Recently there was another documentary about Anne Frank and the horrors perpetrated against the Jews during the Nazi reign in Europe. This story has been told many times but the deeper questions of how did it happen? Where did this madness come from? and what was the Jewish response? These stories have not been addressed. I have chosen five books that will give you a more nuanced insight into these matters.
The first book, With G-d in Hell by Eliezer Berkovitz, addresses the questions
• Where was G-d?
• Why didn’t the Jews resist?
• How did any of them survive?
This book answered many questions for me. It describes the spiritual resistance that enabled Jews to maintain their integrity in the face of cruelty and brutality and to come out whole on the other side. In this fascinating book, Eliezer Berkovits (1908-1992) tells us the stories of Jews, who stuck by their faith in the camps, and analyses the strength of Jewish observance in such an environment.
Only thus, he suggests, can we gain an understanding of the power of the Jewish religion, and an insight into the great historic destiny of the Jewish Nation.
Their behavior demanded a courage no less great than that of armed resistance.
He gives real case histories of courageous Jews, who gave up all to observe Judaism, and also discusses the dynamics of life and death and the holocaust according to halacha – (Jewish law).
He outlines the story of Reb Mendele, the brother of the Gerer Rebbe, who pleaded with one of the Kapos for some water. To everyone’s surprise the man, who was one of the most sadistic among the Nazi lackeys, brought the water.
Reb Mendele did not drink it but used it to wash his hands for preparing himself for the last prayer on earth, the saying of the Viddui (the customary confession of sin before death.)
Along the way, a badly wounded child was thrown across Reb Mendele’s path. He picked up the bleeding baby whose little body was quivering in his hands. Reb Mendele, holding the child, turned to the others and said:
“…this holiness, purer than all purity, a Jewish child: This little Jewish child is sick, weak like a fly…how come that the Satan…has to wage war and vent cruelty on little children?
Berkovits finally refers to the hope of redemption for the Jewish people, by victims of the holocaust, such as the young Jewish boy hiding in Belgium who wrote in his Hebrew diary:
- “My brothers! Do not misunderstand me. As I speak to you about vengeance I want you to pay attention to it’s positive side. Our revenge for present suffering and for all our sufferings during these two millennia of galut/exile, will be the restoration of our land; it’s settlement by its people; the return of our beloved people to it’s inheritance. This will be the greatest revenge that is in our hand to achieve. For this we ask first of all for the help of our G-D , of the G-D of Israel, who has protected us from extinction during our entire exile. He is sure to help us and and to guide us anew to the land of our inheritance, to our holy land, the land of Israel.”
2. Deadly Carousel by Monica Porter
This is a memoir of Vali Racz, the Hungarian Marlene Dietrich, written by her daughter Monica Porter. The book is a wonderful portrayal of the intertwined lives of Jews and non-Jews in pre-war Hungary and wartime Budapest and is also an excellent live action history of what actually was going on in Budapest before, during and after the war to 1956 told by a non-Jewish participant observer.
3. Black Earth The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder
This book talks about the grand ideas of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and how they played out in the grand scheme of the nations and their ideologies that resulted in so many deaths, not only of Jews.
He explains that the Holocaust began in a dark but accessible place, in Hitler’s mind, with the thought that the elimination of Jews would restore balance to the planet and allow Germans to win the resources they desperately needed. Such a world view could be realized only if Germany destroyed other states, so Hitler’s aim was a colonial war in Europe itself. In the zones of statelessness, almost all Jews died. A few people, the righteous few, aided them, without support from institutions. Much of the new research in this book is devoted to understanding these extraordinary individuals. The almost insurmountable difficulties they faced only confirm the dangers of state destruction and ecological panic. These men and women should be emulated, but in similar circumstances few of us would do so.
Snyder concludes, The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth, as growing preoccupations with food and water accompany ideological challenges to global order. Our world is closer to Hitler’s than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was — and ourselves as we are.
4. The Pity of it All by Amos Elon shows us the Jewish panorama before the war. Writing with a novelist’s eye, Alon peoples his account with dramatic figures: Moses Mendelssohn, who entered Berlin in 1743 through the gate reserved for Jews and cattle, and went on to become “the German Socrates”; Heinrich Heine, beloved lyric poet who famously referred to baptism as the admission ticket to European culture; Hannah Arendt, whose flight from Berlin signaled the end of the German-Jewish idyll. Elon traces how this minority-never more than one percent of the population-came to be perceived as a deadly threat to national integrity. A collective biography, full of depth and compassion, The Pity of It All summons up a splendid world and a dream of integration and tolerance that fueled the liberal dream.
Rabbi Sacks claims, for too long, Jews have defined themselves in light of the bad things that have happened to them. And it is true that, many times in the course of history, they have been nearly decimated: when the First and Second Temples were destroyed, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, when Hitler proposed his Final Solution. Astoundingly, the Jewish people have survived catastrophe after catastrophe and remained a thriving and vibrant community. The question Rabbi Jonathan Sacks asks is, quite simply: How? How, in the face of such adversity, has Judaism remained and flourished, making a mark on human history out of all proportion to its numbers?
He traces the revolutionary series of philosophical and theological ideas that Judaism created — from covenant to sabbath to formal education — and shows us how they remain compellingly relevant in our time.
This is the story of one man’s hope for the future — a future in which the next generation, his children and ours, will happily embrace the beauty of the world’s oldest religion.