22 Friday, April 11, 1986

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

PURELY COMMENTARY

Pope's Synagogue Visit

Continued from Page 2

Emanuel Ringelblum

he could not move quickly
enough out of the ghetto, and
was shot in the back by a Lat-
vian guard. According to this ac-
count, Dubnow's last words, as
he fell, were Schreibt un
farschreibt!, "Write and record!"
This exhortation in Yiddish was
typical of Dubnow, the lover of
historical record, and the firm
believer in the Yiddish culture of
Eastern European Jewry, a cul-
ture which was being swept
away.
There is a deeply moving element in
Gilbert's accounting of the moral duty to
record, to write down, to keep the mem-
ory intact with drawings.
They all relate to the legacy from
Simon Dubnow and the victims of the
German horrors who understood the
need to never forget. Gilbert provides the
account, with a retention of the Dubnow
appeal:
In the concentration camps,
Jews were not people, but fig-
uren, "numbers" or "figures." But
these "figures," these "men who
had become "dogs," did not in-
tend to die without there being a
record of what had been done to
them. The Jewish desire that the
evidence of mass murder and in-
human torture should survive
was an overwhelming one. Dr.
Aharon Beilin has recorded how,
at Birkenau, he once saw a boy
working, who told him that he
had been castrated in. a medical
experiment in the camp. This boy
asked Dr. Beilin to examine him.
"I said I could not help him, but
the boy said, 'No, I want you to
see what they are doing to us."
As soon after liberation as
Yehuda Bakon was strong
enough to "hold a pencil in my
hand," he made a series of draw-
ings of everything he could re-
member of the gas-chambers, the
undressing rooms and the 'cre-
matoria at Birkenau: the things
he had seen, and the things he
had asked the Jews of the Son-
derkommando to describe to him,
so that if he survived, he could
record it. "I asked the Sonder-
kommando men to tell me," he
later explained, "so that if one
day I will come out, I will tell the
world."

Simon Dubnow

To see, and to record: this
had been the self-imposed task of
Emanuel Ringelbaum and his
"Joy of Sabbath" circle in the
Warsaw ghetto, from the ghetto's
first days. It had been Simon
Dubnow's last instruction as he
was shot down in Riga in De-
cember 1941. In the concentra-
tion camps there had been a slo-
gan, "I am the victim! I am the
witness!" Vitka Kempner, in hid-
ing in the Vilna ghetto, and later
in action with a group of parti-
sans in the forests outside Vilna,
later recalled how "everyone in
the ghetto thought that he was
the last Jew in the world. People
wanted us to leave one person
outside the ghetto so that they
can tell the world the story. We
thought no one else was left in
any other ghetto."
To survive was to give wit-
ness: a historic imperative. The
Warsaw poet, Yitzhak Katznel-
son, in his last days at Vittel, be-
fore being deported to Auschwitz
and his death, had also stressed
the need to recall the acts of re-
sistance: "Sing a hymn to the
hero of the remote hamlet! Sing
loud his praise, see his radiant
figure!"
There was also a moral im-
perative: Zdenek Lederer, a sur-
vivor of the Thereisienstadt
ghetto and of Auschwitz, later re-
flected that, throughout the ages,
"it has been the lot of the Je*s to
deliver to men a warning." This
warning, seen so starkly in the
years of the Holocaust, was a
clear one: "that violence is in the
end self-destructive, power futile,
and the human spirit unconquer-
able."

rifying. Therefore, the Ukrainian guilt
in the Babi Yar mass murders at Kiev in
1941 are so shocking in their revela-
tions.
Every important account of the
Holocaust experiences must recall the
records that were . accumulated by the
great Polish Jewish historian Emanuel
Ringelblum; how they were hidden and
recovered after the war.
The Ringelblum tragedy is among
the most heartrending. He was offered a
way of becoming one of the German
slave laborers, as a tailor or shoemaker.
But he would not abandon his 13-year-
old son Uri and' his wife Yehudith. They
were all murdered: "Thus perished the
historian of the Warsaw Ghetto; the
humane chronicler of events too terrible
to chronicle; the eye-witness, in words
and documents, of the destruction of
Polish Jewry."
The Ringelblum records, the final
two books he wrote while in hiding be-
fore his death, do make a record of "the
idealists from among both the educated
and the working classes who saved Jews
at the risk of their lives and with bound-
less self-sacrifice — there are thousands •
such in Warsaw and the whole country."
This is being recorded to give credit to
those who were among the defiers of the
dominating criminals. There is enough of
guilt and the saintly are not forgotten!
Emanuel Ringelblum is the name
that will remain indelible in Jewish his-
tory in the recovery of the most valuable
data recorded by him before he was
murdered. Gilbert gives an account of
the recovery of the valuable documents:
"On Sept. 18, 1946, the first of the
tin boxes and the milk cans hidden by
Emanuel Ringelblum's 'Joy of Sabbath
'Circle,' was dug up in the ruins of the

