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Friday, September 15, 1944

DETROIT JEWISH CHRONICLE and The Legal Chronicle

A REFUGEE'S YOM KIPPUR .

By ALFRED WERNER

"A Work is done in your days which ye will not believe
though it be told."—Habakkuk 1:5.

I shall never forget the month
of Tishri, 5700, even if I should
become as old as Methuselan.
Verily, I have been in the beau-
tiful modern Munich synagogue,
built like a Romanesque church.
I have felt a deep sense of re-
ligious reverence upon entering
the Altenuschul of Prague, that
medieval house of God which had
defied eight centuries of Israel's
trials and tribulations. And I
have wondered at the Asiatic
splendor of the so-called Turkish
synagogue in my native Vienna.
But never have I been so deeply
moved by a service, never have
I experienced the power of pray-
er so deeply as in a small primi-
tive but in the refugee camp of
Richborough, England.
"Hell's Corner" is the name
given that heavily-shelled area
on the southeast coast of Eng-
land, first devastated by Heinkel
bombers, and last summer again
by the ghastly "robot" planes.
Our camp must now be a heap
of ruins. But it can hardly look
worse now than it did when we
took it over in February, 1939.
It had been battered by the ele-
ments, weeds were growing up
through the floors and down
through the roofs—a chaos of
bricks and mud. But to us it
seemed a paradise. We had come
from the concentration camps of
Dachau and Buchenwalde, from
the slaughter houses of Fascism
to a free country!
When the high holidays drew
near, England had been at war
with Germany for a few weeks.
The Battle of Poland had been
lost for the Allies, after the Pol-
ish Government had fled to Ro-
mania and hapless Warsaw fin-
ished its hopeless resistance to
the Germans. Ceaselessly Nazi
planes were making reconnais-
sance flights over darkened Eng-
land. In order to avoid crowd-
ing in the dark camp streets and
to prevent any violation of the
severe blackout regulations by
the use of flashlights, we were
requested by the camp authori-
ties to hold the holiday services
not in the general synagogue but

in each of the 40 huts, sheltering
a total of about 3,600 Jewish
refugees.
The iron beds were pushed in-
to the corners and two long
tables, covered with white linen,
were placed in the center of the
hut. Candles gave the "syna-
gogue" a dim but solemn illumin-
ation. All of us were painstak-
ingly shaved and neatly dressed,
though few of us had more than
one suit in addition to his every-
day working clothes. This was
our only outward tribute to the
Day of Atonement. Gone were
the times, now grown almost un-
real to us, when the synagogues
in Berlin and Vienna and
Prague glittered with jewels and
gold watches and handsome new
clothes.
I glanced down the rows of
faces; there were 80, known to
me now from six and more
months of refugee life. They
looked ghostly, picked out by
the candle light against the
background of pitch darkness.
There was Hans Muehlstein who
had been a radical, opposed to
Judaism, though he was the son
of a noted preacher. Six months
at Dachau had changed him, and,
no longer pretending that he
knew nothing about the ritual,
he was now explaining the mean-
ing of the prayers to Paul War-
tenberg. Paul was a half-Jew
who could have remained in Ger-
many had he followed the fright-
ful practice that became wide-
spread after the promulgation of
the Nuremberg laws and dis-
owned his Jewish father, a uni-
versity teacher.
Jacob Teitel looked up to
Muehlstein and Wartenberg, for
they were intellectuals who
spoke English, and he was any-
thing but a linguist. A refugee
from Galicia, forced by the Rus-
sian steamroller to flee to Vien-
na, he still could not talk Ger-
man correctly after 20 years in
the capital, and as for his Eng-
lish, even our sweet, patient Ken-
tish lady teachers gave him up.
But he was a good tailor and,
what counted for more on this

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particular occasion, he could hur-
ry through the pages of his "si-
derl" like a squirrel, always
ahead of the chazan. Once, fat
Mayer had teased him, asking
him whether he knew the mean-
ing of what he was babbling over
his book—and the mocker had
come out second best. "God un-
derstands it!" Teitel had replied,
confident as never before. To-
night Mayer was not looking for
trouble. Tears poured down his
cheeks, he sobbed and seemed
to have lost all his pugnacity.
He was not the only one who
wept when Berliner, in his dark,
beautiful voice, started the Kol
Nidre. Berliner, who had been a
chazan in Halberstadt, would
have been a cerdit to any opera
house. But it was not the beauty
of his singing that made us weep.
It was Berliner's story that we
heard along with the sacred
words of our prayerbook, a pri-
vate story and yet known to
each of us: "I have a wife and
a daughter in Germany. Shall I
ever see them again? What if
God forbid, they suffer hunger or

