A Jew Worthy of Receiving Kvittelach

A JEW WORTHY OF RECEIVING KVITTELACH

An interview with Reb Eliyahu Herman

by Debbie Shapiro

Before Rav Yoel Teitelbaum, ztz”l, the Satmar Rav, left Eretz Yisrael to make his home in America, his devoted chassid Reb Asher Zelig Margolis asked him, “Rebbe, now that you are leaving us, to whom shall we give our kvittels?”

“Go into any shul,” Reb Yoelish replied, “and look for a Jew with a number on his arm. A Jew like that, who still puts on tefillin after gong through the war, is worthy of receiving your kvittels.”

A Hidden Tzaddik

Over the years, I had heard rumors of a hidden tzaddik who sits in a tiny tailor shop just down the street from the Prima Palace Hotel. Someone even pointed out his store to me, but it wasn’t until last week that I finally got up the courage to enter and request a berachah, and, being a writer and journalist, a story.

Reb Eliyahu Herman looks like everyone’s favorite zeideh. Beardless, with a large knitted kippah, he doesn’t fit the stereotype image of a tzaddik. But his mesiras nefesh for the mitzvah of tefillin saved thousands — yes, thousands — of Jews from death.

Born and raised in Budapest, Reb Eliyahu was fifteen years old when the Germans occupied Hungary. Although the countries were allies, it wasn’t until the very tail end of the war, on March 14, 1944, with Operation Margarethe, that German forcefully took over the Hungarian government, and Hungarian Jews began to feel the full force of the Holocaust. Within days of the occupation, Eichmann came to Budapest to institute the Final Solution. Every day over 12,000 Jews were shipped to Auschwitz, where most were sent directly to the gas chambers. The change was so sudden, and so drastic, that the Jews of Hungary were completely unprepared.

“Yes, we had heard rumors of the atrocities taking place across the border, but we really thought they were exaggerations. We were totally unprepared for what would soon become our new reality.

“Rav Aharon of Belz escaped Galicia together with his brother, the Bilgoray Rav, and was living in the apartment adjacent to our yeshivah. I was zocheh to receive a personal berachah from him, and” — at this, his words falter — “I am sure it is in that zechus that I was saved, and that I was able to keep my tefillin with me, even while in the Gehinnom of Mauthausen and Gunskirchen, two of the worst spots on the face of the earth.”

I shudder at their mere mention.

Before Reb Eliyahu can continue, the door to his shop is pushed open and a tall, elderly rabbinical figure enters. It is Rav Naftali Porush, one of the heads of the Agudah in Eretz Yisrael. He takes one look at me, perched on a backless wooden stool, my small laptop balanced on a pile of long black reichelach waiting to be repaired, and smiles. “A tayere Yid… Reb Eliyahu’s a tayere Yid… All the gedolei Yisrael used to have their suits sewn davka at his shop.”

Reb Eliyahu smiles and the two men speak for a few minutes about the daily shiur that Rav Porush delivers and that Reb Eliyahu attends. The moment Rav Porush leaves, Reb Eliyahu turns to me and smiles. “Look at me, a sheigetz” — his grin widens — “with my knitted kippah and short-sleeved striped shirt. But it doesn’t matter. My knitted kippah, his black velvet one, this hat, that hat — we’re all Yidden, and limud Torah unites us.”

They Tried to Warn Us

Reb Eliyahu continues his story: “There were fifteen Polish refugees in my yeshivah. They had tried to alert us to what was happening across the border. The Belzer Rebbe’s gabbai, Reb Dovid Shapiro, also tried to warn us, but we could not believe them. We were living in an illusionary world, and we couldn’t imagine that such horrors were possible. But it wasn’t long until we learned otherwise.

“When the Germans arrived, our rebbe, Rav Chaim Alter Berkowitz, Hy”d, instructed us to close our Gemaras and return home. Rushing through the streets, I saw a sight that to this day still horrifies me. Soldiers with guns were prodding long lines of Jews in the direction of the Danube River. I heard gunshots in the distance. I later learned that the Jews were ordered to remove their clothes and then forced to jump into the water. Most drowned — it was a wide, deep, river — and those who didn’t were shot.

“I was lucky enough to find a job at a German factory. A few days after I started, the Nazis rounded up all the Jewish residents of our apartment building. Thanks to my work papers, I was able to save my family from being drowned in the river together with our neighbors. My parents survived the war — they found refuge in one of Raoul Wallenberg’s safe houses, and later on, in 1953, we escaped Hungary and moved to Israel. My father, who’s buried on Har HaMenuchos, opened this tailor shop, and now that he’s gone, I work here. But my son, he’s not a tailor. He’s a rabbi, a real talmid chacham.” The pride was apparent in his voice.

In the Zechus of These Heilege Tefillin

Before Reb Eliyahu could continue, the door opened again, and a young kollel student entered. He had just purchased two pairs of pants at a store down the street and wanted to have them shortened. Reb Eliyahu pointed to a small white stool with peeling paint and asked the young man to stand on it so he could pin the hems in place. “The Rebbe of Belz also stood on this stool,” Reb Eliyahu chuckled. “But there’s no way he could do it today. Then he was a tiny boy — not even three years old, and was trying on the suit that I had made him for his upsherin.”

While Reb Eliyahu was pinning the hem in place, the kollel student stared at him intently. Finally, he asked, “Are you the man with the tefillin that survived the Holocaust?”

Reb Eliyahu smiled in response, and the student continued, “Someone in my family is very sick. Could you give her a berachah?”

“Who am I to give you a berachah?” Reb Eliyahu asked. “It’s all the zechus of the tefillin. Here, take my tefillin and daven, and may the merit of my mesiras nefesh for this mitzvah bring you a yeshuah.”

