By forcing so many Jewish children to hide or abandon their Judaism in order to survive, the Germans demonstrated that, while Jewish genes could not be renounced, a child’s religious faith could be irrevocably altered.
This aspect of Sophie’s story had been a subliminal attraction for me. The idea that the descendant of two long lines of Jews could so readily believe herself to be an anti-Semitic Catholic was fascinating. My own religious identity at times seemed tenuous; I was the product of an upbringing that was Jewish in name, culture, and history but without being religious. When my Catholic neighbor and friend John called me a “Christ-killer” at seven, I had no idea what he was talking about, so devoid of overt anti-Semitism and religious rivalry was the milieu of my childhood.
I was raised in a friendly fog of religious freedom, born into a community where no one appeared to give Jews a second look, even if anti-Semitism still operated openly in my father’s textile industry, prompting him to briefly change his name to Ross. I grew up thinking that Jewishness, far from stigmatizing me, actually conferred an extra measure of appeal. Who wouldn’t want to be a Jew in the same 1960s society as Sandy Koufax, Paul Newman, and Sammy Davis Jr.?
My parents were founding members of a Reform temple that looked like an extremely large split-level ranch house. The sedate services, which had been shorn of all alien traces of Hasidism, lacked joy. They were enlivened only by our charismatic, rabble-rousing rabbi, but he no longer believed in bar and bat mitzvahs because “thirteen was too young for any important decisions or for acquiring sufficient knowledge to be an adult Jew in any intelligent sense.” To me, Judaism was not a world of specific rites and ceremonies, but a comforting community based on deeply humanistic and democratic values, humor, dissent, existential rumination, and a penchant for salty and smoked fish.
I identified with those who had lost touch with Judaism and had to decide later in life what being Jewish actually meant to them. After all, what it meant to be Jewish was not a question I could easily answer either, nor did I feel particularly compelled to answer, since I had always viewed competing religious beliefs as little more than an issue of which set of narratives you happened to grow up with. Although countless people throughout history have died rather than renounce their religion, the Holocaust’s hidden children didn’t have the luxury of conscious martyrdom. What did their intrinsic Jewishness consist of now if it could be so easily replaced?
And what did it mean to embrace it again?
I didn’t know whom to identify with,” Flora said of her years after the war. “I knew I was Jewish, but I didn’t know I was Jewish.”
Like Sophie and Carla, Flora had been born to assimilated parents with only a modest sense of religious tradition and little consciousness, before Nazism, of being the persecuted “other.” Her ambiguous or diluted relationship to Judaism was not caused by her wartime experiences so much as exacerbated by it. Instead of simply professing a vaguely apologetic “cultural Jewishness” as an adult, like so many reform and nonobservant Jews everywhere, Flora has had to contend with a more serious confusion of religious identities—and perhaps more than most hidden children—since she had had multiple religions and spiritual disciplines foisted upon her. “I was lost. I was telling everyone I was Protestant, but I became an atheist.” When she finally tried to resolve her religious identity in her thirties, “I figured out it was ridiculous.” When she finally had a seder, she held it on Easter Sunday.
Flora became interested in studying other child survivors’ struggles with split religious identity. In 1988 she published an article, “The Experience of Catholicism for Jewish Children During World War II.” She interviewed four Jewish women who, as girls, were saved by being hidden in convents or Catholic homes. All four women she studied were so enamored of their emergency religion that initially two wanted to become nuns, one wanted to be a Catholic Polish girl, and the fourth wished to be a saint. After Liberation, however, they found themselves in a religious prison. “Feeling abandoned by the church after the war,” Flora wrote, “alone and disillusioned, they still yearn to belong to the Christian world which is now seen as unreachable, while feelings linger that the adult Jewish world failed to protect them. . . . All four women struggled to develop an identity that would include their contradictory experiences, mostly by finding a connection with their Jewish roots so that they could ‘belong’ and also feel ‘good’ through the adoption of Jewish values and qualities.”
