A child but not a child
Here’s a stirring story of another courageous rescuer during World War II and the Holocaust:
In an emotional ceremony on Tuesday, the Holocaust memorial Rabbi Lau now chairs posthumously granted Feodor Mikhailichenko Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews.
“This closes a circle of 64 years. You look for this person, to whom you owe your life, and you don’t know whom to thank,” said Rabbi Lau, 72. “He was my childhood hero. A man with a huge soul and a heart of gold.”
Rabbi Lau had previously identified a fellow inmate, a non-Jewish Russian named Feodor, as his savior in the Buchenwald concentration camp, but he never learned the 18-year-old’s full name. He said Feodor stole and cooked potatoes for him, knitted him wool earmuffs to protect him from the bitter cold and lay on top of him as gunfire erupted when the camp was liberated on Apr. 11, 1945. At the time, Lau was an 8-year-old boy nicknamed Lulek.
“Feodor, the Russian, looked after me in the daily life like a father would for a son. His concern and feeling of responsibility gave me a sense of security,” Lau wrote in his 2005 autobiography.
Mikhailichenko grew so close to Rabbi Lau that he wanted to adopt him as a son. But Rabbi Lau kept his word to his murdered family and emigrated to pre-state Israel on a ship of orphaned refugee children. He lost track of Mikhailichenko and despite many efforts could never trace him again.
Lau later became the chief rabbi of Israel.
I have noticed that in the case of Jewish children who were saved by the kindness of non-Jews, a number of factors often seemed to be present. The child was usually very bright, and had an especially winning and courageous personality. The protectors sometimes already had children and families themselves, but sometimes they were people such as Mikhailichenko who were alone (some had lost their own families), and the child came to symbolize family and love for them. Helping the child was one of the only ways they could assert some sort of control over their dreadful situation and maintain a sense of their own moral and spiritual integrity.
Israel Lau seems to have been a very unusual child, wise for his age. Some of that was due to the fact that he had experiences no child should ever have, experiences that—if survived—would make one grow up very quickly. However, they are so harrowing they could have caused permanent emotional and physical damage of a very severe sort.
A few years ago Lau wrote a memoir. The following is an excerpt from it describing the liberation of Buchenwald, the camp where Lau was at the end of the war. Rabbi Schacter was an American rabbi who was with the forces liberating the camp, and he found Lau hiding behind a stack of dead bodies:
In full army uniform, Rabbi Schacter got down from his jeep and stood before the pile of bodies. Many of them were still bleeding. Suddenly he thought he saw a pair of eyes, wide open and alive. He panicked, and with a soldier’s instinct, he drew his pistol. Slowly, carefully, he began to circle the pile of bodies. Then””and this I recall clearly””he bumped into me, a little boy, staring at him from behind the mound of corpses, wide-eyed. His face revealed his astonishment: in the midst of the killing fields, from within that sea of blood””suddenly, a child appears! I did not move. But he knew that no child in this place could be anything but Jewish. He holstered his pistol, then grabbed me with both hands and caught me in a fatherly embrace, lifting me in his arms. In Yiddish, with a heavy American accent, he asked me: “Wie alt bist du, mein kindt? How old are you, my boy?”
I saw tears dripping from his eyes. Still, through force of habit, I answered cautiously, like someone perpetually on guard: “What difference does it make? At any rate, I’m older than you.” He smiled at me from behind his tears, and asked, “Why do you think that you’re older than I am?” Without hesitating, I replied, “Because you laugh and cry like a child, and I haven’t laughed for a long time. I can’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?”
I’ll tell one more story of Lau’s, this one describing something that occurred when he first arrived in a labor camp at Czestochowa when Lau was seven years old. Although the Nazis usually killed all children who arrived at the camps, Lau had survived due to the protection, courage, and quick-thinking of his older brother Naphtali (who also ended up surviving the war, although the rest of his family did not):
But, the trouble was far from over: “One day, the Gestapo camp commander bellowed out in anger, ”˜Wozu brauch ich diese dreckigen dicken Jungen, die sind nicht produktiv! (What do I need these filthy kids for, they are totally useless!) All they do is eat.’”
Listen to Rabbi Lau recount his first public speaking opportunity, the first in a long career but his most important, by far. “His words pounded in my head like hammers,” he writes. “I do not know what exactly came over me, who gave me the courage to open my mouth, or who put the words into it. I spoke up, ”˜Why does the commandant say such things about us? That we are useless? That we are incapable? For twelve hours a day in Hortensia, the glass factory in Piotrkow, I pushed a cart with sixty bottles of water and that was already a year ago. Now, I’m older and I can do more. We have a right to live, too.’
