The concept of authenticity of being was introduced into modern existentialist philosophy by Martin Heidegger. He meant by this the form of human existence that is not determined by external conditions and whose values do not derive from “them,” from the standard bearers of the established social order in the midst of which a human being may find himself. Jean-Paul Sartre developed the thought further when he spoke of freedom as a condition to which man is “condemned,” meaning that no matter in what situation a person may find himself, he is always free to make his choices and, indeed, he always does choose between different possibilities of behavior. The decision is always his. When the Gestapo tortured a member of the Maquis to get him to betray his comrades, he was still free to choose to die or to reveal. His betrayal might be understandable; it is not a matter of condemning him. But in all circumstances the decision is his.
Sartre’s position is no mere theory. His understanding of human freedom is based on his actual experiences in the French underground. Similarly Frankl, basing himself on his observations in the concentration camps, affirms the reality of human freedom even in extreme conditions. He writes: “The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action…Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.” There were always choices to make, and it was your decision that “determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom…”1Op. cit., pp. 65–66.
For the Jew there is no surprise in these discoveries of Sartre and Frankl. He has made his choices all through history and the Jewish people have survived to this day because there were always Jews who knew that no matter what the conditions and circumstances, it was always up to them to make the decision. We are not only thinking of the untold martyrs who made their choice, in the supreme freedom of the spirit, to die rather than to surrender, but also — and perhaps chiefly — of the ordinary daily life of the Jewish masses through the ages. They lived in confrontation with cultures and civilizations whose values they often rejected and whose lifestyles they mostly did not share. The Jew has been the nonconformist of history and has lived in authenticity of selfhood through many centuries.
Though living through a persecution radically more severe than anything experienced previously, the Jews who suffered under the Nazis in essence continued the historic lifestyle of the Jewish people. To be sure, this lifestyle, as embodied in the halakhah, is a style of living. It does not consider physical existence unworthy of its concern. On the contrary, it is concerned with existence in its entirety. But human life is not limited to physical or biological existence; its physical and biological components are not a bit more “real” than its spiritual, value-oriented and meaning-seeking aspects. In the same sense, external reality, whose determination has been the preoccupation of modern philosophy for generations, is no more real than the internal life of the person. A thought, an idea, a concept, is no less of this world than a cell, a molecule, or a biological drive. The human being, as a potentiality, and the world that he encounters, are the raw material out of which selfhood emerges. The reality of man is never given; he has to shape it for himself out of what is given to him. How he does it, that alone determines the quality of his humanity.
The significance of what we have called authentic Jewish behavior is that even in the ghettos and the death camps there were numerous Jews who determined their own lifestyles. In the midst of the filth of the SS kingdom they established their own realm of Jewish continuity, giving structure to the wilderness into which they were cast. What did this mean in terms of the actual, daily camp situation?
In a moving passage, Frankl describes one of his personal experiences that could have occurred on any ordinary day:
“Almost in tears from pain (I had terrible sores on my feet from wearing torn shoes), I limped a few kilometers with our long column of men from the camp to our work site. Very cold, bitter winds struck. I kept thinking of the endless little problems of our miserable life. What should there be to eat tonight? If a piece of sausage came as extra ration, should I exchange it for a piece of bread? Should I trade my last cigarette, which was left from a bonus I received a fortnight ago, for a bowl of soup? How could I get a piece of wire to replace the fragment which served as one of my shoelaces? Would I get to our work site in time to join my usual working party or would I have to join another, which might have a brutal foreman…?”