Flora blazed her own middle trail. She went to synagogue, but only for Yom Kippur. She celebrated Passover, but in her own way, emphasizing the courage and survival of the Jews. She visited her relatives in Israel but didn’t like Judaism’s “rules” or its “right wing.” She liked Judaism’s focus on life here on earth. “Somewhere in the Talmud, it says that men look in envy at heaven, but the angels look in envy at men,” she said. “My philosophy is ‘I’m lucky I’m alive, I have a responsibility to do my best, to be good to other people.’” But it’s a philosophy that’s often frustrated by the unimaginable inhumanity that blackened her life. “I manage to do what I can in a small way. My value is to enjoy life and not to be overwhelmed by everything.”
Flora summed up her religious experience with a shrug, saying “I’ve got a whole problem with God—or the idea of God.”
“Why didn’t I rebel against Judaism?” asked Sophie. After all, she was raised as an anti-Semitic Polish Catholic and kept her Jewishness from coworkers into her thirties. A compliant temperament provides part of the answer. “I always did what people said!” When she was five, her mother told her to be a Catholic and she obeyed. Six years later, when her mother informed her that she was really a Jew, the information was shocking, absurd, and initially useless to her, but at a deeper level, she experienced this too as an inescapable verdict. “I never asked myself, I never had the luxury of ‘Do I want it?’ So now I’m a Jew!” she recalled, laughing. In time she accepted it and even vowed to marry a Jew and raise Jewish children. “I always gave a hundred percent!” she said with a smile.
Still, when she attended High Holiday services at a conservative synagogue, she was extremely uncomfortable. Although she joined a reform temple in Great Neck, it was the aesthetics of it, the beautiful synagogue itself, that appealed to her as much as wanting to belong and connect with her ancestors.
Was Sophie the same adult that she would have been had she remained a Catholic? Since religion plays little religious role in Sophie’s life, it’s easy to believe that, whatever her faith, Sophie would be the same person—and precisely because her experience ultimately freed her from the man-made constructs and exclusivity of religious beliefs and committed her, like Flora, to a nondenominational gospel of kindness and responsibility. But we’ll never know, and who’s to say that Sophie, who kept her childhood rosary and her catechism until a museum finally claimed it, wouldn’t have become a devout Catholic had her mother not survived the war or had she decided to spare her daughter the trauma of religious confusion so soon after all the other losses?
For Carla, who is six years older than Flora and eight years older than Sophie, Judaism had had more time to take root in her consciousness. Moreover, she had only to keep her Judaism secret, not renounce it for Catholicism. But since Judaism for Carla, as for Flora and Sophie, was a cultural tradition rather than a formal religious commitment, she had that much less of it to conceal. “I remember once, in hiding,” Carla recalled seventy years after the fact, “thinking that there is no God. If there was one, he wouldn’t have put me in this position because I hadn’t done anything. The whole idea of a God who is good and everything was gone at the age of thirteen.”
Regardless, her ethnic and cultural connection to Judaism never weakened. In her eighties, Carla is “very Jewish, a very proud Jew. Ed and I don’t have a problem with our Jewish identity. Not only from the Holocaust, but from the Zionist organization after the war. When we lived in Israel on a nonreligious kibbutz for five years, we weren’t religious. We didn’t have to be!” Although she celebrates Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Hanukkah at home, she is otherwise nonobservant and doesn’t attend synagogue, not even on High Holidays.
The five years in Israel made her husband Ed “a very patriotic Jew. I’m not religious, but there’s something mystical that this people have survived. There are more people living now in Israel than were killed in the Holocaust. To me,” Ed said, “being Jewish is the most magical thing. It’s a privilege to belong to this amazing people, who’ve given more to mankind than any other people in the world.”
What does it mean to be a Jew?
The question is a matter of endless debate among unambivalent Jews everywhere, but for the hidden children the question is more immediate and even more unanswerable. Almost every Jew at the Gathering had been torn from their Jewish families and traditions by the Holocaust. For those hidden in convents, monasteries, and Christian families, the Catholic church and religion provided them with structure and beauty, positive and omniscient authority figures, a surrogate sense of family and belonging, a feeling of active control over their own and their family members’ fates through prayer, and a doctrine that made some sense of their suffering. At a time when Judaism was not simply reviled but punishable by death, Catholicism could be irresistible and its God benevolent, while the Jewish one appeared to be on some sort of sabbatical. If exposed to Catholicism at a very young age, they were faced with a later decision of whether to embrace a religion—Judaism—that they never knew had embraced them. If older, they were later confronted with the challenge of reconciling two historically antagonistic faiths they now experienced as competing for their loyalty and faith.