Reb Eliyahu removed a purple velvet tefillin bag from behind the counter and handed it to the kollel student. When he took it, I noticed that his hands were trembling. Then he stood in the corner, motionless, grasping the faded velvet bag containing the sacred tefillin close to his heart as he davened. When he finished, Reb Eliyahu handed him a tattered Sefer Tehillim. “This also survived the War. Say a kapitel of Tehillim from it.”

He did, and then he thanked Reb Eliyahu, asked him when the pants will be ready, and quietly — almost reverently — exited the store.

As the door closed, Reb Eliyahu smiled. “Hashem blessed me to be a shaliach to help people come to teshuvah. It’s all in the zechus of these heilege tefillin.”

The Tefillin

A few months later, the Germans grabbed Reb Eliyahu off the street and brought him to a brick factory. “It’s impossible to describe what it was like. Thousands of Jews were lying helpless in the mud. One old woman had extended her arm to try to grab a crust of bread. A Hungarian soldier kicked the bread with his shiny leather boots. In my innocence, I thought he was trying to kick it closer to the starving woman. Instead, he continued kicking it until it was totally out of her reach. A few minutes later, the woman succumbed to starvation.

“Shortly after I arrived, the Nazis brought a truckload of Jews from the old age home and the Jewish hospital. The old people could barely walk. The soldiers cruelly pushed them into the mud and shot them.

“After a few days of this Gehinnom, the Germans ordered us to leave the factory and begin marching. It started to rain, and then the rain turned into snow. Our ‘friendly’ neighbors stood on either side of the road, jeering at us as they threw snow-covered rocks. Some moved their hands across their necks, to let us know that we were being taken away to slaughter.

“We left the city and continued walking, and walking and walking. Every night, we slept somewhere else — on hard gravel, pavement, mud, even inside a pigsty. The Germans didn’t provide us with food or water; they just forced us to walk until we finally arrived at the city of Sopron on the German-Austrian border.”

In Sopron, Reb Eliyahu, together with the other inmates, were loaded into cattle cars and shipped west, into Austria, away from the approaching Red Army. Thirty-five thousand men had left Budapest. The remaining five thousand were brought to Mauthausen.

“We arrived on erev Pesach. Mauthausen is located in an ancient castle on the top of a very tall mountain. Entering the building, we felt as if we had just passed through the gates of Gehinnom. While a band played a rousing march, we stared in horror at the skeletal beings dressed ludicrously in pajamas.”

Before entering Mauthausen, Reb Eliyahu hid his precious tefillin by carefully tying them to his leg. At the selection, someone whispered to him to lie about his age and profession, so the 15-year-old yeshivah student told the camp commandant that he was a 28-year-old tailor. “I was sent to the right, to life, while all the other boys my age were sent to the left, to death.”

When sent to the shower, Reb Eliyahu miraculously managed to hide his tefillin under a rock. “That was the last time I was ever separated from my tefillin. I kept them with me throughout the war, and afterwards. Today, I take them with me wherever I go.” He pointed to the small velvet bag lying on the counter.

“Dressed in nothing more than thin pajamas, we slept that night in the snow. It was our mattress, our blanket, and our food. At home, we had a maid who polished my shoes. There, I had no shoes. Not far from us were what appeared to be five small huts. When I woke up, I was horrified to discover that they were really five enormous piles of frozen corpses. There was no fuel to burn them.

Take Me

“The first morning in that Gehinnom, I donned my tefillin and begged Hashem to take me. I could not stand the suffering. But although I was no better than the others, Hashem wanted me to remain alive.”

Reb Eliyahu remained alive, and continued to don his tefillin and recite a quick prayer each morning before setting out to work. He had to be careful — if the Nazis were to discover him with the tefillin, he would be immediately shot.

“The camp commander took tremendous pleasure in torturing the prisoners. Afterwards, he would return to his house, located on the camp premises, and, together with his wife, listen to classical music, to Mozart!”

Reb Eliyahu recalled the special hashgachah pratis he had in hiding his tefillin: “Twice a day, at roll call, the SS soldiers would surround us and check us with their dogs. Although these dogs always stopped to smell my leg, the one where the tefillin were tied, the Nazis never discovered my tefillin. I can only describe it as a miracle. There is no other explanation.”

Reb Eliyahu spent some eight weeks in Mauthausen.

“The allied forces were closing in. One day, there was a selection. Most were sent to the crematorium. I was selected for life. Life? We were forced to march for twelve days in the heavy rain until we reached our destination, Gunskirchen. Of the 33,000 who left Mauthausen, 20,000 arrived in Gunskirchen.

“I had been positive that there could be no place worse than Mauthausen. But I was wrong. Gunskirchen was much, much worse. The first thing the Nazis did upon our arrival was to set three huge German shepherds on my friend Chaim. They tore him to pieces.

“Gunskirchen was not a work camp. We did nothing all day, except remove the dead bodies from our barrack and wait for time to pass. A few times a week the Nazis would give us a bit of food and water.”

Escape

Reb Eliyahu recalls his last day in the camp: “It was a Friday night, Parshas Behar-Bechukosai. We were locked in our barrack, and had heard that the Germans had placed explosives around it. They wanted to kill us and hide all the evidence. People were dying like flies, and I knew that if the Germans didn’t explode the barrack, I would die of hunger. I said to my friends, the brothers Klein, ‘If you’ll join me, let’s escape together.’ We began climbing over bodies to make our way toward the door.

“In front of the door, I saw a man named Yitzchak lying on the floor. He had converted to Christianity prior to the Holocaust. I bent down and asked him, ‘Do you want to return to the Jewish people?’ Although he was already unable to speak, his eyes told me that he did. My friends were upset with me. After all, what difference would it make, one goy less? But I couldn’t leave him to die as a gentile. I said the Shema with him. He died at the word echad.

“We somehow found the strength — don’t ask me how — to break the door open and escape that death-filled room. Of course I had my tefillin with me. Once we were in the forest, we threw off our lice-infested prison pajamas and put on SS uniforms that we had removed from dead soldiers.