Therefore, when these recollections
and admonitions are taken into account,
the reader will understand Gilbert's fac-
tual approach. He pulls no punches. He
calls a spade a spade and the document-
ing gives power to every detail in the ac-
cumulated history of a crime. He does
not whitewash, as some are attempting,
the Polish collaborations with the Nazis,
nor those of the Ukrainians and Lat-
vians.
Therefore, the record of the crimes
in Kielce, by the Poles, immediately
after the war are among the most hor-

Simon Dubnow's last
words were, as he was
shot in the back: "Write
and record!"

Warsaw Ghetto. The second was found
four years later, in 1950."
Important related reactions and ex-
periences, the horrors of so many of the
areas where the mass murders were
committed, have recordings, like the fol-
lowing, in the Gilbert anthology of ter-
rors:
Among the Jews who re-
mained in Poland were some who
saw their task as recording the
history of the war years. On 24
March 1947 the organization of
Jewish writers and journalists in
Poland wrote, from Lodz, to the
Amercian Jewish Joint Distribu-
tion•Committee, in search of fi-
nancial help for the forty Jewish
writers in their organization:
"They are living under very
difficult circumstances but are
loath to forsake the ruined land
that they might better absorb the
atmosphere of the dreadful
Jewish catastrophe and render it
into literary and scientific work.
We consider it a mission of par-
ticular importance that these
Jewish writers proVide, for the
future generations, prose and
poetry which will portray and
document the recent experiences.
Would that we now had such
literary records from our
forefathers of•the Spanish era."

Five manuscripts of the Son-
derkommando at Birkenau,
which are among the most vivid
contemporary documents of the
war, were discovered at different
times between 1945 and 1962: that
of Salmen Lewental on 17 Oc-
tober 1962. The notes of the
Greek Jew were only found in
the earth around one of the cre-
matoria, in the late autumn of
1980, buried in a thermos flask. It
was discovered there only by
chance, by Polish schoolchildren
planting a tree.
As the decades passed, many
survivors, and the relatives of
survivors, sought to return to the
scenes of their youth, to the
scenes of their family's suffering,
even to the scenes of their own
torment. The sites of the mass
murder of Jews became places of
solemn pilgrimage. For Jew's in
the Soviet Union, visiting these
sites, such as Babi Yar in Kiev,
and Rumbuli near Riga, Ponar
outside Vilna or the Ratomskaya
street pit in Minsk, became a
means of renewing and asserting
their sense of Jewish identity.
In the twenty years following
the war, Babi Yar filled up with
rubbish, mud and water, forming
a deep lake. "It was motionless,"
Sara Kyron later recalled, "and
mixed up with silt, and it seemed
from afar to be greenish, as if the
tears of the people who had been
killed there had come out of the
soil."
Above the Yar, a wail had
been built to mark it off from an
adjoining brickyard. One evening
in 1961, the wall collapsed.
Streams of clay and mud, mixed
up with the remains of human
bones, gushed out into the streets
of Kiev below. In the wake of the
rushing waters, a garage was
completely destroyed, fires broke
out, and the stream of liquid clay,
reaching the nearby tram depot,
overturned tram cars and buried
alive in its onward rush both
passengers and tramway work-
ers.
That night, as soldiers were
busy digging out the dead, and
searching for survivors in the
mud, a second wave of liquid
clay burst out from the Yar,
wreaking further havoc, and
death. In the two disasters,
twenty-four citizens of Kiev wree
killed. A few days later as a tram
passed the site of the disaster, an
old woman suddenly began to
shout: "It is the Jews who have
done this. They are taking ven-
geance on us. They always will."
Sara Tartakovskaya, going
by taxi to work on the morning
after the disaster, was told by the
taxi driver: "One could not fill up
Babi Yar. Jewish blood is taking
revenge."
A reviewer will be tempted long
after perusing Gilbert's achieving collec-
tion of data to keep referring to his great
book. Babi Yar itself calls for, so many
indictments that it becomes hair-raising.
Gilbert is chronologically superb,
factually impressing, a collection of data
unmatched in the massive . Holocaust
publishing process. The Holocaust: A
History of the Jews of Europe During the
Second World War by Martin Gilbert
gains a place among the most valuable
documentaries ever compiled.

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