RABBI STERN'S WELCOMING REMARKS
When my father hid with my mother and their two little babies—before they were taken to Auschwitz, my father told my mother. “This is no way for a Jew to live."
When Abba Kovner decided he could no longer make a stand in the Vilna ghetto before running to the forest, he said, “This is no way for a Jew to die."
When Tuvia Bielski ran to the forest with his brothers Asael and Zush, he said, “This is how a Jew lives; this is how a Jew dies."
Life and death, inexorably bound up together by a ruthless enemy who did not want the Jew to know the difference. Death following life instantaneously, life being snatched from near death time and again. There was no way to avoid the collision of the living and the dying.
The question for those attempting any kind of resistance, those heroes we honor tonight, is how far they could widen the gap between life and death? How many minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years could they forestall the inevitable? How much good could someone do in the time left to them?
On January 1, 1942, this 23-year-old Abba Kovner, a Zionist youth activist, spoke at a secret meeting held in a public kitchen in the Vilna ghetto. Around him were 150 young people. Sympathy for resisting was not on his side. “Yidn,” Kovner said, We have nothing to lose. Death will overtake us in any event. And who can still believe in survival when the murderer exterminates us with so much determination? Ask yourselves, What can we do NOW!!!
For some, defiance meant pushing oneself to survive from one camp to the next. For others it was reciting the Shema, for yet others, organizing a play, giving a lesson, sending a message, smuggling food, hiding Jews, writing false passports— for Vladka’s mother it was the determination to give her child Bar Mitzvah lessons by paying a teacher with her only piece of bread, knowing full well that neither she nor her son would ever celebrate that blessed occasion.
And if you were really lucky, defiance was living like an animal in the forest with the chance—a slim chance—that you might even be able to fight back. These are the Jews who graduated from insect—as the Nazis viewed them, to squirrel, to rabbit, to wolf, and sometimes even to ferocious bear—and perhaps in their wildest imagination to subhuman. Fay Schulman, a feared woman partisan, who is the only partisan to ever have photographed partisan life extensively, said, “We are not the real heroes; it is they--who were killed for an act of resistance. They are the heroes. We merely survived. That’s not an act of bravery—that’s just luck.”
But for anyone watching the movie “Defiance,” heroism belongs to both the living and the dead. Most Jewish partisans did not survive the war. They lived to die fighting. But in the Bielski camp, 1200 souls marched out of the forest, a fete unparalleled by any Jewish partisan group. How did the Bielskis do it? The answer, as is the case with anything related to the Holocaust, defies logic: “The more people we are, Tuvia Bielski said, the greater our chances of survival.” People, with no guns, the old, the very young, the ill—the more the merrier.” What chutzpah in the face of death to snatch out of the ghettoes, people who would have otherwise been exterminated, with such belief and determination that a subhuman could pretend for the moment that he/she had any semblance of humanity, with personalities that mattered, surrounded by people who cared, and each contributing his/her talents to help others survive.
I cannot fathom Auschwitz, where my parents were taken. I cannot comprehend the Nazis killing my two innocent sisters. I cannot for even an instant imagine the horror of living in a ghetto. Psychologically, I cannot bare the thought of what it was like to be in a forced labor camp. But I can imagine living in a forest, hiding, sabotaging Nazi railroads, killing collaborators, confiscating food from peasants, singing and dancing with the birds, developing a relationship with another human being because--I want to believe that there could be such a thing as a superhuman Jew even in the Holocaust … until I start to think of having to run from forest to forest, from swamp to swamp, of going through long periods of starvation, of little sleep, of not having a change of clothes, or take a bath, or rid myself of lice. Then my imagination turns back to darkness and the plants of my hope turn once again into weeds.
That is why the movie Defiance was so powerful for me. It awakened in me a spirit of appreciation for the struggles of the living and the dead like never before, of realizing that every life saved—no matter for how long, was a momentous act of Kiddush hashem, of sanctifying God’s name, as was every act of dying to help save another’s life.
And when the movie came to a close, there was one more person who walked out of the forest—that dense patch of psychological brush and swamp—it was me. It was my parents who survived Auschwitz, and countless others who were here to serve as witness and to bare testimony to the indomitable spirit of man that demands dignity in the face of evil, that cries for a voice where others are silent, that remembers what others have forgotten, and that tries to offer a morsel of hope when others have given up.
It is these heroes we are privileged to honor this evening and to whom we say “Chazak ve’ematz:” you found the strength to resist and maybe, just maybe, because of your courage, we might do the same. Let us this evening commemorate “Heroes of the Holocaust.”