Meet the Holocaust Baby

By Project Witness
Exclusive for COLLIVE

How My Parents Met
Rabbi Yosef Wallis, director of Arachim of Israel, talks to Project Witness about his father, Judah Wallis, who was born and raised in Pavenitz, Poland:

“While he was in Dachau, a Jew who was being taken to his death suddenly flung a small bag at my father, Judah Wallis. He caught it, thinking it might contain a piece of bread. Upon opening it, however, he was disturbed to discover a pair of tefillin. Judah was very frightened because he knew that were he to be caught carrying tefillin, he would be put to death instantly. So he hid the tefillin under his shirt and headed for his bunkhouse.

“In the morning, just before the appel [roll call], while still in his bunkhouse, he put on the tefillin. Unexpectedly, a German officer appeared. He ordered him to remove the tefillin, noted the number on Judah’s arm, and ordered him to go straight to the appel.

“At the appel, in front of thousands of silent Jews, the officer called out Judah’s number and he had no choice but to step forward. The German officer waved the tefillin in the air and said, ‘Dog! I sentence you to death by public hanging for wearing these.’

“Judah was placed on a stool and a noose was placed around his neck. Before he was hanged, the officer said in a mocking tone, ‘Dog, what is your last wish?’

“’To wear my tefillin one last time,’ Judah replied.

“The officer was dumbfounded. He handed Judah the tefillin. As Judah put them on, he recited the verse that is said while the tefillin are being wound around the fingers: ‘Ve’eirastich li le’olam, ve’eirastich li b’tzedek uvemishpat, ub’chessed, uv’rachamim, ve’eirastich li b’emunah, v’yodaat es Hashem—I will betroth you to me forever and I will betroth you to me with righteousness and with justice and with kindness and with mercy and I will betroth you to me with fidelity, and you shall know Hashem.’

“It is hard for us to picture this Jew with a noose around his neck, wearing tefillin on his head and arm — but that was the scene that the entire camp was forced to watch, as they awaited the impending hanging of the Jew who had dared to break the rule against wearing tefillin. Even women from the adjoining camp were lined up at the barbed wire fence that separated them from the men’s camp, forced to watch this horrible sight.

“As Judah turned to watch the silent crowd, he saw tears in many people’s eyes. Even at that moment, as he was about to be hanged, he was shocked. Jews were crying! How was it possible that they still had tears left to shed? And for a stranger? Where were those tears coming from? Impulsively, in Yiddish, he called out, ‘Yidden, don’t cry. With tefillin on, I am the victor. Don’t you understand, I am the winner!’

“The German officer understood the Yiddish and was infuriated. He said to Judah, ‘You dog, you think you are the winner? Hanging is too good for you. You are going to get another kind of death.’

“Judah, my father, was taken from the stool and the noose was removed from his neck. He was forced into a squatting position and two huge rocks were placed under his arms. Then he was told that he would be receiving 25 lashes to his head — the head on which he had dared to position his tefillin. The officer told him that if he dropped even one of the rocks, he would be shot immediately. In fact, because this was such an extremely painful form of death, the officer advised him, ‘Drop the rocks now. You will never survive the 25 lashes to the head. Nobody ever does.’

“Judah’s response was, ‘No, I won’t give you the pleasure.’

“At the 25th lash, Judah lost consciousness and was left for dead. He was about to be dragged to a pile of corpses , after which he would have been burned in a ditch, when another Jew saw him, shoved him to the side, and covered his head with a rag, so people didn’t realize he was alive. Eventually, after he recovered consciousness fully, he crawled to the nearest bunkhouse that was on raised piles, and hid under it until he was strong enough to come out under his own power. Two months later he was liberated.

“During the hanging and beating episode, a 17-year-old girl had been watching the events from the women’s side of the fence. After liberation, she made her way to the men’s camp and found Judah. She walked over to him and said, ‘I’ve lost everyone. I don’t want to be alone any more. I saw what you did that day when the officer wanted to hang you. Will you marry me?’”