Unlike the mass of prisoners, Frankl, having been able to safeguard a high measure of personal dignity, became disgusted with a situation that compelled him to think “daily and hourly…of only such trivial things.” Fighting off the onslaught of the trivia, he found relief in falling back on his professional interest. Suddenly, as if in a vision, he saw himself standing “on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room.” In front of him sat “an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats,” to whom Frankl lectured on the psychology of the concentration camp. Thus the daily camp experience became objectified as a phenomenon for scientific examination. Frankl then explains: “By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past.”2Ibid., pp. 73–74. Needless to say, matters which in normal conditions would be considered mere trivia received extraordinary importance in the camps. Hosts of prisoners found themselves in the predicament of having to limp many kilometers from the camp to their work site and back in pain because of their sore feet. What would authentic Jews be thinking of during such a march? Probably of the very same trivial needs that so preoccupied Frankl. But they would not be thinking of these things “daily and hourly,” and their concern was not only with “such trivial things.” They would be no less deeply involved with problems of an entirely different nature: would they be able to find a corner in their barracks where they might be able to pray Ma’ariv (the evening service) with the prescribed quorum of at least ten men? How could they get their hands on a pair of tefillin? How many rations of bread would it cost? Or, if Purim was approaching, where could they get a megillah (the Scroll of Esther)? Would it be another Pesaḥ without matzah? How could they minimize the need for eating the hot soup of the camp, which was terefah? How could they make a menorah for Ḥanukkah and smuggle it into the camp? And once it was there, how could they light it without it being discovered? Innumerable problems of this nature, and the devising of possible solutions for them, were among the foremost of their “daily and hourly” concerns. Victor Frankl had the strength of character to create his scientific vision and thus to escape the degrading misery of the death camps. These Jews, however, were not escaping. They imposed another rhythm on that raw reality to which they were subjected and thus drew out its dehumanizing poison. They lived their lives as Jews.
Trying to understand, trying to empathize with the suffering of Frankl, his feet covered with sores, limping along with his fellow prisoners from the hell of the camp to the hell of the work site and back, I see in my mind’s eye another long column of men, marching perhaps along the same road, in all kinds of chafing footwear, their torn rags exposing them to the elements, many of them limping along supported by their comrades; and the same long column returning exhausted in the evening, usually dragging along a few lifeless bodies with them. But somewhere there, intentionally lost in that same column, is a group of Jews, keeping close together. In their midst there walks one, a Talmid Ḥakham, who knows large sections of the Talmud by heart. He teaches Talmud, he teaches Torah. The others are listening; they interrupt with questions or to make their own contribution to the discussion. And of course there are other roads, other threadbare marchers, and other intense groups of Jews studying Talmud, or perhaps Mishnah, or reciting chapters from the Psalms by memory.
The camps had their own geographic pattern, designed to serve the goals of the extermination squads. But for these Jews, some of the roads were not paths of SS-prescribed misery, but were transformed by them into paths of daily renewal. The authentic Jewish lifestyle superimposed a space-structure of meaningfulness on the camp geography of humiliation and degradation. Similarly, the occupants of the Tahara Bretter (the boards of purity) at Buchenwald changed the space structure of the camp in their immediate area, establishing a focal point of direction for the Jews all around them, and not only for those who were still practicing Judaism. In that section, the map of the camp received the impact of a humanizing purpose. Or think of the deathpit turned into the Bet Medreshel, a place of prayer and study; the various spots in the Holocaust kingdom where sukkot were built secretly; the hiding places for tefillin, for a Ḥanukkah menorah, for a shofar to blow on Rosh haShanah — all points of a conspiratorial changing of space structure, a reorientation of directions in the camps.
Nowhere did this autonomous restructuring of camp reality achieve a more penetrating influence than in the dimension of time. Using the example of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, Terrence Des Pres effectively discusses the trying experience of unstructured time that was the lot of the prisoners in the concentration camps. He writes: “…in extremity the forms of time dissolve, the rhythms of change and motion are lost. Days pass, seasons, years pass and the fixer has no idea how long his ordeal will go on.” There is “an emptiness complete in itself, a suspension in the sameness of identical days which could last a year or a lifetime.”3Op. cit., p. 12. What was true for the fixer was even more oppressive and demoralizing for those in the German death camps.4Cf. also what Frankl has to say on the crushing burden of unstructured time, op. cit., p. 70. However, for the Jews whose lifestyle we are examining, the “suspension in the sameness of identical days,” the complete emptiness of endless duration, did not exist. Their time was not the SS-imposed structureless sameness; their time was structured by the Jewish calendar. Calendars were handwritten in the ghettos and camps, and even where they were not available, there were always Jews who could calculate and compute the necessary dates on the basis of the scanty information that was available. Thus, for the Jews, time was divided into days, weeks, months, seasons, and years. The division represented an experienced rhythm of sequence, each part of which carried its remembered and observed meaning and significance.
