After the War

I entered the seminary in 1946 and was elected to my first pulpit in 1948. This period of time was right after World War II. I was involved in protest meetings, and I remember towards the end of the war there was a rumor making the rounds that the Germans were ready to trade Jews for trucks. For a truck you’d get “x” number of Jews. There were some people who picked that up and there was a real effort to raise a fantastic sum of money to buy as many trucks so we could possibly get and rescue as many Jews as possible.

Those years touched every one of us. It was wrenching, absolutely wrenching. We knew terrible things were happening but who knew the full dimensions of it? How could you?

My first experience with someone who managed to get away was in 1938. I was I4 years old. One Friday night, a man appeared in our synagogue. He had come from Vienna and he had lived in that section of Vienna which was the most heavily populated Jewish section, 15th-16th Bezirk. I remember that scene back in my mind’s eye right now, walking home from shul with him, telling me how he had to give up everything to get out.

At the time I didn’t understand what he was talking about. But later on I read what was done to strip the Viennese, the Austrian Jews, of their possessions. “You’d come in, first thing, you’d come to a table, you show them your pass. They took it away from you. Then you had to give them an inventory of everything you had. lf you lied—and if they caught you lying—you were shot. Then you had to turn in whatever you had on you, valuables, jewelry, whatever. By the time you were at the end of the table, all you had was the shirt on your back and maybe ten shillings.”

When they came to this country, the Jewish community was organized. No one was left hungry. They were taken care of. We found jobs for them. We educated their children.

In I946 I had a fantastic experience. I had entered the seminary as an auditor in January of 1946. I had graduated Yeshiva (college) in 1945 and I took some time off, preparing for seminary. In June of 1946 I walked down Broadway from the seminary at 122nd Street to 100st Street to a kosher restaurant for dinner. I sat down at a table and there were two young people, sitting opposite me. Young, yet they looked old. There was something weird about it. And I don’t know why, to this day, I can’t tell you why, I automatically struck up a conversation with them in Yiddish. At the Yeshiva, I spoke in Yiddish only when we were studying, not conversationally. As it turns out, these two people were brother and sister. They had arrived in the United States just that day. At the end of the war, President Truman went beyond the quotas and allowed 1,000 displaced persons to come from Europe to the United States . They were two of the thousand. They were housed in two hotels in New York . One was the hotel Marseilles, three blocks away from that restaurant. That’s why they were eating there.

This kid is sitting there and he takes out his wallet and he takes out a bunch of photographs that he took. They had piles and piles and piles of corpses in the trains, the unburied mounds of people. I don’t remember all the details, but this left a horrible impression. I went back to the hotel with them. I had never seen such turmoil in my life.

There were some social workers working with them, but these people were so agitated running back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, not just these two people, but everybody else that was there. There were others, too. Finally, one of them gave me a list of names of people who were still looking for relatives in the United States . Well, I called these names in to a Yiddish newspaper. We brought some of the displaced persons over to the seminary. We took them to a Russian movie. Boy, if anything opened my eyes to what those horrible years were about, this did. They started telling me these stories.

One kid, 16 years old, looked like a dwarf. Why? During the whole time, he was hidden in the cellar. Never saw sunshine from 1939 to 1945, from the age of 10 to 16. Apparently, without Vitamin D from the sun, his bones failed to grow properly. He was lucky to survive. I met a woman and her daughter. They looked pretty, blonde and as Nordic as anybody could possibly be. The two of them had passed in Poland for non-Jews. That’s how they survived. I mean stories, and stories, and stories, during this Holocaust. And now, I think there are memories. What can I say? These are very personal to me.

I feel like I contributed to things like that not happening again. I became involved with civil rights. There’s no such thing as saying this one has a right to live and that one doesn’t. I don’t buy that.