The rest is history. Rabbi Yosef Wallis’ parents (for this couple became his parents) walked over to the Klausenberger Rebbe and requested that he perform the marriage ceremony. The Klausenberger Rebbe, whose kiddush Hashem is legendary, wrote out a kesubah by hand from memory and married the couple. Rabbi Wallis has that handwritten kesubah in his possession to this day.

Every woman and girl (high school age and over) is invited and encouraged to come to Oholei Menachem this Sunday, January 22, at 7:30 to meet Mrs. Ruth Lichtenstein and to understand what the Holocaust means to us, Jewish women living in the U.S. in 2012. The evening will be chaired by Mrs. Devorah Leah (“Dina”) Rosenfeld who will speak about Rebbetzin Chana’s legacy.
Admission is $15 for women, $10 for high school and seminary girls. Come early to get a good seat.

Mrs. Ruth Lichtenstein’s Childhood (in her own words:)
“Let me introduce myself. I am a proud child of Holocaust survivors. But I didn’t know that that is what I am until I was about seven years old, and the Eichmann trial began in Jerusalem, where we lived.

“One day during that trial, I heard a knock on the door of our apartment. There stood Leibel, a man we considered our uncle. During the Holocaust, he spent eight months hiding in a bunker with my mother and others, in Warsaw, Poland.

“Leibel was a man I knew as a pillar of strength, always smiling, always with a candy for me, but now he stood there at the door looking shaken, on the verge of tears.

“The moment my parents saw him they took him into the dining room and locked the door.

“A few moments later I heard a voice sobbing bitterly. It was Leibel.
“As a little girl I could not understand why he was crying. But I wanted to understand.
“This was my first exposure to the suffering and brutality and trauma of the Holocaust…”

“I Can Face My Parents Now”

Despite her accomplishments as a prominent and innovative publisher (Hamodia, Binah), Mrs. Lichtenstein views her work with Project Witness (Holocaust Educational Resource Center) and the creation and distribution of the landmark textbook, Witness to History, as the most important work she does. “I can face my parents now,” she says.

“How can Jews tolerate even the slightest hint that their grandchildren might question the truth of what occurred and that they might chas v’shalom dismiss it as something that is not relevant to them?” she wonders.

Come Meet “The Baby,” This Sunday, 7:30 p.m, in Oholei Menachem

The Germans decreed that every Jewish woman who was expecting a child had to abort. One woman refused. She was threatened with death and was promised she would receive no medical care. The Germans warned that any doctor who assists a Jewish woman giving birth would be punished severely. She persisted. This was her baby and she would give it life, if Hashem allowed her. She had her baby boy in a closet in an attic in the ghetto and she almost died, if not for a Jewish doctor who risked his own life to come and save hers. It was clear that the baby could not stay in the ghetto so at the age of three months he was smuggled out in a suitcase into the car of a non-Jewish woman for money.

The parents were sent to two different camps. They survived and soon they were reunited. Now they had one goal: To find their baby.

Project Witness went in search of the “baby,” now 75 years old. They found him, in New Jersey. Meet him on video this Sunday night, January 22, at 7:30 at Oholei Menachem, and find out how long it took for his parents to find him.

And Last, Quotes From Everyone From Edmund Burke to Rabbi Shea Hecht

Edmund Burke, Irish supporter of the American Revolution: “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Mrs. Nechama Chanin of Bnos Chomesh, a new and growing girls’ high school in Crown Heights: I heard Mrs. Lichtenstein speak at Ohel once, and I promised myself then and there that I would make sure she comes to Crown Heights soon. This evening [Sun, Jan 22, at Oholei Menachem] is the fulfillment of that promise.

Mrs. Ruth Lichtenstein, founder of Project Witness (Holocaust Educational Resource Center) and author of Witness to History: “As time marches on, we see Holocaust denial becoming an industry, while the precious population of Holocaust survivors – eyewitnesses – unfortunately dwindles daily. [We must] take immediate action to teach the younger generation what happened to our people a mere seventy years ago…!”