TSHUVAH

Continued from Page 11)

tribute to a great Jewish soul—
to an American, who though he
had not yet mastered the unac-
cented language of America, had
still caught a true glimpse of its
spirit. I stood at his grave a
few days ago, and repeated the
El Moleh as I faced the Mogen
David, which was bedecked with
an American flag on Memorial
Day.
A chaplain's heart is often
heavy, especially when tragedy
hurtles itself close to home. On
three occasions, the Graves Reg-
istration Officer informed me of
men who were found with Bibles
in their hands, in which I had
inscribed "L'chayim v'livrochoh
. . ." The life which God in
His inscrutable wisdom has seen
fit to grant them is that of Olam
Haboh: They will surely live on
in the hearts and lives of us
whom the Almighty has spared.
Their's is a true immortality.
That's all for now, except this.
When you folks at home repeat
the Yizkor on Yom Kippur,
please add a litle prayer for
Benny, for Meyer, for Hymie-
yes—and for Gus too.

SINCERE

GREETINGS

Best Wishes
For A Happy
New Year

with a sentence from the prophet
Zechariah which well fitted our
situation: "A . nd there shall be
one day which shall be known
as the
Lords . Lord'
. . and it shall I
come to pass that at evening
time s t h here
al
esvhearl o breg
forget
el light."
t h
I shall n
night
of Yom Kippur, 5700. It was
wthhernthecoAx
un ts_A
isri( \,'as_Wiunsntirniga:
when three
lovakia and Poland—hail
yielded to the Fascist arms, and
more nations were expected to
fall. At that time Hitler dreamt
of out-smarting and subsequently
smashing the Western Powers,
while Mussolini, though still a
neutral, prepared his armies for
the invasion of France and
Greece. Now Mussolini is out,
for all practical reasons, and the
hard-pressed Hitler regime is
tottering, with the "invincible"
Nazi armies cracking on all
fronts. The end of the tyrants
is in sight, but we had had to
pay dearly for that achieve.
ment; since that memorable Tis-
hri of 5700 more than four mil-
lion Jews, and millions of inno-
cent Christian civilians have
been butchered or starved to
death by the Fascist monsters,
large regions of Europe, Africa
and Asia have been devastated,
and countless young people in
this country have given their
blood for the preservation of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of hap-
piness!

ROSH HASHONAH

GREETINGS

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have no roof over their heads?"
We were not weaklings, no
sentimental as a rule. There
were even a few "hard-boiled"
fellows among us, men who had
seen war in Flanders and in It-
aly. Karl Tischler, who had spent
a year in the hell of Buchen-
walde and who never smiled,
rarely addressed any of us and
seemed interested only in his
work on the road. Tischler even
hated to attend a service. But
he was moved on this Yom Kip-
pur night.
After the service we started
getting ready for bed. But Katz,
the hutleader, motioned to us.
He had a message for us which
would take only a few minutes.
He was a quiet, friendly man
nearing 50—a former business-
man from Frankfort-on-Main. He
preferred work to talk, and he
had addressed us only once be-
fore. That had been on one
dreadful day in September after
our first air-raid alarm. when
Hans Feuer, the second young-
est of our group, had almost gone
crazy—the siren from the nearby
city of Sandwich had suddenly
shrieked, reminding him of the
Dachau siren that announced evil
things to come for the prisoners.
Good phychologist that he
was, Katz knew that unless the
tension were relieved by a few
words of comfort we would not
be able to sleep a wink after
the emotions that Yom Kippur
evening had arounsed. An eager
student of the Bible, he started

•

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A JOYOUS NEW YEAR TO ALL

IN THE SPIRIT OF THE SEASON, WE EXTEND SINCERE

WISHES TO ALL THE JEWISH PEOPLE FOR A

JOYOUS NEW YEAR OF HAPPINESS,

PEACE AND GOOD WILL

—HAROLD C. ROBINSON

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