Ceremony and Celebration Family Edition, The Hagim, Yom HaShoah, Learning Lessons from the Holocaust
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THE FAITH OF THE SURVIVORS
The following is an excerpt from the epilogue of Rabbi Sacks’s book Future Tense*.*
It was the Holocaust survivors who taught me. I have read hundreds of books about the Shoah. I made a television programme from Auschwitz. To this day I cannot begin to imagine what they went through, how they survived the nightmare, and how they lived with the memories….
The survivors I came to know in the past twenty years were astonishing in their tenacious hold on life. Perhaps it’s how they survived.
Some believed in God, others didn’t, but they all believed in life – not life as most of us understand it, something taken for granted, part of the background, a fact that rarely holds our attention, but life as something to fight for, as a consciously articulated value, as something of whose fragility you are constantly aware. They had, in Paul Tillich’s phrase, “the courage to be.” Slowly I began to think about another phrase, not one that exists in the traditional literature, but one that was articulated in fateful circumstances and constituted a kind of turning point in modern Jewish history: kiddush haḥayim, the sanctification of life.
I had expected that trauma would turn the survivors inwards, making them suspicious of, even hostile to, the wider world.
It didn’t, at least not those I knew, and by the time I came to know them.
Many of them had undertaken, fifty or more years after the event, to visit schools, talking to children, especially non-Jewish children.
What amazed me as I listened to them telling their stories was what they wanted to say. Cherish freedom. Understand what a gift it is to be able to walk in the open, to see a flower, open a window, breathe free air. Love others. Never hate. Practise tolerance. Stand up for others if they are being picked on, bullied, ostracised. Live each day as if it might be your last.
They taught the children to have faith in life. The children loved these elderly strangers from another world. I read some of their letters to them; they made me cry. Their courage kept me going through tough times. I count myself blessed to have known them.
☛ REFLECT
- Would it be understandable if the trauma of their experiences made the Holocaust survivors “suspicious of, even hostile to, the wider world”? Why?
- How was Rabbi Sacks’s experience of the survivors he met different from his expectations? What impact did that have on him?
- Have you ever met or heard a talk given by a survivor? What impact did it have on you?