“Suddenly, we heard the sound of a car traveling. When we saw it was an American jeep, we emerged from our hiding place and stood at the side of the road. Three soldiers jumped out of the jeep, their guns trained on us, and requested that we show them our documents. Documents? We didn’t even have clothes, let alone documents!”

You Are the Mashiach

“I didn’t have documents, so I showed the soldiers my tefillin. At first, they thought it was a hand grenade! But then, one of them recognized that they were tefillin! He asked me, ‘Du bist a Yid?’

“I started crying, and said, ‘You are the Mashiach!’ The soldier ordered me to recite a Jewish prayer. I said Shema. He immediately embraced me and started kissing me. When I told him that the two German soldiers standing next to me were also Jews, he hugged and kissed them, too.

“I gave them directions to get to Gunskirchen. Although the camp was not far from where we were located, it was difficult to find. The Jewish soldier immediately phoned his commander and informed him that he had found the camp they had been looking for. ‘Please save the over 35,000 Jews that are left there,’ I begged. ‘Most of them are on the verge of death. If you don’t get there quickly, most will die. Every minute is crucial.’

“The army immediately sent medical care to Gunskirchen, and in doing so, thousands of lives were saved. My tefillin saved my life, and the lives of thousands of Jews, because in their zechus, the American army arrived at the camp quickly,” Reb Eliyahu concludes, the emotion evident in his words.

Reb Eliyahu was sent to a local field hospital. When he arrived there, he weighed in at 81 pounds and was running a very high fever.

“I lost consciousness almost immediately after arriving at the hospital. I woke up to discover my tefillin under my head. I asked about the Jewish soldier who had saved my life, but no one could identify him. And that was the last I heard of him for almost 70 years. Last year, I asked the American embassy to help me find him. They suggested I call the Vatican — a lot of help that was!”

Reb Eliyahu later turned to the media. “I phoned one of the more popular radio stations, hoping they’d publicize my story. After explaining my request, the man on the other end of the telephone said, ‘Everything you told me was broadcast throughout the country. Certainly one of our listeners will contact you with information.’”

None of the listeners contacted him, but a major Israeli newspaper did, and a large writeup about his quest appeared in their Friday edition. Motzaei Shabbos, the phone rang in the Herman household, and when Reb Eliyahu answered the phone, a stranger asked, “Are you the guy who was in Gunskirchen 65 years ago?”

Reb Eliyahu replied in the affirmative.

“Do you remember what you said to that Jewish soldier?” the stranger asked.

“I told him, ‘You’re the Mashiach.’”

A few days later, Reb Eliyahu and Rabbi Meyer Birnbaum, a well-known talmid chacham in Jerusalem and author of Lieutenant Birnbaum, met at Rabbi Birnbaum’s home in Mattersdorf, Jerusalem. Of course Reb Eliyahu brought his tefillin. He would never leave them.

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A Reunion with the Klein Brothers

A few years ago, Reb Eliyahu’s story appeared on a television program about the Holocaust. The following day, he received a phone call from a stranger. “My grandfather was one of the Klein brothers who joined you in your escape from Gunskirchen,” he said. A few weeks later, Reb Eliyahu and the two brothers met for the first time in over 60 years.

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The Gunskirchen Concentration Camp

Captain Pletcher of the 71^st Division arrived at the Gunskirchen Work Camp just hours after Lt. Birnbaum. The following is an abridged version of his account:

“When the German SS troops guarding the concentration camp at Gunskirchen heard the Americans were coming, they suddenly got busy burying the bodies of their victims — or rather, having them buried by inmates — and gave the prisoners who were still alive what they considered an extremely liberal food ration: One lump of sugar per person and one loaf of bread for every seven persons. Then, two days or a day and half before we arrived, they left. As we drove up to the camp, we saw hundreds of starving, half-crazed inmates lining the roads, begging for food and cigarettes. Many of them had been able to get only a few hundred yards from the gate before they keeled over and died.

“Of all the horrors of the place, the smell, perhaps, was the most startling of all. It was a smell made up of all kinds of odors — human excreta, foul bodily odors, smoldering trash fires, German tobacco. The grounds of the camp were pulpy, churned to a consistency of warm putty by the milling of thousands of feet, mud mixed with feces and urine. The smell of Gunskirchen nauseated us. It was completely different from anything I’ve ever encountered, and hung over the camp like a fog of death.

“The living skeletons who were still able to walk crowded around us and wouldn’t let us continue driving. Almost every inmate was insane with hunger. They were excited at the opportunity to touch an American, to touch the jeep, to kiss our arms — perhaps just to make sure that it was true. Those who were incapable of walking, crawled toward our jeep. Those who couldn’t even crawl propped themselves up on an elbow, and somehow, through all their pain and suffering, revealed through their eyes their gratitude and joy at our arrival.

“The prisoners had been crammed into a few low, one-story, frame buildings with sloppy, muddy floors. Those who could came out of the buildings, but there were hundreds inside — the dead, the near-dead, and those too weak to move. The buildings were so crowded that the inmates slept three-deep on the floor, one on top of the other. Often, a man would awake in the morning and find the person under him dead. Too weak to move even the pathetically light bodies of their comrades, the living continued sleeping on them.

“None of the inmates of Gunskirchen will ever be the same again. I doubt if any of us who saw it will ever forget it — the smell, the hundreds of bodies that looked like caricatures of human beings, the frenzy of the thousands when they knew the Americans had arrived at last, the spark of joy in the eyes of those who lay in the ditches and whispered a prayer of thanks with their last breaths. I felt, the day I saw Gunskirchen Lager, that I finally knew what I was fighting for, what the war was all about.”

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The Righteous Gentile Raoul Wallenberg

Raoul Wallenberg was born in 1912 to a prominent Swedish family that had produced generations of bankers and diplomats. He studied in the United States and graduated with a degree in architecture in 1935. He then worked as a foreign representative for a central European trading company. In 1944, at the request of President Roosevelt and the United States’s War Refugees Board, he was sent by the Swedish Foreign Minister to Budapest in an attempt to save the Jewish community of Budapest — the last left in Europe.