According to Frankl, the most ghastly moment of the day was “the awakening, when, at a still nocturnal hour, the three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings of our dreams.” He tells the story of how a comrade beside him was having a nightmare. At first, instinctively, he meant to wake him; but then he decided not to disturb him, for no matter how frightening his nightmare might have been, the awakening would have been even worse. To Frankl, it was a wonder that prisoners got up at all. What was awaiting them? An endless day of torture, humiliation, exhaustion, and hunger. “Prisoners were driven awake by fear, by anxiety, and often by the blows of a whip or club.”5Op. cit., p. 75. But what was each new day in the structured time of the Jewish calendar? Needless to say the tortures, the humiliation, the fatigue were all there in it. But for those Jews who rose one or two hours before the general appell in order to put on tefillin for a few moments, and for the thousands who had no access to tefillin but who nevertheless rose before the other prisoners, without the three shrill blows of the whistle, in order to say their morning prayers, it was a day given by God, on which one praised him as the Creator of light. One got up, because one had to, not because of the whip and the club, but because the morning is the time for Shaḥarit, the daily morning service. The day of the camp was indeed endless misery, yet another daily order was superimposed on it. With the sun about to set, one had to find an inconspicuous spot for a quick Minḥa prayer. And at night, one did not drop with senseless exhaustion into one’s bunk. One collected oneself. The order of the day called for its conclusion with Ma’ariv, the evening service. The week: for those who live in unstructured time there is no such thing as a week, but empty duration stretching infinitely. Only he who knows of the Sabbath knows of the week. Of course, the Sabbath could not be observed traditionally. One had to work; yet, one could, and did, celebrate the Sabbath even in the most extreme circumstances. This is how one survivor describes it:
“Comes Sabbath we feel the Neshama Yeterah, the enrichment of our souls.6According to a mystical tradition, the Jew receives an “additional soul” on the Sabbath which leaves him at the Sabbath’s conclusion. She sings in the depth of our being. How we love the Sabbath! We draw from her strength for all the days of the week. In the dim light of the descending evening we sing quietly…God is with us. Imo Anokhi beẒarah. ‘I am with him in his trouble’…Shekhinta beGaluta, yes, the Divine Presence itself is in exile with us.7Cf. Psalms 91:15; T.B. Ta’anit 16a; also T.B. Sukkah 45a and Tosafot s.v. Ani veHoo. We are not so lonely. A High Guest is staying with us. He, too, is now homeless, lonely without His people, suffering through our suffering. As the day is passing, in a darkening world we hold on to her, to our Sabbath. It is hard to take leave of her. We shall be alone again for such a long gray frightening week. Beginning with the first day of the week we start counting the days in our hearts till Erev Shabbat, till the sixth day…”8Eliav, p. 141; from Leib Rochman, BeDamayikh Ḥayyee, Jerusalem, 1961.
A long week indeed, full of hardship and suffering. But on Monday it would be only five days till the next Sabbath; on Tuesday, only four; by Thursday they would have almost made it. And what is true of the day and the week in that calendar is also true for the months, the seasons, and the year. All along the road there are stations; one moves toward them, one prepares oneself for them. The time spent in the evenings studying, usually by heart, the talmudic tractate Megillah in anticipation of Purim, or going over the laws of Pesaḥ as that festival approached, or on studying the relevant Talmud passages in mental preparation for Ḥanukkah — all this was not time suspended in empty repetition of the same eternal misery; it was the ordered time of a lifestyle imposed on chaos.
