Faith against all odds

PAT JOHNSON

As a two-year-old child in Poland, Lulek spent two months in the summer of 1939 with his zayde, a scholar of the Bible. In August, Lulek said goodbye to his grandfather to return home to Piotrkow. Within days, the German army invaded Poland, and the boy's life – and the lives of millions – became a series of unspeakable horrors.

Through the darkness of the following years, during which Lulek somehow survived the worst of the Nazis' death camps, he remembered one story his zayde had taught him – the vision of the valley of dry bones, which foretold to the Prophet Ezekiel that G-d would revivify the people, the nation, of Israel; that in the darkest hour, redemption is imminent.

This story, imparted in the final days of peace, sustained the child through six years of inhumanity. This biblical allegory, a single shred of faith husbanded by an uncomprehending child through years of unimaginable trauma, is what Lulek credits for his survival.

Six years later, liberated from Buchenwald by the American army – almost alone among his family and his village – Lulek began a journey of rehabilitation that remains remarkable in the annals of human history. Lulek – Yisrael Meir Lau – would grow up to become a leading Jewish theologian and chief rabbi of the state of Israel. Along with a group of 426 miraculous child survivors of the brutal Buchenwald concentration camp, Lau defied the expectations of the orphanage administrators and, like many among the reprieved victims of Nazism, went on to greatness. At this orphanage 100 miles from Paris, as well as at a few others in Western Europe, child survivors like Lau learned what it is to be human after years of depravation, starvation, exhaustion and constant terror. The 426 young Buchenwald survivors taken in by the French government after liberation included not only Lau, who would serve as Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel from 1993 to 2003, but also Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel and a long list of leading scientists, writers, thinkers and teachers, including Robbie Waisman, a leading member of Vancouver's Jewish community and a Holocaust educator who has shared his story with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of young Canadians.

It was Waisman who welcomed Lau to Vancouver on Feb. 28. The emotional reunion was at a presentation by Lau – now chief rabbi of Tel Aviv – to a gala evening in support of Beth Hamidrash synagogue. The event took place at Schara Tzedeck.

Lau's presentation was titled Faith in the Modern World, but the emotional, occasionally tearful recollections of the rabbi were less about faith in a universal context than a few illustrations of the astonishing power of faith as experienced by individuals.

Like Lau's own story, the other cases he recounted were of the capriciousness of fate and the power of faith. For boys who had neither laughed nor cried in years, the stone-heartedness bred by their inhuman treatment was not easily overcome. Lau recalled the epiphany he had at the orphanage, a small ray of humanity that told him perhaps life was still possible:

When told that a delegation of politicians and high officials from Paris would be visiting the French orphanage, a rabble-rouser among the young charges rebelled, Lau recalled last week. The boy rejected what would now be called a photo op, asking where the French politicians and voices were six years earlier, when the signs were evident that a genocide was about to consume European Jewry. Now that the smallest survivors of the Holocaust were cause for sympathy and curiosity, the world was far more interested in their cause.

The dissent didn't halt the assembly, so the boys planned an act of civil disobedience. They would attend the event, sitting on the lawn and listening to the speakers, but they would not raise their eyes from the ground in front of them. As speakers addressed the crowd of child survivors, one man stood out. He was a French Jew, and the one responsible for the orphanage that had taken the boys in. Addressing the boys, he could not control his emotions and, after telling them that he was childless and that they would all be his children, he dissolved into tears. At this, Lau recalled, 426 pairs of eyes rose from the ground and gazed at the weeping man. The entire assembly, many of whom had become inured to emotion of any sort, joined his weeping.

For Lau, the moment was transcendent.

"Someone that is able to cry has a chance to love as well," he said.

For Lau's Vancouver friend Waisman, the ascent of Lau is a story of implausible reversal of fortune. Waisman told the rapt audience he would have said, "You are dreaming," if someone had told him during the Shoah that the boys would not only survive, but live to see "our own Jewish nation and that one of us would become the chief rabbi of that state."

In introducing the rabbi, Waisman recounted that the adults responsible for them didn't know what to make of the orphans.

"To their horror, they found that we were very unusual," Waisman said. "They did everything possible and they couldn't understand why we were so difficult to deal with."

The boys, traumatized and dehumanized, now had to face the prospect of starting a life, alone, with little to no psychiatric care, in a world that had taken their parents, siblings, language and civilization.

The prognosis for the boys was grim. A government report, commissioned to determine what the French had brought upon themselves by admitting these 426 little survivors, predicted the children could not be rehabilitated and would likely not live past 40.

"All of us boys would not be able to rehabilitate," Waisman said, summarizing the report's conclusions. "We were lost. We had seen too much."

Recounting the contributions to the world made by the child survivors, Waisman wondered aloud how the world would have changed had the 1.5 million Jewish children lost to the Shoah lived to share their gifts with the world.

The rabbi's presentation did not reach the breadth implied by the title, Faith in the Modern World, but in a few powerful, emotionally expressed recollections, the chief rabbi may have demonstrated the very definition of faith in the modern world: that it could grow at all in the souls of men with a shared early history like theirs.

Pat Johnson is, among other things, director of development and communications for Vancouver Hillel Foundation.

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