Adolf Hitler’s plans for the annihilation of the entire Jewish population in German-occupied countries had become widely known. Hungary, which had joined forces with Germany in its war against the Soviet Union beginning in 1941, still had about 700,000 Jewish residents as of early 1944.

Raoul Wallenberg’s tactic was to issue Swedish passports to as many Hungarian Jews as possible, which normally saved them from deportation to the death camps. Several tens of thousands of Jews were saved by Wallenberg that way or by the embassies of neutral countries inspired by Wallenberg’s work.

One of his helpers, future Congressman Tom Lantos, accompanied Raoul Wallenberg to the trains where Jews were being packed together like animals for their journey to a certain death and helped the Swede pull people off. “He bluffed his way through,” said Tom Lantos. “He had no official authorization. His only authority was his own courage. Any officer could have shot him to death. But he feared nothing for himself and committed himself totally. It was as if his courage was enough to protect himself from everything.”

Raoul Wallenberg even had a number of face-to-face confrontations with Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” for the Jews in Hungary. After asking Eichmann: “Look, face it, you’ve lost the war. Why not give it up now?” the German replied that he was staying to complete unfinished business — the extermination of the Hungarian Jews. “Don’t think you’re immune just because you’re a diplomat and a neutral!” Wallenberg was threatened. A few days later, Wallenberg’s car was attacked, but he was not hurt.
Raoul Wallenberg shocked the other diplomats at the Swedish Legation with his unconventional methods. He successfully used everything from bribery to threats of blackmail. But when the other members of the Legation staff saw the results of Wallenberg’s efforts, he quickly gained their full support.

Armed only with courage, determination and imagination, Raoul Wallenberg saved approximately 100,000 Jews from slaughter. He was able to issue thousands of protective passes, purchase and maintain “safe houses” and soup kitchens, secure food, medicine and clothing for the new “Swedish citizens” and the many children orphaned by the Nazi violence. A master of diplomacy, organization, threats, bribery and charm, he brought people back from death trains and death marches.

In January 1945, Raoul Wallenberg received information that Adolf Eichmann planned a total massacre in the largest ghetto. Wallenberg sent an ally, Szalay, to find General Schmidthuber, the Commander of the German Army in Hungary — the only one who could stop the slaughter. Szalay delivered a note to Schmidthuber explaining that the general would be held personally responsible for the massacre and that after the war, he would be considered a war criminal and hung.

Thanks to Wallenberg, General Schmidthuber cancelled the order at the last minute and more than 70,000 Jews were saved. Two days later, the Russians arrived and found 97,000 Jews alive in Budapest’s two Jewish ghettos. A total of 120,000 Jews survived the Nazi extermination in Hungary.

After the war, the Soviets arrested Wallenberg and he disappeared into the Soviet prison system. His fate still remains a mystery. During the late 1940s and 1950s, many foreign officials captured by the Soviet Union were released, but Raoul Wallenberg was never sent home. The Soviets claimed that he died of a heart attack in 1947, but there were reported sightings of him in Soviet prison camps over the years.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan approved a special Act of Congress making Wallenberg an honorary US citizen, a recognition shared with only one other foreigner — Winston Churchill.

In 1989, Wallenberg’s family visited the Soviet Union, and the Soviets surprised them by handing over Wallenberg’s personal belongings, including his passport, money, a daybook and a permit to carry a pistol. But they did not hand over his personal papers.

In 1990, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, an international commission discovered that the KGB had destroyed the Raoul Wallenberg file, effectively eliminating all possibility of discovering his fate.

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Mauthausen

The Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz in Upper Austria was not among the Nazi regime’s biggest camps, but it was undoubtedly among its most horrendous. Built in August 1939 by inmates of the Dachau concentration camp, Mauthausen was one of the most brutal concentration camps. Almost 200,000 people, from practically every European country, died there.

More than half of Mauthausen inmates died. They were either beaten to death, lynched, shot, given a lethal injection or gassed, or died “naturally” of disease or starvation.

The inmates were used as cheap labor in a nearby quarry, which was connected to the camp by what became known as the “Stairs of Death.” Several times a day inmates carried heavy granite blocks up a total of 168 “stairs,” consisting of randomly placed rocks of different sizes, some which were over one and a half feet high, while being chased and beaten by their SS guards. Inmates who collapsed were shot.

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Parshas Noach for Partners in Torah

Parsha Perspectives

ולא מצאה היונה מנוח לכף רגלה ותשב אליו אל התבה כי מים על פני הארץ וישלח ידו ויקחה ויבא אתה אליו אל התבה