Frankl makes the point that a human being must have a future to live for. But since in the camps one could not see an end to the incarceration, one could not aim at a future. Therefore, he saw his life as “provisional existence of unknown limit.” This is one of the causes of so many losing their hold on life. Everything became pointless for them.9Op. cit., pp. 69–70. Future for them meant time beyond camp existence. But in the structured time sequence of the authentic Jew the future was also the next moment, with its demands and promises, waiting to be lived through as a Jew. His future was the continuous anticipation of the meaning and purpose of the next date in his calendar — Pesaḥ, the festival of liberation; Shavu’ot, the festival of the revelation at Sinai; Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur were waiting for him.
One is deeply stirred by Frankl’s words as he describes what the futureless existence in empty time meant for a sensitive prisoner who told him that as he marched in that long column of new inmates from the station to the camp he felt…
“as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died… The outside life, that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as if it might have to a dead man who looked at the world from another planet.”10Ibid., p. 71.
Now the authentic Jew never had his roots in that “outside life.” In fact, at all times he would look at it with a measure of reservation. Living in a different dimension of the spirit, he indeed looked at that world as if from another planet. The concentration camp was hell on earth. But even in such a hell one lives, in the embracing context of historic Judaism, in the presence of God.
Frankl has a counterpart to the story of the man who felt as if he were walking at his own funeral. It is the story of the human greatness of a sick young woman who knew that she had only a few more days to live. Yet, cheerful in spite of her knowledge, she told Frankl that she was grateful for her fate. “In my former life,” she said, “I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Then, pointing with her finger through the window of the hut, she continued: “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” All that could be seen through the window was a single branch of a chestnut tree with two blossoms on it. “I often talk to this tree,” she confessed. At first Frankl was startled, imagining that the woman might be delirious or that she suffered from occasional hallucinations. But when he anxiously asked her whether the tree replied, she said: “Yes! It said to me, ‘I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.’”11Ibid., pp. 68–69. The woman’s answer is very reminiscent of Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship. According to Buber, it is possible to establish such a dialogically personal relationship even with a tree. Through the finite Thou of that tree one might gain a glimpse of the Eternal Thou. Quite clearly, this young woman did not feel that she was seeing an outside world of unreality, as if she were dead or on another planet. In fact, never previously had she been so much alive to the reality of the world, never before so intimately close to it. Such are, of course, the unique experiences of unique people. But it is remarkable to what extent the authentic Jews remained in touch with the reality of the world. Even though separated from the world of men, these Jews were not alienated from God’s creation. This resulted, in a way, directly from their continued observance of the seasonal festivals. Pesaḥ does not only commemorate the Exodus, it is also Ḥag haAviv, the Spring festival; Shavu’ot, when the Torah was given, is also remembered as Ḥag haBikurim, the festival of the first fruits of the land that used to be offered in the Temple of Jerusalem; and Sukkot, the “season of our joy,” is also the season of the harvest. They were not only memories of the past; the Jews knew very well that no matter what their personal fate might turn out to be, Pesaḥ, Shavu’ot, and Sukkot, as well as the other significant dates in the Jewish calendar, would outlast Nazi Germany. The structured time of the Jewish calendar preserved their contact with the world that brought to them the message of the eternal life of its source.
In the ghetto of Lodz a few young men were in hiding in order to be able to do nothing else but study Torah. We know the address. The place was in Radogshaz Street. We know their names: Moishe Podembizer, Leibel Rosenblat, Moishe Liss, and two Bornstein brothers, Naftoli and Falk. When the Gestapo discovered their hiding place they were accused of spying and sabotage and taken to a prison. There they were tortured in order to get them to reveal the “secrets of the underground.” After one of these bloody “examinations,” when the boys met for a short moment in a prison corridor, Moishe Liss called to the others: “Remember to start saying Tal uMatar, tomorrow evening,” referring to a two-word seasonal change which is introduced into the Shemoneh Esrei (Eighteen Benedictions) prayer early in December each year. The exact date of this change varies between December 4 and 5, but since Jewish calendars were no longer printed in the ghetto, Moishe Liss must have known the calendar of that year by heart and thus could remind his friends not to forget to insert the change in their prayers the next evening.12Prager, I, p. 82. Who cared about the Nazis! In the midst of the inferno, these young Jews, bruised and bleeding from German barbarism, could focus on such a small nuance of their prayers, reflecting the change in season.
