Okay. That is your right to believe as such.
But let me tell you a story.
My grandfather, in blessed memory, was a slave at the Czestochowa forced labor camp, making munitions for Krups. He was also a smuggler. I wouldn’t believe the specifics if not for corroboration from the witnesses, but he bought ingredients from the Polish day workers, made candy, sold it back to them, and bought food with the profits, which he then gave away to the people in the camp, which kept them from being starved to death as they were being worked to death.
One day in Spring of '45, they can hear the guns of the Russian army off in the distance, and tensions in the camp are rising; the prisoners are hearing rumors that they’ll be liberated any day now.
A truck loaded with young teens and pre-teens comes into the camp, having made a wrong turn into the work camp instead of the extermination camp up the road. They start unloading the truck, the kids are milling around, the guards are yelling at the driver, and my grandfather sees one boy who looked a little bit older, a little bit more mature, and figures that he can take another risk, any day now, they’ll be rescued.
So he tells the boy to come with him.
The rest… got back on the truck and went off to their deaths.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a few days.
It was six weeks.
The Russians camped on the far side of the Vistula River and told the Polish partisans to fight against the Nazis, and that they would be given materiel and logistical support by the USSR army.
So the partisans did so and were duly slaughtered, because the Red Army didn’t lift a finger on Stalin’s direct order. Afterall, any partisans willing to fight the Nazis would also be willing to fight him.
Meanwhile, back in the camp, my grandfather and his friends are taking insane risks to hide the boy.
They held him up over empty shoes stitched to long pants at the roll calls so that he would look taller, they had to smuggle food for him… if they had been caught, the best outcome that they could have hoped for was a noose of piano wire.
Finally, one night, they’re locked in their barracks, the Nazis are retreating from the camp and attempting to use it for cover while the Soviets are finally advancing.
And, in the chaos that followed… my grandfather lost track of the boy.
He tells this story to my father when my father was 12. He does know what happened to the boy. Did he live, did he die? Did he find his family? He doesn’t know.
Six months later, my grandmother is planning my father’s bar mitzvah, not as a religious observance, but as a 200 foot tall flaming middle finger to the Third Reich that we are still here, and they are not.
She plugs into what my father calls the “Camp Network” for logistical support.
The trombonist in the band was on a death march with an uncle…
The florist was in a work camp with a second cousin…
And so forth.
Finally, she says, “I need a photographer. Who is good?”
“Oh, you want Joe Brown, up in Queens.”
So she calls him and he comes down to Coney Island to meet with her. So the first question when two survivors meet each other is “Where were you?” and Joe Brown responds, “Czestochowa”
“You were in Czestochowa? My husband Teddy was in Czestochowa!”
“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum.”
“When he gets home, you’ll see that you knew him.”
It’s funny, you live in the US for twenty years, you and your family forget that your name was not Teddy Baum but Tuvyas Bumps, and, when my grandfather came home from work, he got reminded of that fact, because, sitting at his kitchen table…
Was the boy that he had saved.
So, yeah.
I feel fully justified in judging not only my grandfather’s brother for allowing his sister-in-law and infant nephew to starve to death and for other crimes against his people and his family, but in judging the people who are selling out their brethren to the next fascist wannabe overlord.
Because I know that it is always a choice.
Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.
Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Yerushalmi Talmud 4:9, Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a