But the dove found no resting place for the sole of its foot, so it returned to him to the ark because there was water upon the entire surface of the earth. So he stretched forth his hand and took it, and he brought it to him to the ark (Gen. 8:9).
Why does the Torah point out that Noah extended himself to bring the dove back into the ark? Why didn’t it just fly back home?
Rabbi Naftoli Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (1816-1893), otherwise known as the Netziv, points out that because the dove was not successful in its mission and returned without anything in its mouth, it thought that its master would be angry and not allow it to enter the ark. Noah, however, had compassion on the dove and took it in his hand to warm while it rested from the travails of her journey.
Even though the dove “found no resting place for the sole of its foot” — in other words it did not succeed in its mission — Noah treated it with compassion, and extended his hand to return the exhausted bird to its home.
In the eyes of the Almighty, it is the effort, not the result, that counts. How often do we do everything seemingly right, yet it ends in failure? This idea is apparent in today’s turbulent financial times, where we clearly see that success, or lack of success, is completely in the Almighty’s hands. With regard to spiritual pursuits, it is our responsibility to do our utmost, and we are rewarded accordingly.
A noted lecturer illustrated this idea with the following anecdote:
Dr. Levi was a famous heart surgeon who took his job very seriously. He made sure to keep abreast of all the latest medical developments and to be well rested and alert before beginning surgery. But although he took every possible precaution and reviewed all of Mr. Paloni’s tests and x-rays prior to the operation, Mr. Paloni’s heart stopped suddenly just minutes after beginning surgery, and he died on the operating table.
Dr. Simon was also a famous heart surgeon, but he did not take his job seriously. He laughed at those doctors who wasted their precious time reading medical journals. “After all,” he’d say, “after six years of medical school I should know what I’m doing.” A late night person, he often had to take a break during surgery to down a quick cup of coffee. The night before Mr. Almoni’s operation had been a particularly late one, and the good doctor was exhausted even before he made the first incision. Although he performed the surgery while half asleep, it was incredibly successful, and Mr. Almoni was given a new lease on life.
Although it appears that Dr. Levi failed while Dr. Simon succeeded, in the eyes of G-d it is completely the opposite. Dr. Simon failed — he was lax in his duties — while Dr. Levi was successful, as he did everything humanly possible to succeed.
Just as G-d treats us with compassion and rewards us for our efforts rather than for our accomplishment, we should treat others in the same way. If we ask someone to do something for us, and that person tries yet is unsuccessful, we should behave with compassion and treat him as if he had succeeded in his mission.

The Year of the Flying Sukkah

This story appeared in this month's edition of Jewish Lifestyle

This story took place over a decade ago. Although it's about a flying Sukkah, it really started about a week before the holiday, when the stores throughout Jerusalem were selling a new type of Schach, a light bamboo mat that could be used again and again. Their advertisement ditty, "U'b'Sukkaseinu…" played to a catch tune, blared throughout the streets of the city, and everyone, myself included, found themselves humming it underneath their breath as they busily prepared for the upcoming holiday.

"It'll be so much easier for you to build your Sukkah with this new type of Schach," I told my husband. "And it won't make such a mess in the house," I added. Every year my husband and sons dragged the old, wilted palm branches up from the bomb shelter where they were stored during the year. Somehow, as they maneuvered the schach and Sukkah boards down the hallway over the dining room table and across the living room, they would manage to bang into at least one piece of furniture (to make sure that we'd never forget the holiday), and leave a few wilted brown palm "droppings" on the floor.

This year, I had visions of a clean living room and a very calm and quiet erev Sukkot.

But my husband insisted on roofing our Sukkah with the old-fashioned palm branches. "We've always used them, and we'll continue to use them," he said.

I was frustrated. But it wasn't worth arguing about, and besides, he was the one who shlepped the palm branches up from the bomb shelter and positioned them on the Sukkah roof. I just had to clean the droppings.

We were the only family in our apartment building whose Sukkah was not roofed with a new easy-to-use super-light bamboo rug.

Two days before Yom Tov, I received a phone call from the Chabad Chernobyl program. They had airlifted children out of the area affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and brought them to Israel for medical treatment -- as well as their first taste of Yiddishkeit -- and wanted us to host two nine-year old girls for the entire week of the holiday. Of course we agreed. It would be a privilege to introduce these youngsters to their heritage.

Olya and Katya had never seen a Sukkah before; as a matter of fact, they had never even heard of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot before coming to Israel. Their eyes widened in amazement and delight when, through a combination of sign language and a few Hebrew words we explained that we actually eat and sleep in the Sukkah for an entire week!

At the meal that evening, the girls were delighted by the neighbors singing together in stereophonic harmony, and giggled over our vain attempts to speak a few words of Russian.

Half-way through the soup, the weather suddenly changed. It wasn't long before we could feel the first drops of rain penetrating the palm branches above our heads.  Then, without any warning, the weather became vicious. The storm wind howled on all sides of us. We raced to the window and stared outside in amazement. Just a few minutes before everything had been calm and serene. Now, the trees were bending and… yes, that's when we saw the first roof flying through the air, accompanied to a rousing rendition of "Harachaman hu yakim lanu Sukkot Dovid Hanofelet," "May the All-merciful One rebuild the fallen Sukkah of Dovid" from the neighbor's now roofless Sukkah.

Within less than an hour the street was full of soggy bamboo rugs and ruined decorations were bobbing in the river that had once been our street. Ours was one of the few Sukkahs to survive the storm – and I was very grateful to my husband for being so obstinate and old fashioned.

We tried to explain to our guests that this was not part of the usual Sukkot celebration, but they seemed to think that flying schach and roofless Sukkot were the norm, and they loved every moment of it!

When it was time for Olya and Katya to return to their dormitory at the end of the week, we felt as if they were part of our family, and I believe the feeling was mutual. With their limited vocabulary, they let us know that Sukkot with the Shapiros was an experience they would never forget, and thanked us profusely. I told them that if they really want to show their appreciation, they could do me one favor – one very important favor, that would mean a lot to me, and to the entire Jewish people.

Olya and Katya's interest was piqued. "What's that?" they asked.

"Promise me that when you grow up, you'll make sure to marry a Jewish boy," I answered.

They could not promise.

I can only pray that the All-Merciful One rebuilds His fallen Sukkah, quickly and in our days.

Somehow I Survived Binah may, 2011

Somehow, I Survived

Byline: As told to Debbie Shapiro

While the world was preparing for war, I was enjoying myself at the Bais Yaakov summer retreat in the Carpathian Mountains. We were a small, close-knit group; many of my schoolmates had come from afar to attend the only girls' seminary then in existence. Although Frau Schenirer's school was tiny, it was from this seed — this kernel of kedushah — that today's Bais Yaakov movement emerged.

We were oblivious to the thunderous black cloud threatening to engulf us, until, like a lightning bolt on a clear day, one of the girls received a letter from her parents with money and instructions to return home immediately — “before the war erupts.” The camp was immediately closed and we all returned to Cracow, where the seminary was located. I suddenly realized that there really was a possibility of war.