If the festivals are chiefly seasonal, the Sabbath has its place in the cosmos. For God created the world in six days and He rested on the seventh. “And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it.”13Genesis 2:2. The same survivor, whose words about the Sabbath in his bunker we quoted earlier, experiences the holy day in its cosmic context:
“At the time of sunset on the eve of the Sabbath it would seem as if the fields were being covered with plush carpets in honor of Queen Sabbath. The lights in the far-away little windows flicker as if they were Sabbath candles lit in universal space. Our saintly mothers who kindled those lights hover above in the distant blue. They cover their faces with their hands…they put their hands on our hands and bless us. The stars across the sky twinkle…twinkling Sabbath candles. Soon they will fade and be extinguished. A Sabbath song is in the air, floating in from somewhere behind the woods. Oh, how we wish to sit at the hole of the bunker and let the song filter into us till the rise of the sun.”14Prager, I, p. 82.
* * * * *
A partisan. The battle has subsided. Quiet. His head fills with confusing thoughts. A maddening desire overcomes him: to smoke, to smoke. To take a piece of paper, to roll a cigarette and to forget. To forget everything.
“Suddenly, a thought passes over my mind, cutting as if with a knife’s edge. Shabbat! Shabbat?”
Behind him a red sun ignites flames of fire at the end of the horizon and floods with purple some scattered and lonely greyish clouds. Far, far away, other clouds rise thickeningly above the trees, hastening to extinguish the conflagration. Roll that cigarette! The sun…Shabbat!
“Raise your head and look at the sky — spoke a voice within me — it is already dark. The Sabbath has descended.”
His fingers clasped the tobacco in his pocket as if it were some precious and desired treasure that one did not have the courage to bring out into the light of the day. Just to touch it gave him a pleasurable feeling.
“I looked at the sky. As if there were something there before which I was ashamed…nor did I have the strength to pull my hand out of my pocket.”
The partisan struggled against that voice on behalf of his consuming desire.
“Gradually the dark cloud covered the last tongues of fire that were still spreading from the horizon. The sun was emitting some of its last weakening sparks. Then it disappeared as if it had never been. Shabbat! Shabbat!”
His head sunk onto the soft earth. He closed his eyes and his thoughts took him away from the still unfinished battle and from everything around him.
“I did not sleep, nor did I see any visions in a dream. Only my eyes were closed. Suddenly, well-known faces of long ago, forgotten under the burden of the time, were flowing towards me. Sabbath evening! The Shtiebel is filled from one end to the other with Jews in black ‘kapotes’ of silk, and velvet hats on their heads…long tables covered with white tablecloths…red-cheeked little children with long descending curly sidelocks squeeze themselves through the crowd. Heart-warming tunes are heard as some study the Zohar and others recite Shir haShirim.15The Zohar, the Book of Light, is the classic work of Jewish mysticism. Shir haShirim, the biblical Song of Songs, is often read in the synagogue by individuals prior to the communal Sabbath eve services. The wax candles are dripping from the warm atmosphere of the Shtiebel.
‘L’kha Dodi…Come, my beloved to meet the Bride
Let us welcome the Shabbat.’16A refrain from the Sabbath eve liturgy.
It is the voice of my father who has been honored with Kabbalat Shabbat, to welcome the Shabbat. And I am assisting him…with a tune that inspires and caresses at the same time.”
The Germans interrupt the silence; they tear apart the web of the dream. Bullets, flying like stars, erred in their paths and were whistling over his head. Quickly he emptied his pocket. Temptation had been conquered. The tobacco was swallowed up in the mud. He felt better; he breathed restfully, as if a heavy burden had been taken from off him.
“I felt light, refreshed; as if born anew. I sat on the trunk of a rotting tree. I looked up into the star-studded sky; I knew that the night was a Shabbat night. My lips were whispering…I did not know what…I thanked God for the loving kindness that he rendered unto me on that day…”17Eliav, pp. 75–76.
