Community Views
Opinion
To Understand Rescue
Learn Of Rescuers
Staring Down Failure
Through Faith
SID BOLKOSKY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
Several weeks
ago, as I visited
the photographic
exhibition "The
Rescuers" at the
Janice Charach
Epstein Gallery
in the Jewish
Center, I was re-
minded of the
woman who asked me to speak
about some aspect of the
Holocaust to her study
group. She pleaded,
"Could you make it not
depressing?"
Alas, I could not.
Even an exhibition
dedicated to the res-
cuers cannot do that.
But the exhibit
prompted some surpris-
ing reflections. Exam-
ining the Holocaust,
including survivor testi-
monies, from a perspective of
commenting on the rescuers
offered more difficult and
more complex aspects of that
history.
In some ways, almost mys-
teriously, discussing the res-
cuers carries as much pain as
discussing the victims. Per-
haps at the heart of this am-
bivalence regarding these
individuals even lies a re-
luctance to acknowledge
them. Some chroniclers
of the Holocaust de-
mand in outrage to
know why so few
"Righteous Among Na-
tions" emerged. Too lit-
tle, too late; pitifully
few; not enough to talk
about.
Far more were by-
standers, and were they
much better than the perpe-
trators? Were the allied gov-
ernments any better than the
bystanders? Questions only
half rhetorical which, like every
single aspect of the Holocaust,
have interminable ramifica-
tions. I think that we must face
the possible, probable fact
that there will be no satis-
factory answers.
One wants to call them
heroes — yet, as Cynthia
Ozick pointed out in her
prologue to the catalogue
of the exhibition, many
of the the rescuers reject
the epithet. In Den-
mark, there is public
embarrassment about
their national heroic role
in the rescue of Jews.
Scholars, psychologists, his-
torians who have tried to un-
cover some pattern, some
commonality among the res-
cuers have been confounded:
Some were religious; some were
Sid Bolkosky is a professor at U-
M Dearborn.
not; some thought through their
actions; some did not; some hat-
ed Germans; some did not; some
acted out of intense political or
ideological commitment to op-
pose fascism, and some did not.
Some had Jewish friends; some
did not; some even disliked
Jews, and some did not. Noth-
ing about this is simple; motives,
like everything else, must be
overdetermined.
k: Surely we
should know
more about Dan-
ish history and culture to dis-
cover why the Danes, as a
people, rescued over 7000 Jews:
a shining light in the darkness.
Yet they are embarrassed —
perhaps because of the tighten-
ing immigration laws in the
1930s, the refugee camps es-
tablished for German and Pol-
ish Jews before 1940 or for the
sense that a decent community
could do nothing else. But as at
least one scholar has pointed
out, Danish behavior toward the
Jews was admirable at the cost
of economic and political col-
laboration with the Germans.
The same may be said of the
less famous but similarly ad-
mirable and remarkable rescue
of the Bulgarian Jews. They are
less famous, perhaps, because
the Bulgarian government was,
first of all, an Axis ally until
1944; and second, Bulgaria gave
up some 20,000 non-Bulgarian
Jews to Germans in 1943 in an
effort — successful — to rescue
their own Jews.
This happened, too, in
France, where the collabora-
tionist Vichy government ac-
ceded to the German demands
by handing over German, Pol-
ish and Austrian Jews in order
to save French Jews. Again,
how does one react to the fact
that the ploy seems to have
"succeeded"? Despite the
Vichy collaborationist govern-
ment in France, 2/3 of the
French Jews survived.
In Holland, where 25,000
Jews were hidden in Amster-
dam alone, of whom 18,000
were caught, like Anne Frank
and her family, some 80 percent
of the 140,000 Dutch Jews were
murdered, most in Auschwitz.
Ironically, in Germany and
countries which were allies of
Germany, Jews survived longer
and in greater numbers.
The histories of the possible
abandonment or rescue of the
Jews by governments or orga-
nizations, by partisans or un-
derground movements finally
must be put aside for more con-
crete, specific stories. Few sur-
vivors could not tell of some
acts of assistance from non-
Jews, acts without which sur-
vival, already dependent on
blind luck, would have been im-
possible. A crust of bread, a
helping hand from a civilian
non-Jew, a gesture, a hiding
place for a night kept a person
alive for that moment, that hour
or day. No heroics, or at least
not obvious ones.
