is incumbent upon us to draw these insights into our hearts on this Memorial Day. In the Torah it is written, “Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you.”
To listen to their memories makes us the conveyers of memory to the next generation. The virus of COVID19 translates into the Pandemic of Nazi hate long ago. Those memories, which percolate inside us, will secure the future of their legacy to us.
During my visit last summer to Poland, I could feel an oppressive scent that reeked over me throughout my travels. In one moment, I just stood still inside the Warsaw ghetto; closed my eyes and imagined the sights and voices of children scrounging the streets like dogs for bits and pieces of food. I just couldn’t rid myself of that stench of suffering in all the ways described above.
No doubt that the days of COVID19 will be a lasting memory for our children today as it will be for us too. Children like human beings can be resilient and they will renew themselves when the Pandemic subsides. Hope will prevail but, I hope and pray, not at the cost of forgetting our past.
“Yom HaShoah Speech”, Congregation Beth Yam, Hilton Head Island, SC Copyright © Rabbi B. Bloom 2020