The religious choices child survivors made were influenced by numerous factors: their age, their temperament, the mysteries of personality, circumstance—and often whether they ever saw one or both of their parents again. For Shlomo Breznitz, this last factor may well have utterly changed the course of his life.
In Vrbove, Czechslovakia, in 1944, no Christian child seemed as Christian as an eight-year-old Jewish chess prodigy named Shlomo Breznitz. When his grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins kept disappearing from Bratislava, his parents attempted to escape the Nazis by moving him and his sister Judith to a shtetl named Vrbove, which Shlomo later described in his memoir, Memory Fields, as “something out of a Chagall painting or a story by Sholem Aleichem . . . but by the time we arrived, any fiddlers that might have been on the roofs of Vrbove had been taken to Auschwitz.”
As a further precaution, the family converted to Christianity and the two children began taking private lessons in Catholicism. When the parents were tipped off about an impending deportation in September 1944, they tried to hide their children in a local orphanage run by the Benedictine Sisters, but they said they’d already taken as many Jewish children as they wished to. Another local orphanage run by the Sisters of Saint Vincent took in Shlomo and Judith, who said tearful good-byes to their parents, assuming they would be deported to Auschwitz.
Eight-year-old Shlomo was abused, taunted, beaten up, and humiliated by the older Christian orphans while all the while taking great pains to conceal his circumcision, even if it meant wetting his pants. Using his remarkable memory, Shlomo, who had already memorized prayers and passages from the Old Testament, now focused his formidable powers on the long Latin litanies that the nuns themselves couldn’t commit to memory, but had to read aloud as they walked the corridors and courtyard. That Shlomo had no knowledge of Latin didn’t prevent him from being able to recite the litanies at length. The Mother Superior, alerted to his talent by a Sister C., beckoned both of them to her office.
“I have heard that you have a very good memory,” she asked the small, bespectacled boy. “Is it so?” And when he had proved it, she asked him how he did it.
“I don’t know, Sister,” he replied. “The words just come to me on their own.”
She made him promise not to mention his gift to anyone. Inspired by this special attention, Shlomo began volunteering for little jobs, making himself useful. One afternoon, Sister C. asked him to wash, change his shirt, and prepare to visit the house of the prelate, the town’s highest religious authority, who lived near the church orphanage. Ironically, the prelate lived across the street from the house Shlomo’s family had lived in, and which was now occupied by strangers.
The imposing prelate first asked if he was the son of Joseph Breznitz, the Jew who had lived across the street and who had been taken, along with Shlomo’s mother, by the Germans. The prelate then asked him to demonstrate his mastery of the Catholic prayers, which he effortlessly did, after which the prelate retired to an adjacent room with the Mother Superior and Sister C., leaving Shlomo to wonder about the significance of his performance and what destiny awaited him.
He wouldn’t learn what the prelate had in mind until months after the war, when he was miraculously reunited with his mother, who had, unlike his father, survived Auschwitz. Shlomo’s mother found her son’s survival equally miraculous. At Auschwitz she had seen the children from the first orphanage where she had tried to deposit her son, and could only speculate that the Jewish children from Saint Vincent had met with a similar fate. That very morning, Shlomo’s mother informed him that she had met with the Mother Superior, who told her what had happened behind those closed doors.
The prelate had seen Shlomo’s gift for memorizing prayers as a sign that Shlomo might be the Jewish orphan who would one day become pope, foretold in a fable he knew, and familiar to the Saint Vincent sisters as well. The prelate had urged the sisters to protect Shlomo from the Germans at all costs in the hope that Shlomo indeed might rise to become the leader of the planet’s Roman Catholics! After the prelate’s brutal murder near the end of the war, the Mother Superior remained so convinced that Shlomo was papal material that it was only his mother’s reappearance that convinced her to let him go.
Instead of becoming pope, Shlomo and his mother made aliyah to Israel in 1949, where he grew up to be a renowned psychologist and expert on stress, member briefly of the Knesset, and a leader in the use of technology to improve and maintain brain function.
