Rabbi Shmuley Boteach - Holocaust Holiday: One Familys Descent into Genocide Memory Hell

A WICKE D SON BOOK

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-6 4293-780-0

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-6 4293-781-7

Holocaus t Holiday:

One Familys Descent into Genocide M emory Hell

2021 by Rabbi Shmul ey Boteach

All Right s Reserved

Cover Design by Mat t Margolis

This is a work of nonfiction. All people, locations, events, and situations are portrayed to the best of the author s memory.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

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Published in the United States of America

To my father, Yoav Boteach,

who passed away while I was completing the manuscript of this book, at eighty-seven years old. I am in the midst of the eleven-month recital of the Kaddish mourners prayer, three times a day for my father, a haunting and beautiful Jewish ritual that was denied the six million of the H olocaust.

and to

Sheldo n Adelson,

Global Jewish philanthropist and mega-donor and one of modern Jewish historys most consequential figures, who partnered with me in fighting genocide and preserving the sacred memory of the six million. Sheldon, Israels tireless defender, passed away just weeks before this books publication, also, at eighty-seven years old.

And to

Yisrael Zoli Zoltan Wie sner, HYD

my wife Debbies great-uncle who was murdered at Auschwitz, at just twenty-two years old.

May their memories be an eternal blessing.

Contents

by Amb. Georgette Mosbacher

W hen you have visited Auschwitz once, its hard to go a second time. When I revisited the site as United States Ambassador to Poland in 2019 with Vice President Mike Pence, I could barely make it past the gate.

Being there makes the horror feel so real. You are forced to absorb what you cannot properly digest. I didnt believe I could do it again. And yet, I believe every person must make the pilgrimage, because its the only way to truly understand what actually happened to the Jews of Europe between 1939 and 1945.

Like many, I had heard the rallying cry of Never Again. But I had never fathomed its true meaning. Being on the ground where humanitys greatest crime was committed, and knowing full well it could happen again, made me understand, at last, just how deeply the Holocaust af fects us.

This was the slaughter that forced the global community to take its staff and draw an international line against hatred. The Holocaust summons all of us to wage endless war against anti-Semitism and any other form of bigotrywherever it finds embodiment in the intentions, words, or actions o f others.

That moment for me was an epiphany that has framed my outlook on life with a permanent urgency. Auschwitz awakened within me a new sense of responsibility to recognize the suffering of others, whether in the past, present, or future. I knew then that it was down to me to end or prevent injustice. It is also down to you, and each and every one of us. But the duty is mine as far as Im c oncerned.

I first visited Auschwitz a few years before my appointment as Ambassador to Poland, the land where the Germans built their machinery of death. A land where millions of Jews had lived and died, and where today only a few thousan d remain.

It was 2013, and the Polish government had joined some private donors in opening a Museum of Jewish History in Warsaw. One of my close friends was a benefactor. He was not Jewish, yet he believed it to be his responsibility to make sure a temple was erected to the Jewish communities eradicated on Polish soil, to enshrine their memory forever.

He had paid a visit to the extermination camps. At that time, I had not. I had never been t o Poland.

I knew I had to see the camps. There are few sites as essential to the story of humanity than these searing monuments to what humans are both capable of doing and enduring. My journey to that sacred ground was non-ne gotiable.

We traveled to Krakow, where Europes greatest rabbinic minds had once held forth on the precepts of Halacha and the secrets of Kabbalah. Today, its Jewish community is dwarfed by its number of Jewish graves. And yet, I witnessed a small but vibrant Jewish community being rebornan eternal people who refu se to die.

From there we traveled to the small town of Oswiecim, the namesake of the nearby camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, a name that has come to personify unimagin able evil.

We arrived amid the bitter cold of the Polish winter, which pressed through my coat a nd shoes.

We began to walk through the concentration camp, a center of mass Jewish enslavement. I thought of the Jews who lived there without coats or shoes, receiving meager amounts of food. Jews whose only crime was being bo rn a Jew.

We walked on to the extermination camp and its crematoria, whose rubble still lies strewn about in horrifying heaps of bricks and steel. The Germans, I was told, had exploded them in hopes of burying their crimes, even as their victims were never buried but turned to ash and dust and blown into forest mounds. Each was an airtight structure designed to murder thousands of men, women, and children a day with poison gas. Mothers and fathers clutching their children; poets, craftsmen, and sages; murdered with methods of German heavy industryone million at Auschwi tz alone.

As the biting breeze increasingly chilled us, I thought of what those incarcerated here had endured, and whose last moments were a toxic blend of confusion, loss, and pain. My mind reeled to think that human beings could create these massive factories of death. Not just here at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but in more than 900 other camps erected acros s Europe.

Even seventy years later, I could hardly bear to witness the physical evidence of these crimes. How could anyone be a willing participant in this evil design? Where was it in the human genome to have the capacity for a systematic slaughter of such magnitude? Is the center of the human soul just an utterly unlit, vacuous bl ack hole?

Yet this capacity exists somewhere inside of us, which means it could happen again. Things would never be the same for me. I had seen the world through a new lens, one I didnt know existedand one I wish never did. I decided then and there to commit myself to the principle the Holocaust taught us: Nev er Again.

Six years later, I returned. This time, I arrived in a different capacity as the representative of the mightiest country on earth, the very nation that had been decisive in defeating Hitl ers evil.

Beside me was Vice President Pence. Accompanied by a team of diplomats, aides, and advisors, we walked toward the notorious gates, with their infamous message of false hope: Arbeit Macht Frei . Like nearly all of what was spoken by the Germans, the promise that Work Makes Freedom was a shameless, heartless lie. Only death would free the prisoners who c ame here.

That was as far as I could make it.

Would it be wrong, I asked the vice president, if I only went as far as t he gate?

I knew the protocols. As Ambassador I was meant to escort the vice president everywhere. But, seared by my previous visit, I could not walk one step further.

He and the rest of the group said they understood. But it was only after they returned that I beli eved them.