We arrived in Cracow on Monday. Everyone — the wealthy, the intellectuals, the simple people — were working together to dig bomb shelters. The government had already declared a blackout, which meant that at night all lights had to be covered to prevent enemy planes from identifying the city. Although there was an ominous feeling that something terrible was about to happen, we had no idea what, or just how terrible it would be. Even as the hanhalah frantically worked to return us to our families, they kept on reassuring us that there was absolutely nothing to worry about, and that before long everything would return to normal.

The following morning I received a letter from my parents with instructions to return home to Slonim immediately; I was one of the twenty girls who left Cracow before the air raids began. When I left that Wednesday night, I was positive that I'd soon be back and that life would return to normal. But of course, it never did.

The ten of us continuing east from Warsaw missed our connecting train and spent the day at the home of one of my classmates. We kept on phoning the train station to find out when there would be another train heading east, until finally we were informed that there was one at four o'clock that afternoon. Although we had no idea how far east the train was going, at least it would bring us closer to our destination, and we decided to try our luck. I left my heavy suitcase — the one that contained all my sefarim — in Warsaw with my friend, positive that I would soon be back to fetch it.

The train heading east was packed with Polish army recruits. We were petrified to board — ten girls alone with hundreds of Polish soldiers! As we were standing on the platform, wondering what to do, we noticed one empty train compartment and quietly slipped in through the open window. We remained silent the entire trip, praying that the soldiers would not notice us.

The train ground to a stop in Bialystok. Not long afterwards, a cattle train heading east pulled into the station. This train was also packed with drunk Polish Army recruits, but it was the middle of the night and the men were sleeping, so we slipped inside and quietly spread out, blending into the surrounding darkness. Although we were not noticed, one drunken soldier stepped on me. His boots were so sharp that they cut my navy blue (and very fashionable) shoe in half! I was just grateful that it was my shoe, not me!

I arrived at the Slonim train station at 4:55 in the morning and bid my friends goodbye. Of course I didn’t know it then, but of the ten girls who traveled with me from Warsaw, I was the only one who would survive the war.

I disembarked the train and started walking home. A few minutes’ walking distance from my house, I ran into my mother, who was shocked and overjoyed upon seeing me. She had heard that a train had arrived, and hoped that I would be on it. Years later, Reb Zelig Epstein, zt"l, who had spent the previous night at my parents' house, told me that my parents had assumed they'd never see me again.

The day I arrived home was September 3, 1939. Our neighbor's window was open, and we could hear her radio from our living room. At five o'clock, we heard the announcement that war was officially declared. Although it wasn't a surprise — fighting had erupted on September 1 with the German invasion of Poland — we were still shocked. The air raid sirens began wailing almost immediately.

Prior to the official declaration of war, the Germans had signed a treaty with the Russians, called the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, dividing Poland between the two allies. We were now part of the Soviet Union and positive that Germany would never attack us, so despite the shrill wailing of the air raid sirens, we felt relatively safe.

Upon hearing the declaration of war, an uncle of mine who lived on the German side of the border grabbed the two sifrei Torah and his set of Shas, and fled to the relative safety of Soviet-controlled Slonim. Hoping to escape notice, he traveled on the back roads and little-used dirt paths. Crossing what he assumed was a nothing more than a muddy patch of the road, his wagon sunk into the quicksand, and he barely escaped with his life. Although at the time the destruction of the two Torah scrolls and Gemara set seemed tragic, we later realized that it was a blessing in disguise, because in this way they escaped defilement in the Nazis' hands.

Although we were safe from the Nazis’ harassment of Jews (at least that's what we thought it was then — we had no idea that they were planning to kill us all), we were afraid of becoming Soviet citizens. The USSR was an anti-religious state, and we knew that it would be almost impossible to remain G-d fearing Jews under the Communists. So, when the Soviet Union announced that it would be granting independence to the tiny state of Lithuania, thousands of Jews, including many of the great Polish yeshivos that were now inside the USSR, raced to get there during the two weeks that Lithuania was still part of Russia, before the border would close. For many, including almost the entire Mirrer Yeshiva, this window of opportunity became their passport to life.

My mother was an extremely realistic and intelligent woman. Although she was not aware that many of the yeshivos were escaping to Vilna, she wanted my brother and me to flee the Soviet Union. My father, on the other hand, felt that we were much too young to undertake such a dangerous journey. Later on, when they learned that many of the yeshivos had taken that route, he changed his mind. But by then the borders were closed. So we made preparations to flee illegally.

I had just turned seventeen when I fled from Soviet-controlled Poland to Lithuania together with another five young people: my younger brother and his two friends, and another two girls. We took the train to the Lithuanian border, where we were immediately arrested and thrown into prison; but when the guards left their posts for a few minutes, we slipped out the back door into the surrounding forest. After several hours of crawling in the snow, we saw a small, decrepit old hut and knocked at the door to beg for help. An old Jewish woman let us in. She pointed to her one piece of furniture — a shaky, old bed — and told us to hide underneath it. That night, she found a professional smuggler to guide us across the border.

On the Lithuanian side of the border, we were also caught and thrown into prison. This time, we bribed our way out. On our way to Aishishok, we met a Jew who told us that the city was now a closed military zone, and he kindly hid us in the back room of his home. Meanwhile, we asked him to deliver a note to an acquaintance of mine who lived in Aishishok.

It was Wednesday. We had been walking and crawling in waist-high snow since Sunday, and were so exhausted from the ordeal that we fell into a deep sleep. A few hours later, three Russian army officers burst into our hiding place. Seeing our shocked expressions, they said, “Yidden, don't be afraid. Your friend sent us to you. We'll be back tomorrow.”

The following afternoon, the soldiers arrived at our hiding place to take us three girls out for a stroll. We looked like three couples out on a date. They brought us to a Lithuanian hotel, gave us some Lithuanian currency, and instructed the hotel owner to put us on the train that left to Vilna at five o'clock the following morning.