In the case of Jean-Marie Lustiger, perhaps the most famous of all Jewish-born priests, the crucial factor seems to have been a temperamental affinity for Catholicism so strong that, unlike Breznitz, he likely would not have renounced his adopted Christian faith even if his mother had survived the war. Lustiger was born in 1926 in Paris to two Polish Jews, but when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 Lustiger and his sister were sent to live with a Catholic woman in Orleans. Immediately taken with Catholicism, the teenage Jean-Marie decided to convert that same year, against his parents’ wishes. Not even his mother’s murder in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 deterred him from entering a Carmelite seminary in 1946 and being ordained in 1954, while his Jewish father, a survivor, watched from a seat in the back of the church. He went on to become the pastor of Paris’s Sixteenth Arrondissement.
After a spiritual crisis in the late 1970s, when he considered moving to Israel, the stylish but conservative Lustiger was appointed archbishop of Paris by the pope in 1981, a nomination about which his enigmatic comment was, “For me, this nomination was as if, all of a sudden, the crucifix began to wear a yellow star. . . . I was born Jewish, and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope, and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.” Two years later he was named a cardinal and gained a broad reputation for his authoritarian manner. A strong supporter of Israel, he was instrumental in pressing Pope John Paul II to order the removal of the controversial Carmelite convent that had been constructed next to Auschwitz in 1984.
When the Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel accused Cardinal Lustiger of betraying his people and his faith during the Jews’ darkest period, the Holocaust, he replied, “I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”
“I believe he saw himself as a Jewish Christian, like the first disciples,” one of his close friends said.
After he stepped down as archbishop in 2005, the year that pope John Paul II died, he was mentioned as a possible successor, but he refused to discuss the possibility publicly. To a friend who asked him if he might become pope, he reportedly said in French-accented Yiddish, “From your mouth to God’s ear.” However, to another who asked him the same thing, he reportedly replied, “Oy vey—you think I’m meshugge?”
Jakob Hirsch Greiner was also able to juggle, or reconcile, his double religious identity. In 1942 Jakob, already eleven years old, ran away moments before the Germans shot the rest of his family. He spent most of the rest of the war wandering alone from Polish village to Polish village under the name Jakob Popofsky. After the war, he found a home at a Catholic orphanage, where he didn’t reveal his Jewish name for fear of standing out, but he missed having a faith. The children’s agency didn’t know what to do with him until a nun from the orphanage said, “Well, if he’s so religious, I’ll take him with me.” Popofsky entered the seminary in 1952 and became a priest in 1958. “But all the time one thought kept bothering me,” he said. “I was a Jew and I was still hiding. Why was that? It began to torture me.” In 1966 he announced in a magazine article about his life that he was a Jew, after which he was better able to reconcile the religious tension in his life.
Things were not so simple for Father Popofsky’s brother, who had survived the war and was now living in Israel as an Orthodox Jew. He discovered his long-lost brother through the magazine article and tracked Jakob down. When the priest decided to visit Israel in 1970, his brother warned him that if he insisted on coming as a priest, “You better stay in Poland.”
Disregarding this advice, Father Popofsky arrived in Israel wearing a cassock. His brother, who met him at the airport, was upset. “This is how you greet us?” he said. “I can’t take you home like this.” So Popofsky changed out of his cassock in the airport men’s room and went home with his brother to meet his long-lost relatives, who took him to their synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, where the Lubavitcher rabbi said, “Let God bless him.” Back home, his brother exclaimed, “Do you realize what an honor that was!?”
“Big deal,” Popofsky replied. “I could’ve blessed him!”
Somehow Popofsky survived his “dual personality” with a sense of humor. “I’d go to synagogue with a yarmulke on my head, and the next day I’d go to church with the yarmulke in my pocket,” he said. “I had to be careful not to cross myself in the synagogue or put my yarmulke on in church.”
In the mirror, Popofsky doesn’t see a 2,000-year-old rift between two major religions predicated in some large measure on the allegation that the Jews killed Christ. Instead he sees the essential decency and kindness that followers of all religions profess to aspire to. “When I’m alone,” he says, “I can talk to myself in the mirror: ‘Oh, there you are—a decent guy I can talk to.’”
