Dad's Dad - One of 6 Million

  אהרן מאיר אייכענשטיין  הי''ד

This father of 10 lived in Czechoslovakia during Germany's WWII occupation. He had left Poland, where his surname was פרידלנדר, and adopted his wife’s surname as a precaution against Poles who might pursue him to draft him into their army.

All his children lived in Europe except for one daughter who lived with her husband in America.

This was during a troubled era for European Jewry. Much of his offspring gravitated to the lure of a bankrupt, secular "Zionism", but several held tightly and mightily to live the Torah life.

He went to the Germans to ask what they required for documentation in order for him to leave for America. They provided him with a list of requirements. His daughter in America sent him all that he needed. When he showed up again at the German office with his documentation in hand, they said, “You have, in fact, everything required – except for one thing: You need to shave off your beard!”

Because he refused they shipped him off to Auschwitz-Birkenau where they burned him.

The above was probably his passport picture.

About 10 years ago, at a simchah in Boro Park, an elderly gentleman approached me and asked if my name is אייכנשטיין. I said Yes. He said he knew my grandfather because he had been “shipped” to Auschwitz in the very same cattle-car as was my grandfather. My grandfather, he said, told everybody inside that cattle-car they should know that this “trip” they were on – will be the last trip of their lives. He said, when they were unloaded onto the platform at Auschwitz, my grandfather actually started dancing!

I bring this anecdote to your attention because Jews in the Holocaust offered their lives in self-sacrifice to Hashem for being Jewish, and proud of it.

I'd venture to say that very deep down every Jew who gave his life, in the face of then European "humanity", had to have harbored even a slight touch of happiness.

The Jewish People Live - An Auschwitz Story

This story was told in 770 tonight, during a grand "farbrengen", and, as a son of holocaust survivors, I feel obligated to retell it. The speaker was Rabbi Gershon Avtzin.

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During the joyful days of Sukkot, when thousands dance in the vicinity of 770 for seven straight nights, from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am, Jews from all over the tri-state area come here to dance to the music. A pair of chassidim were dancing on their own while singing the Chassidic song, "הבל הבלים‫,‬ אין עוד מלבדו". A Jew nearby, when he heard their singing, suddenly stopped, looked at them, took a step back, and watched as if frozen in his tracks, awe-struck.

Someone asked him why he reacts that way. Rabbi Avtzin, standing nearby, overheard his story. He was an outstanding student in school and was awarded to go on a trip with a group of congregants to visit Germany's concentration camps. They did this yearly to show the Germans the Jewish nation is alive and well.

When they arrived at Auschwitz, they were offered a tour guide. The young man felt it inappropriate to take a "tour" in such a place; A "guided tour" in this deathly setting didn't feel right. Instead, he went off on his own. He walked to the barracks and entered one.

It was a cold winter day. Alone in the barrack, he wondered what Jews must have felt in this gruesome place. Despite the frost in the air, he removed his fur-lined coat. All he saw were boards that served the inmates as "beds". He wanted a better experience of the imagined feeling, so he decided to lie down on one of those "beds". In so doing, he was amazed to discover 5 Hebrew words written on the wall next to him, "הבל הבלים‫,‬ אין עוד מלבדו". He looked hard at these words; Their contrast in an atmosphere of hell was overwhelming. (The words mean, everything is rather meaningless - only God exists! )

Suddenly he heard a voice, "What are you doing?" His eye spotted an old man standing in a far corner of the barrack. He got off the board and walked to the old man. "I'm trying to feel what the Jews must have felt here."

The old man told him that could never happen. Only those who actually were here, like he himself who in his youth was an inmate in this very barrack, could get a feeling like that; Only those who knew that sooner or later their number will be called, only those who suffered the despair and hopelessness could know the feeling. The young man asked, "Do you know who wrote those words on the wall?"

The old man said, "I know very well. There was a young fellow who would sing a melody to us every night, a niggun accompanied by those words. Every night, after a long day of slave labor, after a day of starvation, and after many more Jews died that day, this song he sang lifted our spirits. He did so every night before we went to sleep. It gave us strength to endure and hope that we will live it through.