Rabbi Elimelech Silberberg, Chabad of West Bloomfield, MI, and son-in-law of survivors: Several years ago, while talking to a group of Jewish Russian-American girls about the importance of knowing Jewish history, my wife asked if any of them knew the name Bogdan Chmielnicki. One girl from Ukraine raised her hand. Chmielnicki’s statue stood in the town square of her village in Ukraine. “He’s a hero,” she said. This was the man who instigated the pogroms of 1648-1649 (“gezeiros Tach v’Tat”) wherein hundreds of thousands of Jews were brutally murdered! Do not underestimate the extent of our children’s ignorance!

Rabbi Yossi Lew of March of the Living, which takes teenagers to Poland and to Israel: To its everlasting credit, the N’shei Chabad Newsletter has researched and written the stories of many survivors. But [to know individual stories] is far from enough. …Our children need to understand government issues and world politics, and how Hitler and his minions got way with the wholesale, systematic murder of millions of innocents in this century…

Mrs. Rishe Deitsch: In the 1960s, when I was a child, we used to drive in to Crown Heights from Worcester, Mass., where we lived, to shop for kosher food. We always made a stop at Singer’s, with those barrels filled with homemade pickles and sour tomatoes. While we were gathering the items on the list, Mrs. Farkash always spoke at length with my father in Yiddish, and sooner or later, the conversation would give way to tears. Daddy, what’s wrong, we would whisper to our father. Don’t you see the numbers on her arm? he would reply. Later, on the drive back to Worcester, he would repeat some of the painful memories Mrs. Farkash had shared with him. Mrs. Farkash was the first Holocaust survivor we knew.

Rabbi Yossi Lew: We knew survivors – and yet, to be candid, awareness of the Holocaust did not carry that much significance for me. … I later learned how wrong I was to feel that Chabad-Lubavitch had little to do with the Holocaust. I now know that there were ten Chabad shuls in Riga alone. Throughout the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland, there were hundreds of Chabad shuls. In many cases, Jews were forced into the shul, the doors were locked, walls were doused with gasoline and set on fire… Rabbanim were targeted first in order to make it easier to get the now-leaderless Jews to fall in line. A similar fate awaited the remaining Jews of Lubavitch… all murdered at the hands of the Nazis.

Rabbi Yanki Tauber (Chabad.org): For the Rebbe, the important thing about the Holocaust was not how we do or do not understand it, nor, even, how we memorialize its victims, but what we do about it. …If we rebuild, if we raise a generation proud of and committed to their Jewishness, we will have triumphed.

Mrs. Shula Bryski (Chabad of T.O.): What is education? Is it simply accumulating knowledge? Or is it more? When it comes to telling our children about the Holocaust, it has to be more. Knowledge alone cannot immortalize our loved ones. Education about this genocide must be infused with the idea of action. … all the millions of souls, some of whom are nameless to us, will not be forgotten.

Mrs. Chana Shloush (N’shei Chabad Newsletter editorialist): My father didn’t have a number on his arm, but he often woke up screaming from nightmares. Mind you, my father didn’t talk much about it… Holocaust education, yes – the young people must be taught …, but they must be taught with simchah and even with a light heart. Because Moshiach really is coming any minute.

Mrs. Ruth Lichtenstein: If we ignore the problem of Holocaust denial, we are letting our enemies and neo-Nazis grow up and become a new threat as if nothing ever happened. She’al avicha veyagedecha. We must ask our parents about their experiences, hear them study them, and learn from them.

Rabbi Shea Hecht (NCFJE): I strongly believe that even in the chassidishe yeshivos we need a curriculum about the Holocaust. We must know and understand what happened in the past to protect ourselves for the future. I urge every woman and girl to attend the event Sunday night Jan. 22 at 7:30 p.m. at Oholei Menachem. Women of Crown Heights, it is your obligation and your privilege to go and hear Mrs. Ruth Lichtenstein, creator of Project Witness and author of Witness to History.