It’s easy to see the priest’s renunciation of his Jewish faith, as Popofsky’s own brother does, as a betrayal of Judaism and a kind of posthumous victory for Hitler. Yet the relatively peaceful coexistence of both religions within Popofsky might also be seen as a profound spiritual rebuke to the very anti-Semitism that motivated the Final Solution. If the Jew is no longer the Other, no longer the viciously maligned foil for Christianity, but rather Christianity’s long-lost brother, a vital member of the spiritual family, then how can you murder him? He too is in you. As Popofsky says, “If Christ’s a Jew and I serve him, that means I’m also a Jew.”
For Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, however, the question of whether he was Catholic or Jewish became a source of great suffering. Unlike Breznitz, Lustiger, and Popofsky, Weksler-Waszkinel never had a chance in childhood to choose his faith. Born in 1943, he was given up as a newborn to a Catholic couple, the Waszkinels, the only parents he would ever know—or know of, until middle age. Still, he harbored faint doubts about his origins; it was as if others knew something about him that he didn’t. When he was a boy, two drunks once yelled “Jewish orphan!” at him. He was the target of other taunts about his appearance, so unlike his parents’. At the age of ten or eleven, the dark-haired Weksler-Waszkinel looked in the mirror and asked his mother if he looked like his fair-haired father. On a trip with his father when he was thirteen, an elderly Polish man pointed to him and said to the father, “Where did you conjure up this little Jew?” At fifteen, he was reading to his illiterate mother about some Jews when he saw tears in her eyes. “Why are you crying?” he asked. “Am I a Jew?” To which she replied, “Don’t I love you enough?”
At seventeen he decided to enter a seminary, which angered his father. “Am I doing something wrong?” Weksler-Waszkinel asked him. “No,” his father replied, “but your life will be very difficult.” Shortly after, his father died of a heart attack. In 1966, Weksler-Waszkinel was ordained a priest at the age of twenty-three.
In 1975, now a Polish Catholic priest and professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, Weksler-Waszkinel moved his mother in with him in an apartment in Lublin, where he was again encountering rumors of his possible Jewishness. “The question ‘perhaps I really am Jewish’ nudged its way into my consciousness more and more intensely,” he wrote of that period. “I nurtured this question in my heart and the possibility of it having a positive reply no longer terrified me.” In 1978, when he was thirty-five, his beloved, now elderly mother, Emilia, finally brought herself to tell him the truth—that in 1943 his Jewish mother, trapped in the Lublin ghetto, contacted Emilia and begged her to take her week-old baby, saying, “You are a devout Catholic. You believe in Jesus, who was a Jew. So try to save this Jewish baby for the Jew in whom you believe. And one day he will grow up to be a priest.” And so it had actually come to pass.
Weksler-Waszkinel now considered himself an emissary between Jews and Christians, who themselves had lost three million to the Holocaust. But the belated proof of his earlier suspicions that he had been born Jewish unsettled him, even as, for the next thirty years, Weksler-Waszkinel attended to his university students at an Ursuline convent in Lublin. When he was in his sixties, the knowledge that he was born Jewish gave birth to a determination to settle in Israel and become a Jew. For one thing, he had learned that his biological parents had been Zionists who wanted to immigrate there. For another, with the help of a nun who herself had saved many Jews during the war, he had been put in touch with an uncle and survivors from his Jewish parents’ small town who now lived in Israel. He at last learned his father’s family name and appended it to his Polish Catholic surname. Maybe most of all, he could no longer abide the anti-Semitism in Poland. The country, he said, reminded him of people smoking under a sign that says NO SMOKING. Anti-Semitism was prohibited, but no one complied. “The sermons are filled with it,” he complained. A Christian radio station with millions of listeners peddled anti-Semitism to the masses. “I can’t bear it,” he said. “It’s too intense for me.”
On a preliminary visit to Israel, Weksler-Waszkinel wore both his priest’s collar and a yarmulke at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. His plan was to learn Hebrew and Judaism at a religious kibbutz but practice as a Catholic priest on Sunday. However, no monastery in Israel would accept him, most likely because he was Jewish, and no kibbutz would accept him as a Jew if he insisted on conducting a Mass one day a week. Eventually he accepted a place at a kibbutz on the condition that he give up his once-a-week Mass—“Is he a Jew? A Christian? Who are you, Yaakov?” a member of the kibbutz’s Ulpan Admissions Committee had asked during his interview. He insisted on having two faiths, but the kibbutzim wanted him to choose Judaism. “I’m going through something very intense,” he confided in a friend, a woman who was also a hidden child, but one who returned to Judaism decades earlier after seven years as a Catholic. Under the strain of reconciling his two faiths, he became very depressed and wanted to leave the kibbutz.