We arrived in Vilna at seven o'clock Friday morning. My brother and his friends arrived shortly afterwards. Rav Aharon Kotler's daughter learned with me in Cracow, so we went straight to her house, where we were warmly welcomed. The Kotlers told us about a dormitory there in Vilna that had opened up for Bais Yaakov girls, and warned us that it was dangerous to walk on the street before becoming legal residents. So, after putting our bags in the dormitory, my friends and I went straight to the government office to apply for our official papers. On our way there, I ran into a neighbor of ours from Slonim, who helped us get our papers and then insisted that we spend Shabbos with her family.

My father's cousin, who had come to Vilna with the Mirrer yeshiva, visited that family over Shabbos while I was there. After Shabbos, he suggested that instead of returning to the dormitory, I rent a room in the home of one of the Mirrer rabbonim. I stayed there for an entire year, and as a result I became an integral part of the Mirrer community, which meant that when an opportunity to escape arose, I knew about it. So many times in our lives we never fathom events' true ramifications. I “happened” to meet a friend from Slonim and accept her invitation for Shabbos, and as a result, my life was spared.

I knew Russian and some English, and became the unofficial yeshiva secretary — the one who composed the telegrams to the Mirrer talmidim in the States, and took care of all the official government business. Since I was so involved in helping the community, I knew everything that was going on. This knowledge was crucial to my ultimate survival. In the summer of 1941, the Japanese consul began handing out temporary visas to Japan. At first, we were skeptical. We thought it was a ruse to send us to Siberia. But when we heard that some bachurim had succeeded in getting there safely, we started investigating the possibility.

In order to attain a Japanese visa, I needed a Polish passport. But although I had a birth certificate stating that I was born in Poland (Slonim belonged to Poland before being transferred to the Soviet Union at the start of WWII), I’d never had a Polish passport, and was planning to travel to Kovno to apply for one. But the evening before I was supposed to go, I received a telegram from my father instructing me not to go. He wrote that all Jews residing in Slonim who had made official arrangements to flee the country had been exiled to Siberia. Although this later proved to be their salvation, at the time we viewed it as tragic.

With no other choice, I ended up leaving Lithuania on a forged passport. I flew (yes, flew!) to Moscow, as I had received papers from America entitling me to get an American visa. When that didn't work out, I boarded a train heading to the Japanese border. But my visas were not in order, and I was caught in Wladivostok, the last stop before Japan. I was interrogated for close to five hours. When they asked me to sign my name, I purposefully wrote a Polish “r” instead of a Russian “p.” When they saw me sign my name like a Pole, they laughed and told me that I could continue on, even though my passport was obviously forged. I still don't know how I managed to keep my cool!

Although the Soviets accepted my Polish passport, I remained in Wladivostok for seven weeks waiting for a Japanese visa. All the Jewish refugees stayed in one hotel. I was friendly with a group of six other young people, so for Pesach, we joined together to make a Seder. Even those Jews who were very far from religious observance refrained from eating chametz on Pesach. One of the Mirrer bachurim gave us one of his two matzos when he left for Japan. Another bachur found a potato somewhere, which we cooked in an electric kettle. For the arba kosos, we boiled dried fruit and used the water for wine. Although the refugees conducted several Sedarim at the hotel, it was all done very quietly, as no one wanted to draw the attention of the authorities.

I'll never forget how hungry I was that Pesach. Every day we went out searching for food, but mainly, we survived on air. One girl's feet became so swollen from malnutrition that she was unable to walk. It was a very difficult time for all of us.

Finally, after seven weeks, we received our visas. Years later, when a contingent of Japanese historians came to Israel to learn about Japan's role in saving the refugees, they examined my visa and told me, much to my shock, that the consul had stamped it with the wrong date, to make it appear as if it had been issued earlier, as by then it was illegal for him to issue visas!

Visa in hand, I traveled to Kobe, Japan, where I remained for the next five and a half months. Now that I was relatively safe, I decided to get a legitimate Polish passport, and went to the Polish consulate together with the required two witnesses. It turned out that the Polish Consul was also from Slonim, and knew me and my family well. After spending over half an hour talking about life back in our home town, he issued a passport on the spot. Now that I had an "in" with the consul, I often turned to him for help with other Jewish refugees.

Kobe was crowded with Jews in transit. Most people were permitted to remain for just ten days before continuing on to Shanghai, but for some unexplainable reason, I was given a six-month visa. Still, I didn't want to be in Kobe for Yom Kippur; due to its close proximity to the international dateline there was a question as to which day Yom Kippur was — and I certainly didn't want to fast for both days! I made arrangements to travel to Shanghai, but since the rickety old boat that had transported most of the refugees to Shanghai was no longer in service, I traveled on a fancy cruise ship via Korea! The Jewish refugees on board, along with the other passengers, were served gorgeous five-course meals, which of course we couldn't eat.

Shanghai was a different world, totally unlike anything I had ever experienced. It rained constantly throughout the summer, and with each rain the heat became more intense. Sometimes the rain was so heavy that it was impossible to leave the house. Winters were dry, without snow, and freezing cold. It was a city of stark contrasts. The rich were extremely affluent, whereas the poor starved. The established Jewish community consisted of Russian Jews who had immigrated to Shanghai prior to the First World War. They were well off and lived in large, spacious homes with numerous servants. They had magnificent shuls and an independent educational system. They were also big baalei chessed who helped us in many different ways, such as assisting newlyweds in setting up their households. Although we refugees did not have much money, we were able to reciprocate in our own way. For example, I made two aufrufs for one of the families that had been influenced by the yeshiva to become more observant. I even prepared cakes and baked them in the bakery's oven.

In addition to the established Russian Jewish community, some 15-20,000 German Jews had fled to Shanghai after Hitler rose to power. The majority were able to take along at least part of their wealth, which they used to establish businesses and become financially independent. Only a small percentage of the German Jews, however, were religious, and with our arrival in 1940, the few religious German refugees joined our kehillah.

