A Time to Dance, and Mourn
By DAVID BROOKS
As you read this on Saturday morning, my elder son, Joshua, will be having his bar mitzvah. We'll be doing what many parents do on these occasions: telling stories about him, worrying about the party this evening.
But it will be hard to miss the larger meaning of the ceremony because Joshua will be having his bar mitzvah in downtown Washington in a newly restored synagogue that hasn't seen a bar mitzvah in over half a century. On the day we rehearsed, there were three Torahs in the ark, none of them used since World War II. One was confiscated by the Nazis at the entrance to Auschwitz. Another was smuggled into Bergen-Belsen.
The third, from which Joshua will read, was written in Wegrow, Poland, and is the only one of the 13 Torahs in that town to survive the Holocaust.
Wegrow (pronounced VEN-gwoov) is about 55 miles northeast of Warsaw. Jews settled there early in the 16th century, and there were 6,000 to 8,000 of them when the Nazi occupation began on Sept. 7, 1939. A few weeks later, on Yom Kippur, SS officers went to the home of the town's rabbi, Mendel Morgenstern, dragged him to the central marketplace and ordered him to undress. They handed him a broom and told him to sweep up the manure in the square and carry it to the town dump in his velvet hat. As the rabbi tried to do that, a soldier drove a bayonet into his abdomen, killing him. His synagogue was immediately closed and ultimately destroyed.
The Nazis set up a Jewish governing body, a "Judenrat," to collect taxes and supply forced-labor teams. News about the concentration camp in nearby Treblinka swept the town, but the roundups in Wegrow didn't begin until the day after Yom Kippur in 1942.
A few families had constructed hiding places in attics and basements, and they could watch through peepholes as their relatives and friends were loaded onto trucks. By that time everyone knew exactly what was going to happen. Some cursed the Germans; some lunged at the soldiers and tried to scratch their eyes.
"I want to live a little longer," one girl told her mother as they stood in line. "No, you will not live because the world has no room for you," her mother answered bitterly.
The roundups lasted for several days. About half the Jews in the town fled to the nearby forest, where almost all were hunted down and shot by German troops. (Poles received two pounds of sugar for every Jew they killed or captured.)
The other Jews waited. One father, furious at the universe, announced that he was going to turn in his family immediately. He was told to hide and think of his children. "If my children remain alive, they will curse me for not having allowed them to die earlier," he answered.
At night, those in hiding could hear Germans celebrating the deportations. By day they watched their former neighbors taking over their stores and businesses.
Some Jews did survive. About a hundred were kept in the town to work, though they were herded into a building on May Day 1943 and burned to death. Others hid in farms and in the forest for the duration of the war. The last survivors included Feivel Bielawski. When the Nazis were driven back, he and his brother returned and sat for days on the front step of their old house. "Freedom did not bring happiness," he wrote in his memoir. "We were sad and depressed and longed to see another Jew." But, of course, there were none.
Feivel Bielawski, who became Phil Biel, died 15 days ago in Minnesota.
Joshua will be reading in a neighborhood brought back from decay, in a synagogue restored to its former self, from a Torah that not only recounts history, but is itself history. There will be an amazing sense of threads' being retied. And there will be reminders that we're mysteriously bound by things that happened before we were born and to people, now dead, whose lives are interwoven with our own. "What their species is for animals and plants, that is history for human beings," the 19th-century historian Johann Droysen observed.
In today's ceremony the Book of Exodus will mingle with the Holocaust, and a child will be recognized as an adult, which means not only following God's commandments, but also taking responsibility for the future, guided by the light thrown by the past.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