Because of a decades-old Israeli law that prohibits a Jew who practices another religion from having the right to return to Israel as a Jew, the Israeli Population and Immigration Authority granted him temporary residence status, not as a Jew, but as a monk, with a home at Abu Gosh, a Benedictine monastery, once run, ironically, by a monk of Jewish origin.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that Israel had already granted Weksler-Waszkinel’s Catholic parents the status of Righteous Among the Nations for saving a Jewish boy—himself.
Why has Romuald Jakub agonized so over his religious conflict while Jakob Popofsky embraced both religions, and Shlomo Breznitz and Jean-Marie Lustiger made their choices and stuck with them? Where do you go looking for the answer? In the fact that Weksler-Waszkinel was born during the war and traumatized as an infant, so that the roots of his conflict were preverbal and more disturbing on a subconscious level and unresolvable? That he happened to lack Popofsky’s sense of humor, as well as his feel for a spirituality that transcends all religions? Or is the answer just hidden in the unknowable thickets of personality and personal preference?
The discovery that hidden child survivors were born Jewish continues to this day, but perhaps nowhere is the revelation more perilous than in Poland, the home of an increasing number of people who have learned only as adults that they were born Jewish. As their Catholic hiding parents enter old age, they, like Weksler-Waszkinel’s mother, have finally come clean. The number of Jews in Poland—three million before the war, more than any country in the world—had dropped by the 1990s to roughly 4,000, but has climbed in recent years to 20,000 or more. Since 1988, an annual Jewish Cultural Festival in Kraków provides an opportunity for curious Poles to learn about the country’s vanished Jewish culture and cuisine, but almost every newly discovered Jew in Poland who embraces his or her Judaism still does so at some risk—to their social status, family harmony, friendships, careers, even their marriages.
In her book Broken Chain: Catholics Uncover the Holocaust’s Hidden Legacy and Discover Their Jewish Roots, American psychoanalyst Vera Muller-Paisner, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors whose first spouses and families had been murdered by the Nazis, recounts the dilemmas of several newly enlightened Polish Jews. Poles who learn they are Jewish and decide to embrace it have resources to help them in the form of educational programs sponsored by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, in particular a Jewish “camp” in the countryside, run by an American-born rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who started working in Poland in 1990 and is now the official rabbi of Poland.
Nothing, however, protects them from ostracism, persecution, and the traumatic effects of being identified as Jewish. The friends of one teenage girl who learned when she was fourteen that her father was Jewish called her a “Jew who should be thrown to the gas.” Another teen lost his friends after a yarmulke was spotted on the floor of his family’s dining room. After a fifteen-year-old girl who learned her mother was Jewish decided to keep kosher, her father stopped talking to her and eventually became estranged from the whole family. One mother who thought she was dying told her child that they were Jewish, but, once recovered, insisted she was “delusional.” In a country still as anti-Semitic as any, and with virtually no separation of church and state, many “new” Jews were fearful that being Jewish meant no longer being Polish. One person wondered, “Because of prevailing anti-Semitism I find myself also anti-Semitic. How do I get rid of it?”
Even for older hidden children survivors who always knew they were Jewish, organized religion can seem like a necessary mirage, a wavering vision of safety in an existential desert. Judaism is simultaneously embraced and rejected, a set of inconsistent rituals that nonetheless give meaning to their devastated childhoods. Many survivors (and victims) of a genocide based on religion were not observant to begin with; the beliefs, rituals, and traits for which they were targeted for extermination were often as alien to them as to the Nazis. For some survivors, Judaism lost much of its remaining religious meaning after the war, leaving its cultural, historical, and sentimental values to cling to.