I arrived in Shanghai the day before Yom Kippur. Two weeks later, my friends and I opened a Bais Yaakov. I taught my first graders in the little one room apartment that I shared with three other girls. Until December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America and Japan went to war, we received a regular stipend from the United States, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (commonly known as the Joint) paid our rent each month. After that, it was all nissim!

I was the “baby” of the community, the youngest girl living in Shanghai without her family. After my roommates married, I was the only single girl in the yeshiva community. But I didn't stay that way for long. My husband and I were married in 1941, just eleven months after I arrived in Shanghai.

During all this time, I had no contact whatsoever with my family. I constantly hoped for the best and prayed for their safety. It was only after the war that I discovered they had all been killed, Hy”d, including my brother.

Running a household in Shanghai was a full time job, even with a servant to help me. Our one tiny room served as a living room, bedroom and kitchen. Each morning I went to the marketplace to shop for fresh food, as in the dense heat and without any refrigeration, food spoiled quickly. If I wanted chicken for supper, I would purchase a live chicken and take it to the shochet. Afterwards, I'd bring it back home, where I'd pluck it and clean it, and, more often than not, I'd have to bring it to the rav to ask a shailah. (One erev Yom Tov, three of my four chickens were treif!) If the rav paskened that the chicken was kosher, I'd return home to kasher it and only then could I start preparing the meal!

Disease was rampant, and everything, including the water, had to be boiled; even the fruits and vegetables that we peeled had to be sanitized with boiling water before they could be eaten. Although many of the people in the yeshiva community came down with dysentery and typhoid, none of them succumbed to the disease. It was absolutely amazing; all those who joined our community survived!

I was constantly battling the dirt and trying to stay on top of the laundry, which we washed by hand. Despite the tedious, almost non-stop work, my house was always immaculate, and my two children clean and well-dressed. They never looked like poor, neglected refugee children.

After Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese and the Germans became allies, the Jewish refugees were confined to a ghetto, whereas Jews who had lived in Shanghai prior to the war were allowed to continue living outside of the ghetto. That was the beginning of the anti-Jewish edicts, when the Germans pressured the Japanese to kill their Jewish population. Any Jews caught outside the ghetto without a proper pass were immediately thrown into jail, where they usually died of disease. (Although, as mentioned, no one from the yeshiva community ever succumbed to disease, baruch Hashem.) Since the yeshiva was located outside the ghetto, the yeshivaleit received special passes allowing them to be outside the ghetto from six in the morning until eleven o'clock at night.

For us, trouble came when my husband's coat was stolen. We were, of course, upset at losing such a warm, expensive coat, which we could not possibly replace. But even more worrisome was the fact that he kept his identity badge in his coat, so although he was issued a new identity badge, the new number did not match the number on his pass. When the Japanese restricted us further and stopped allowing us to leave the ghetto at all, they collected all the passes and saw that my husband's numbers did not match. They threw him into jail.

Thanks to the askanim's tireless efforts on my husband's behalf, he was only imprisoned for a very short time — but it was still long enough for him to contract typhus. Everyone tried to convince me to send him to the hospital, but I was afraid. Many people never left the hospital alive. Eventually I found a doctor willing to come to our one-room apartment to examine my husband. When he saw how spotless everything was, he told me, “If you want your husband to survive, keep him at home.” Meanwhile, the bachurim in the adjacent apartment vacated their home, and I moved in there with my ten-month-old baby so we wouldn’t be living in close proximity to my sick husband. For the next few weeks, although my baby remained in the other room and I took care of all of our needs there, I devoted every minute of the day to taking care of my husband. Every morning, a friend would come to my window and I'd give her money to purchase food and other necessities. Although bachurim came to help feed my husband and tend to his needs, miraculously, none of them caught the disease.

The heavy bombings began in 1945, when American forces started shelling the city. We lived in rickety shacks, with no place to run. In one air raid, a glass picture fell off the wall, and my knee was so badly cut that I needed stitches and couldn't walk properly for three months. We saw many nissim, too. In a neighboring house, the ceiling collapsed onto two just-vacated beds, forming a canopy over the third bed, where a yeshiva bachur was trying, unsuccessfully, to get some sleep! In another house, a bachur was learning when a piece of shrapnel went through the roof of the building and got stuck in the ceiling over his head. He was very frightened, but l'maaseh, nothing happened.

The last air raid took place on the seventh of Av, 1945. We stood near the glass doors and watched the bombs falling one after the other. The air was grey with dust. The following day, erev Tisha b'Av, there were many, many funerals among the refugees, but everyone in the yeshiva community survived.

The war ended on a Friday night. Instead of air raids, we heard yelling and screaming. Although we realized that something unusual was going on, we were afraid to leave our homes to investigate. In the morning, when the men went to shul, they discovered that the doors to the ghetto were open and that we were free to leave. The war was finally over!

Looking back, I'm amazed how, during these difficult times, when we were living in the ghetto, completely cut off from our families and without enough food to eat, we were able to lead normal lives. We married, we raised families, we invited guests for Shabbos meals; somehow we succeeded in living a rich, full Jewish life. I remember one Purim when a group of bachurim came to visit. We were sitting around our table, eating a desert that I had prepared from dried figs and dates. Since no one had money to prepare proper shalach manos, each bachur passed his plate to the boy sitting next to him, and we all rejoiced in what we had. It was beautiful.

We were really one huge family. We didn't have much, but whatever we had, we shared. And even today, some sixty-five years after liberation, those of us who were part of that yeshiva community of refugees feel like one, enormous family. The connection is very, very deep. When alter Mirrers get together, the years melt away as we share each other's joy and pain.

Debbie Shapiro is a wife, mother, grandmother and longtime Jerusalem resident.. Her latest book, Women Talk  is a compilation of interviews with great Jewish women. If you'd like tocontact Debbie, please write to her at  debbieshapiro@binahmagazine.com .