For this survivor the experience brought back the memory of a far-away, wondrous world, a world that had disappeared and no longer existed. And yet, it was speaking to him with the cosmic voice of a Shabbat night in the universe.
* * * * *
The authenticity of being reached its deepest validation when the Jew was confronted with the ultimate, when powers beyond his physical strength were about to put an end to his physical existence. The prototype of this autonomous Jew has been Rabbi Akiva, the story of whose death, as told in the Talmud, is well known. When the Romans were leading him to be executed it became time to recite the morning Shema. As he was being tortured, he said the Shema, taking upon himself the “yoke of the Heavens.”18T.B. Berakhot 61b.
Struggling intellectually with the nightmarish bequest of the destruction of European Jewry makes one think with awe of the majestic simplicity of the words in this story “…it was time to recite the morning Shema.” It has been customary for many generations that when a Jew’s life is threatened, or, on his sickbed when he feels that his end is approaching, he would use his last moments on earth to recite the first verse of the Shema. With a last effort and fervor he would call out the words: “Hear, O Israel…” There is a drama in this call that surpasses the mundane and is sounded in a transcendental realm at the border line between two worlds. It was, however, not like this that Rabbi Akiva said the Shema. There was nothing of drama in his words, nothing of the sublime that one might notice in the voice of a man who with his last breath affirms the meaning of his whole life. Rabbi Akiva did not say the Shema because they were taking him to his execution, not because the ultimate test was approaching. On the contrary, there was nothing extraordinary about his Shema. The reason he said it was very simple; “…it was time to recite the morning Shema…” He said it just as on any other day, because that hour of the day had arrived when one was supposed to say it. It was totally irrelevant to what the Romans were about to do to his body. The soldiers of Rome, all the might and glory of the empire — Rabbi Akiva ignored them. They were of no consequence; he was busy with something else. It was time to recite the Shema and according to the law one should not delay saying it.
To be unconcerned with what others may do to you, even when your life is at stake, because you are committed to the truth of your own life, is the supreme act of personal autonomy. In the spirit of Rabbi Akiva such acts of autonomous being occurred not infrequently in the ghettos and the death camps. We are not thinking here of the tens of thousands who went to the gas chambers with the Shema or some other form of affirmation of faith on their lips, though this, too, was a majestic deed of devotion to the truth of one’s life. We are thinking of those who showed that radical indifference to the external reality that had been imposed on them. Such for instance, was the behavior of a group of fifty baḥurim (young yeshiva students) who stood at the door to the gas chambers in Auschwitz on Simḥat Torah (the festival of the Rejoicing of the Law): “It is Simḥat Torah today. There are no scrolls of the Torah here; but surely God is here. Let us celebrate with Him.” It was the same indifference, the same contempt for all the might of the oppressor that Rabbi Akiva showed so many centuries earlier to the Roman Empire.
There were many similar situations in which others acted no differently. One Friday, the Germans took Rabbi Ḥayyim Yeḥiel Rubin of Dambrowe to the cemetery, together with twenty other Jews of the city. There they ordered them to dig their graves. As so often on such occasions, the Germans were in no hurry. Standing in their graves, the Jews were able to welcome the Sabbath Queen with the traditional prayers. After the prayers, the Rebbe greeted the little congregation, as well as the regular Jewish grave diggers who were there, with the traditional “Good Shabbes” and started singing, as on every other Friday night, Shalom Aleikhem, “Peace unto you, angels of peace.” He recited Kiddush, sanctified the Sabbath over two ḥallot, two Sabbath loaves which the Jewish grave diggers had smuggled in to them, and taught Torah, interpreting the twenty-two letters with which the contents of the Torah are written. In the midst of his teaching, he was overcome with religious fervor and began to sing. Influenced by Rabbi Rubin, the other Jews joined in with him and, singing and dancing, celebrated the Sabbath, completely ignoring the Germans who, their machine-guns at the ready, were surrounding the grave.19Unger, p. 135.