Poet and writer Judith Sherman was hidden in Czechoslovakia and Hungary before being shipped at fourteen to Auschwitz in a boxcar that gradually filled with the dead during four days without food or water. Because of the recent arrivals of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, Auschwitz was unable to accept the living contents of Sherman’s train on that particular day and she was sent on to Ravensbrück, where she, unlike her parents and most of her relatives, survived the war. There were days, she writes, “when I was surrounded by more dead people than alive ones.” Why did she live to enjoy her grandchildren and write, after a long silence, a beautiful, moving memoir, Say the Name? The answer, she knows, can be found in a thousand tiny contingencies, and yet nowhere at all.
On a spring day in 2012, the energetic eighty-two-year-old sat in a coffee shop on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan and tried to explain her difficult relationship with God, whom she treats like a stubborn, irrational, and cautiously loved father. She had just returned from an annual two-day event in Scranton, Pennsylvania, for which the Jewish Federation and Catholic Marymount College bring together 1,800 students and numerous survivors to discuss the Holocaust. While on a panel there, she had been asked by a student about forgiveness. “I don’t really know what that word means to me,” she replied. “Does it mean I forgive the Nazis for killing my father, mother, etc.? I can’t visualize forgiveness. My days are not consumed with rage and hatred and vengeance, but forgiveness is not part of my thinking. I have never heard a Nazi express remorse or regret for his crimes, so what ‘forgiveness’ is that student asking for?”
God was central to Sherman’s childhood in Kurima, Czechoslovakia, and although she never believed she was anything but Jewish, she has retrofitted her surviving faith in God with paradoxes and provisos that fit the emotional realities of her life. She attends Sabbath services, but reads the prayers phonetically in Hebrew—a language she doesn’t understand—because “I cannot read words like ‘The Lord is good to all. He hears their cry and saves them and upholds all who fall.’” As she writes in Say the Name:
With the images I carry I cannot utter such words of praise. God, such words of praise uttered by this Ravensbrück prisoner—number 83621—should be disdained by you. An insult to you. My unanswered struggle continues. On Yom Kippur I get up early, have a big breakfast, and then spend the day in the synagogue. My act of defiance. I will not go hungry for God. But I will pray. Today I say Kaddish, the memorial prayer, whenever Kaddish is said during Services. Silently I say it. I do not stand up as required—how would I explain the frequency of this reciting to fellow congregants?
“Having God is having someone to rage against,” she said over coffee. “Where else will I go with that? God is strong enough to take it, like a strong parent. My railing is not only against God, but also against man. Where was God? Where was man?” When she talks to schools now, the focus is on the Nazis and on their victims—“I order the Nazis to ‘say the name’ six million times”—and on God—“God, please see to it that every name is accounted for.” In one of her poems, Sherman writes,
God, would you come down that ladder
that ladder Jacob climbed
I will not deal with angels
I’ll wait till you arrive.
when You come down
that ladder—that ladder
Jacob climbed
then I will take Your hand
and I will be Your guide
and I will show You sights
not fit for Godly eyes
She has maintained a relationship with God because it is in her childhood DNA to do so. She has also turned him, in a sense, into a victim of the Holocaust as well. “God needs us,” Sherman said. “We should not abandon him. We must not leave God unattended. Nor us. Nor us.”
So what of Father Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, who at thirty-five hears the call of Judaism, a faith to which he belongs by birth but by no other lived experience, and sets out to become a Jew in Israel at the age of sixty-seven? What is happening when Jakob Popofsky, knowing he is Jewish, decides to become a priest but continues to be tortured by that knowledge and, only at the age of thirty-five, comes out of hiding? What is happening when Sophie, who knew herself only as an anti-Semitic Catholic until she was eleven, is determined as an adult, despite her ambivalence toward Judaism, to marry a Jew and raise Jewish children? What is happening when Flora, whose Judaism was buried under successive waves of Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, and atheism, celebrates Passover and is drawn to her Israeli relatives?
Do these individuals simply want to alleviate their guilt at turning their backs on their religion, even if they did so involuntarily? Do they feel an abstract intellectual commitment to rejoin and propagate their original and historically persecuted minority? Do they want to lay claim to their rightful portion of their legacy of revolutionary Jewish humanism? Or does the discovery of denied Judaism strike some deeper nerve, provide a potential missing piece to the puzzle of their souls, and resonate with some rejected strand of their genetic selves?
Could it be enough just to ask these questions?