A late 1950's film called The Young Lions attempted to struggle with the mysteries of World War II. It cast Marion Brando in the unlikely role of a German soldier who came to hate the war and the business of killing. Among the American soldiers was a still young Frank Sinatra.
There is a scene in the movie where the Americans break into a complex consisting of buildings surrounded by fences draped with barbed wire They approach one of the buildings and open the door. A figure moves out of the darkness towards them - skinny, gaunt, spectral. In the background, in the shadowed interior, we catch sight of other lugubrious embodiments of humanity.
For a late 1950's movie audience I suppose that scene was meant to be shocking. The casting director must have searched for the skinniest actors he could find. The film attempted in that scene to provoke horror, to capture some of the feelings of American, or British, or Russian soldiers who slogged across the blooded Wasteland of Europe and incidentally, just incidentally, stumbled across those unsought dumping grounds of the dead and the not quite dead.
Hollywood's attempt in that film to evoke the horror and shock of the worst discoveries ever made was pathetically short of the historical reality.
"Liberation" - that is our theme as we meet again as an Island community on this saddest of commemorative occasions, as we meet again to try as a community to grapple with the almost transcendent mystery of evil called the Holocaust,
"Liberation" - a somewhat misleading term. For if the not quite dead were liberated from the furious fate that had been ordained for them, if they were lucky enough to have not yet died when the gates of Hell were yanked open so they could crawl or be carried out, well, sad to say, those who opened those gates had no idea that they were going to be liberators,
They really did not know. They just happened to stumble across Ohrdrufor Buchenwald or Dachau or Bergen Belsen and those dozens and then hundreds of other places where the greatest crime in human history was consummated They really did not know what was over there when they went over there The war was not, after all, undertaken for the liberation of the Jews. Neither Roosevelt, nor Churchill, not to speak of the unspeakable Stalin, set that as their primary, or evan secondary, or even tertiary objective, The liberation of the camps, of the factories of torture and murder, was just incidental to the great enterprise of beating that Axis of Evil. Little did decent mankind understand, or want to understand, just how evil that Axis was, Liberation just happened.
Liberation was not incidental to the Allied soldiers when they made their horrible discoveries. Soldiers that they were, battle hardened veterans that they were, with all that they had seen, heard, smelled of the sordid violent business of war, from the landings on Omaha Beach, through the battles of the Bulge and the Ardennes Forest, nothing could prepare those civilized warriors for what lay inside those barbed wire perimeters with those reeking barracks, with those brick buildings, topped by those tall chimneys. Like voyagers from another planet those soldiers had landed in the kingdoms of Hell. And when they did they cried, they screamed with rage, they vomited, they cursed, and sometimes they killed Yes, sometimes they did not wait for justice, whatever that could mean, to take its course, They lined up the Nazi guards and they administered justice.
Liberation - on the Allied side it was the shock of discovering that one was not just fighting in a war, that one was actually fighting the very incarnation of evil on earth. And on the other side, for those who had entered the gates mockingly marked, "arbeit macht frei," work will make you free, what was liberation? Well here is the story of one Jewish woman. Let her be nameless. She spoke of the day when the Americans came. After what seemed to be an eternity of being called scum, whore; after what seemed to be an eternity of pain, humiliation, brutalization. a soldier appeared in a different uniform and called her "ma'am," and offered her his hand, and treated her--emaciated, sick, skeletal--as she said, "like a lady." 0 happy day And happier still, her liberator happened to be an American Jewish soldier - and then the happiest day: they got married, A true story, Liberation -from death to life.
And yet dear people, brothers and sisters, we can not yet say that they and we lived happily ever after. For even now, 57 years after that liberation, the Jewish people is again in a death or life struggle. Sad, most sad, to say that continent of Europe, where our people was turned to ash, has forgotten, along with most of this planet, the lessons of that appeasement of evil that gave the devil and his hordes more than their due and made the evilest enterprise in all of human history a reality If we come together to remember, bec ause we dare not forget the dead and the not quite dead and how they were summoned to life by soldiers of passion and compassion, then, my brothers and sisters, we must resolve now to unite for life, to fight for life, to fight today's evil, to fight today's appeasement of evil, For their sake, the Kodeshim, the sacred dead, those who were abandoned by an unredeemed humanity. And for our sake, our children's sake. For the sake of the living.
From Liberation to Redemption - How long, 0 L-rd, how long'' We are still waiting for the answer - we Jews, we Americans. Liberation - from the proverbial evil of Amalek and their descendants. As the Torah says of the Amalekites, we must fight them m'dor v'dor from generation to generation ... until liberation, until victory,
Liberation - from Hitler
Liberation - from Stalin
Liberation - from Osama bin Laden
Liberation - from Saddam Hussein
Liberation - from Yasir Arafat
From Liberation to Redemption - 0 L-rd, How Long ? The Torah tells us; Until Victory.