In Baranowicz, Rabbi Nissan Scheinberg was a Dayyan, a member of the rabbinical court. On Shushan Purim, in 1942, the Germans prepared a blood bath in the town at which thousands of Jews were murdered. Dr. Nehemia Kroschinsky, a surviving eyewitness, tells this story:
“A group of Slonim ḥasidim, who were caught in the ‘selection,’ stood together, preparing themselves for the moment of Kiddush Hashem, ‘the sanctification of the Divine Name’ in death. In the midst of the group stood the Dayyan, Rabbi Nissan, who called to the others: ‘Jews! Let us not forget that today is Purim. Let us drink L’ḥayyim, to life.’ He poured out a cupful and said again: ‘L’ḥayyim!’ He got hold of a few other Jews and started dancing. His face was shining as he sang the traditional Purim song, Shoshanat Ya’akov, ‘Rose of Jacob,’ and he shouted with joy until a German bullet silenced him.”20Eleh Ezkerah, VII, p. 196.
This kind of contemptuous indifference to the enemy is the ultimate of human autonomy. Dov Sadan called it haEmunah haAḥaronah, the ultimate faith. He rightly said that it is superior to all the might of the enemy, for while this might is considered by the foe the essential substance of reality, for men of ultimate faith this reality does not exist at all. Only such faith enables the human soul to rise to its highest exaltation, an experience so well-known to the Jew through his wanderings because of the truth that he represents in the history of man.21Dov Sadan in Maḥanayim, Ḥanukkah 5720 (1959). Many a survivor of the ghettos and camps speaks of such joyous exaltation. One of the survivors of the Lodz ghetto recalls the past in these words:
“The truth is that often I am ashamed of myself. How I have fallen from igra rama, from the lofty heights of those days to the life of comforts and smallness of today. Woe is me! How far removed I am today even from the mere perception of the sublime of that time…What are our concepts of the ghetto today? Gehinnom, hell, graveyard! Dark and black abyss! Yet for us, for our group the ghetto was the furnace in which our unlimited commitment (mesirut nefesh) was purified and where one reached a purity of attachment to the divine than which nothing higher is conceivable.”22Prager, II, p. 100.
Another survivor, explaining how the Torah teachings of his father and other pious Jews helped him cope with continually mounting suffering in the ghetto, summed up his memories by observing: “Perhaps now some will believe me when I say in full truth and seriousness that to this day I have not tasted life as I did in those days of trouble.”23Ibid., p. 93.
In one of the huts in a certain concentration camp some Jews were celebrating the Passover seder. Suddenly the door was opened with force. They all expected the worst. But the “guests” were Noḥumze and a few other young Jews. They all acted as if they were somewhat drunk, although it was clear that not one of them had touched a drop of alcohol. “What is the matter, Reb Itsche?” Noḥumze demanded. “Is this how one conducts a seder! Is this how one serves God with joy? And if there is no wine for the ‘Four Cups’ a Jew cannot get inebriated…that God has helped us to celebrate the seder even in a camp?” After that they started singing with fervor the traditional seder songs.24Unger, p. 322.
Many a Jew understood that the way they met the tribulations had itself to be a form of divine service and one had to serve God with joy. Leib Brikman, a survivor of Dachau, tells of a hard winter in a camp he was in near Landsberg. Cold and hunger was gnawing at the prisoners and wearing down what remained of their strength. These are Brikman’s words:
“I felt like a candle about to go out. All along the way…the snow was piled high. I skidded often and fell. The little will that was still left in the dying body whispered to me: ‘Lie down on this soft pile of snow and don’t get up again.’ ”
At this moment his friend, Notte Eibschitz, a young man of eighteen, stepped up to him and said:
“What is the matter, my friend? True, we are walking to hell. (Gehinnom). But does not a Jew accept even suffering with love! Even to Gehinnom one has to walk in joy.”
“It was then that I rose and stood on my feet,” concludes Leib Brikman.25Prager, II, p. 136.