“Kiesling turned red with fury and ordered all eleven children to be brought immediately to Gestapo headquarters. In short order, the Nazi decided that each child could be redeemed for 1,000 marks and would remain alive for the time being. Where does one get so much money?”
Once again, his mother saved his life, although she was not there. She had equipped Naphtali with two diamonds and a gold watch. This time, he used the smaller diamond which was implanted in a hole in his back tooth and covered with a crown. “Rosensweig, the Jewish commandant, presented it to Kiesling, and, in exchange, I received my life.”
I sometimes think I’m a bit obsessive about the Holocaust, but then I read a piece such as yours and dismiss that thought from my mind, and instead feel a moral obligation to continue to read about it and to talk about it with others.
The price to pay is sadness, though, especially when I read of a horror I’d not heard of before, like the four hundred Hungarian Jewish children who were pushed into a pit and burned alive, as told in this piece in the New Yorker.
But then that sadness changes to deep anger when I read about how the U.S. did its best to bring SS monsters to the States after WWII, as related in a recent book, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men. I can’t imagine how the author was able to survive the research and writing of it.
Ann, a lot of the people involved had little choice to be involved, and the idea that they would or could choose otherwise, would be a rarity. given the choice between doing what they say or joining the people with prejudice on you for not doing, what would you choose?
a whole lot of people were conscripted after germans took over their country…
we all might like to think that we woud stand up and get shot rather than follow orders, but i am not so sure when you see people today wont stand up against things in which there is only social nastiness not an actual murder of the state.
if you think that they should have ended up like the other legion (stalin exterminated them as traitors), then you would have sided with Baltutlé¤mningen
Swedish extradition of Baltic soldiers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_extradition_of_Baltic_soldiers
the latvian legionaires that were in the courland pocket were the ones exterminated.
In the 1990s the Swedish government admitted that this had been a mistake. Surviving Baltic veterans were invited to Sweden in 1994, where they were met by the King of Sweden Carl XVI Gustaf and the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden Margaretha af Ugglas and participated in various ceremonies commemorating the events surrounding their extradition. Both the King and the Minister for Foreign affairs expressed their regret for Sweden’s past extradition of Baltic Legion soldiers to the Stalinist USSR
so when you hear of a lot of SS came to america, remember there were whole groups that had nothing to do with the holocaust, they just took up weapons to repel the soviets whom they lived under before the german occupation.
now that is not to say there were no monsters from latvia, there were, and they were part of PÄ“rkonkrusts…
and as far as monsters go, well, some of the worlds worst came from latvia, if you know which ones went into creating the KGB then called the NKVD.
PÄ“rkonkrusts was a Latvian ultra-nationalist, anti-German and antisemitic political party founded in 1933 by Gustavs Celmiņš, borrowing elements of German nationalism–but being unsympathetic to German National Socialism at the time–and Italian fascism.
they were ended when the leader was killed in the 1940s… though recently a new group with the same name has cropped up since 1995…
the left made a freaking mess akin to the gordian knot, trying more variations of what is moral, what is immoral, and what is moral and immoral to do about it.
here is something that may make you think twice..
Karl Plagge was a Wehrmacht officer, engineer and Nazi Party member
should he be killed or imprisoned for being part of the german machine?
during World War II used his position as a staff officer in the Heer (Army) to employ and protect some 1,240 Jews – 500 men, the others women and children, in order to give them a better chance to survive the nearly total annihilation of Lithuania’s Jews that took place between 1941—1944
he survived the war, tried to retire, but they put him on trial..
Some of his former prisoners were in a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart and heard of the charges against him. They sent a representative, on their own initiative and unannounced, to testify on his behalf, and this testimony influenced the trial result in Plagge’s favor.
The court wanted to award Plagge the status of an Entlasteter (“exonerated person”) but on his own wish he was classified as a Mitlé¤ufer (“follower”). Like Oskar Schindler, Plagge blamed himself for not having done enough.
Yad Vashem, declared Major Karl Plagge righteous among the nations….
look up Gerhard Kurzbach, Kurt Becher (ss soldier), Werner Klemke and soldier Johannes Gerhardt, Anton Schmid
one of the sadder histories was the release of jews from concentration camps to sweden in exhange for military equipment… this happening later in the war… when the false rumor went out that they were in exchange for SS troops, hitler stopped the exchange.
you can read: An Uncommon Journey
about an ss soldier named alois that saved another family…
Neo: Another book(and movie)on the subject, only with Christians helping Jews is: “The Hiding Place”, by Corrie ten Boom. Breathtaking courage from a family of Christian women.
Artfldgr, NeoConScum, Ann:
I wrote a post on a related subject here.
Unbelievably heartbreaking and yet a story of endurance in the face of sheer evil. What that child said about his age — no words.
Contrast and compare:
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/205844/?show-at-comment=1375647#comment-1375647