"One day, a German found out. He said to the Jew 'You will die tomorrow for that', and left. The Jew, a Chabad chassid, gathered us together and said to us, 'Yidden, tomorrow I will die as a Kiddush Hashem. I want to give you a gift before I go. If ever you need inspiration and strength to live on, remember me and remember these 5 words' - which he them proceeded to write on the wall."

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Rabbi Avtzin compared the darkness Jews felt in that barrack to the world situation now, where the Rebbe has disappeared from our view, where the darkness before daybreak is great. But 20 years ago, for over a year, the Rebbe, within the same 4 walls, encouraged Jews to accept him as Moshiach with the 8 words that remain written today on a wall in 770, 8 words that lift our spirits by acknowledging the imminent Era of Redemption soon to brighten our landscape,

יחי אדוננו מורנו ורבינו מלך המשיח לעולם ועד

A Soup-Story of Auschwitz

Where Mengele (יש''ו) did his "experiments"

My dear mother, ע‫''‬ה, hardly ever answered my questions as to what happened in Auschwitz, the concentration camp she eventually was liberated from. Sometimes she'd try, but then the hairs on her arm would stand on end, which she'd sometimes show me - her way to get me to back off. Other times she'd just politely say "No".

Nevertheless, from childhood into adulthood, once in a blue moon I'd give that question a try. On occasion she'd respond with a "safe" story, one for which she'd feel no surge of anxiety. (Like the time she worked, as seamstress, sewing clothes in a German officers' barrack, where German soldiers, male and female, drank heavily and fell asleep, and she sewed a huge hem into her "skirt", into which she stuffed many sugar cubes she took out of a large barrel, then shared her "treasure" with the other inmates in her "bunk" that night.)

But then, once, in my adult life, she did tell me a story she'd witnessed. She was in the kitchen, busy making chicken soup on a Friday afternoon, getting it ready for Shabbos, and I was sitting at the kitchen table behind her. (She was, by the way, an outstanding cook, never needing a recipe to prepare mouth-watering, aroma-savoring Hungarian dishes.) One of the ingredients she used in her chicken soup was large slices of cow bones, those with marrow in them. This triggered a memory she decided firmly to share with me on the spur of the moment.

She turned around, said "You want to hear a story of Auschwitz?", sat down across from me and began telling me.

Railways into Auschwitz

My mother often saw transports of Jews coming into Auschwitz behind wire fences that separated her camp ground from the transport platform. As I understood it, Auschwitz had two sets of rails that hugged either side of a platform onto which the Jews, transported there in cattle-cars, were unloaded. Both sides of this platform were last stops for this railway system.

The far end of the train's offload platform was fenced off; This was a "one-way" platform. At the other end, towards which Jews were prodded to "line up" and navigate to, sat the nefarious "Doctor" Josef Mengele, may his name be blotted out forever. Here this monster decided the fate of over 1.5 million Jews. On his hand he wore a white glove. With his little finger, he pointed right or left as each Jew passed him by, then and there determining this Jew's fate to live or die.

A unique, obsessive hobby of this fiend was to make "experiments" on twins.

She related: One particular day, this barbarian noticed in the crowd making their way towards him a father and son, both hunchbacks. Mengele suddenly was seized with excited frenzy.

With wicked delight he took the father and son into the "kitchen", where stood two huge pots used to make "soup" for the enslaved inmates. This soup was nothing more that hot water and some peels of potato thrown in. He had the father placed in one pot and the son placed in the other, and boiled them until their flesh simply could come away from the bone with minimal effort. He did this just so he could compare the bones of father and son.

Surprisingly, she got through the whole story under full composure. That's my memory of it, which I here record, for the first time since about 30 years ago, when I first heard it. (I saw a picture of that demon on the web and decided to write up this short story I'll never forget.)

UPDATE (Jun 9/15): Just read this article regarding Auschwitz, where it also makes mention of father and son hunchbacks, and what happened to them. Not that my mom's story needed corroboration, but the morbid proof is overwhelming.
quote: 
"Above all, the Lilliputs dreaded suffering the same fate as two male dwarfs — a hunchback and his son — who’d arrived in the camp three months after them.

Having decided to send their skeletons to a museum in Berlin, Mengele had ordered his staff to boil their bodies over a fire until the flesh separated from the bones."