RECOGNIZING THE EDGE OF THE HOLOCAUST, BELATEDLY

On Abraham J. Klausner’s A Letter to My Children from the Edge of the Holocaust (2002)

I really didn’t know.

Like many others (I suppose), I bought the familiar narrative that when the Allied Powers “liberated” the prisoners in the concentration camps and death camps of Nazi Germany, those erstwhile prisoners were liberated and resocialized. Their human dignity and their rights were restored, the long process of healing had begun.

That was a lie – a shameless one. In point of fact, for several years after the camps passed into Allied hands the situation of the Jews and other “displaced persons” (the official term) in the camps changed little. True, the ovens and gas chambers were out of operation, but most of the Displaced Persons still lived in subhuman conditions, were near starvation, and were still held in barbed-wire camps under military guard. When the U.S. and other Allied forces did allow them to live beyond the fences, where were they to put them? The former homes of the liberated had been taken by Germans and other citizens of the Reich during the Shoah. At any rate, asking tormented Jews to live peaceably among their tormentors was futile – not so much because of animosity on the part of the camps’ survivors (though this would have been more than understandable), but because the vanquished citizens of the Reich still harbored the same hatred and now additionally took out their rage at their humiliation on the Displaced Persons (with little or no protective intervention from the “liberators”).

It was a twentieth-century echo of the situation of formerly enslaved Black folk in the U.S. as the Union Army took over the secessionist South: the liberators, who were themselves racists, neither knew nor generally cared what to do with the formerly enslaved; and they created a myth of liberation that granted them savior status while also excusing them from the ethical responsibilities of a truly free society. Absence of enslavement is a far cry from freedom.  

So yeah, the familiar narrative of the Allies’ liberation of the Nazi camps is a self-serving lie. It was a fiction created by the parties who persisted in dehumanizing the victims of Nazi culture because that was easier than admitting their own anti-Semitism. And it's been perpetuated by a naïve and trusting America that is always eager to blame enemies real and imaginary but even more reluctant to admit its own complicity and guilt.

That’s why I’m deeply grateful for Rabbi Abraham Klausner’s A Letter to My Children, from the Edge of the Holocaust (Berkeley: Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2002). Klausner (1915-2007) was an extraordinary person, and in many ways an unsung hero of the recovery of Holocaust survivors’ humanity, identity, and faith. He was just thirty when he first set foot in the Dachau concentration camp just weeks after its liberation. He found an unbearable stench, found himself surrounded by swirling stick-figures desperate to reconnect somehow with their humanity – with the loved ones and friends who had been taken from them. He felt helpless, but he decided that he had to aid them in that most fundamental of human quests, the quest to share humanity and recover shared humanity stolen. He soon began work compiling lists of Shoah survivors, having these printed in Landsberg (the same city where Hitler’s Mein Kampf had been printed) and ultimately publishing six volumes of them (the Sharit Ha-Platah, or “saving remnant”). Here are a few images from the first of the six volumes that Klausner ultimately published (courtesy of Abe Books):

To cite one of many powerful moments in Klausner's work on behalf of liberated Jews: on 15 and 16 April 1946 he led the first two Passover Seders in liberated Bavaria, using an extraordinary Haggadah that had been written in Hebrew and Yiddish by Yosef Sheinson (himself a survivor of the Jewish ghetto in Kovno, Lithuania) – a Haggadah that rewrote the beautiful traditional words “we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt” as “We were slaves to Hitler in Germany.” The service thus offered an utterly unique experience to those present for the great feast, persons who had lost home and family and friends, had narrowly escaped death, to celebrate their ancient inheritance while also acknowledging the great tragedy that had befallen themselves and Jews everywhere in modern times.

Some images from the Survivors' Haggadah of Yosef Sheinson, which Klausner used at the Passover Seder in Munich in 1946. Images are from Chen Malul, "The Haggadah that Brought the Nazis to the Seder: A Glimse into a Haggadah Written for the Residents of the Displaced Persons Camp in Munich, Illustrated by a Holocaust Survivor" (here)

Klausner saw much. He saw an American GI flick a cigarette butt at an emaciated survivor; he fought the apathy and red tape of U.S. and British military bureaucracy and of various ineffectual Jewish relief organizations; and he worked against the anti-Semitism of powerful military figures such as General Patton, who wrote that the Jewish Displaced Persons would “spread over the country like a herd of locusts” if they were not kept in camps and described them as “lower than animals.”[1] He recognized the cruelty and incomprehension of the U.S. military’s insistence on identifying the Holocaust survivors not as Jews, but as Germans or Poles or Lithuanians (etc.), and he fought fiercely to help them preserve their Jewish identity and protect them from being lumped together with those who despised them for it. For his work he faced court-martial more than once and earned much enmity – but he continued with extraordinary resourcefulness, ultimately becoming a life-saving figure and inspiration to more than 30,000 Bavarian Jews (plus many others beyond).

Rabbi Klausner ca. 2002

There’s much written about Rabbi Klausner. Here is his New York Times obituary; here is an article about his work from The Jewish Chronicle; and here is a biographical sketch in The Accidental Talmudist. You can also find most of a 1946 documentary that he co-produced titled These Are the People in The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive on YouTube, as well as numerous interviews with him (here are two interview excerpts in The Holocaust Encyclopedia). In own opinion, though, neither those secondary works nor his own interviews are as compelling as his own words in A Letter to My Children from the Edge of the Holocaust.

I picked up this book – part memoir, part social history, part cautionary tale – because Margaret Bonds wrote two still-unpublished choral works in 1965 for a weeklong “Songs of Freedom” arts festival that Klausner organized through the Temple Emanu-El in Yonkers, where he was rabbi from 1954 until his retirement in 1989. It was a difficult read for emotional reasons, but a compelling one, a necessary one. I am not much closer (yet) to teasing out the specifics of the relationship between Klauser, his festival, and Bonds’s music, but there's time for that. No matter: this book and its lessons will be with me always, and I’m better off for having learned what has heretofore been kept from my sight.  

It's a powerful, unforgettable book. I recommend it highly.

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To close, a disclaimer: I am not Jewish and have no formal training in Judaism. What I know comes from reading books by Jewish authors and listening to my Jewish friends; but is certainly is no more error-free than anything haphazardly pieced together amidst a sea of ignorance and misinformation can ever be. If anything in the above remarks generates offense, I beg your forgiveness and ask that you privately message me to set me straight.

[1] Abraham J. Klausner, A Letter to My Children from the Edge of the Holocaust (Berkeley: Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2002), 23-24.