So it is to individuals like
those in the exhibition that we
must turn to learn about rescue.
But we turn to them, I think,
ambivalently. These heroes
broke the law, acted humane-
ly to hide, rescue or somehow
help Jews. From French parish
priests to Polish peasants; from
Italian aristocrats to German
reprobates; from an upper class
Swede to a Ukrainian farmer
who worriedly hid a Jewish
family in his barn for over two
years.
RESCUE page 8
RABBI DAVID WOLPE SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
I is fair to say that we all make When the moon has waned and
mistakes. In my freshman
year of college, I took Ger-
man.
I was not yet wise enough to
drop a bad class, so I persisted.
Week after week, I sank further
in the linguistic swamp. Gradu-
ally, I became convinced that
Mark Twain was right when he
said, "The German language is
just a lousy excuse for spitting
at people." I was drowning.
On my final, I penned in the
only German phrases I knew
from the semester, "Guten Tag"
and "Ich bin ein Berliner."
When grades arrived, I
slipped open the envelope with
trepidation. Next to German, I
saw a "D." I was thrilled.
I was thrilled because I had
not "failed."
We are devastated by the
prospect of failure. The very
word, with its image of irre-
deemability, is frightening.
But of course, failure is in-
evitable. Anyone who lives long
enough knows that living in-
volves failure, and the more ful-
ly one lives, the more frequent
one's failures.
But we decide when we have
failed. Defining it is largely up
to us. Thomas Edison, after
10,000 unsuccessful experi-
ments with a storage battery,
said "I have not failed. I have
just discovered 10,000 ways that
do not work!"
Edison was wise enough to
define success and failure on his
own terms. He recognized that
each experimental failure of-
fered an increase in knowledge.
By understanding that fail-
ure can mean growth, we can
make a success of failing. The
Talmud teaches that "no one can
truly understand Torah unless
he has failed in it." Unless we
risk — and fail — we do not un-
derstand the depths of any ex-
perience. When we set our own
internal standards, and fail to
meet them, we begin to grow.
Next time, our achievement —
and our standards — will be
pushed to a higher rung.
It is critical to believe that fail-
ure is a lesson, not a catastro-
phe. The Bible is filled with
accounts of men and women
who failed, but also fought and
overcame and flourished. The
idea of failure as a backdrop for
growth is beautifully expressed
in the Sefath Emeth's explana-
tion of why Jews count by a lu-
nar, and not a solar, calendar.
To count by the sun is no act of
faith. After all, the sun shines
all day, every day. But when do
we Jews declare the new month?
the sky is dark. To proclaim our
hope in the future in dark times
— that, teaches the Sefath
Emeth, is an act of faith. The
trick of faith is to believe in the
end of darkness.
The only sin of failure is de-
spair. When we allow failure to
define and defeat us, we have
sinned. The very essence of our
tradition is the belief that there
is a better time and a better
world that we can create in part-
nership with God. There is no
promise that we shall not stum-
ble along the way, or that the
world will always be kind. The
promise is that effort allied to
hope will eventually prevail.
Towards the end of his life,
Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav
taught perhaps his most impor-
tant lesson. His disciple, Rabbi
Nathan, recorded the scene for
us as the dying tzaddik spoke to
his disciples (as related in
Failure is a lesson.
The Bible is filled
with accounts of
men and women
who failed,
overcame and
flourished.
Arthur Green's biography of
Rabbi Nachman, Tormented
Master):
"After the teaching, Rabbi
Nachman became very joyous,
and told the people to begin
singing... He had been so weak
of late that they had hardly sung
at all, but now he was so elated
that he ordered them to sing. He
sang with them. Afterwards, he
spoke with us, very happily, and
with an awesome and wondrous
grace. Then he shouted from the
very depths of his heart:
`Gevalt! Do not despair!'
He drew forth these words
slowly and deliberately, saying:
`There is no such thing as de-
spair.' He said the words with
such strength and wondrous
depth that he taught everyone,
for all generations, that one
should never despair, no matter
what it is that one has to en-
dure."
Rabbi Nachman had failures
and tragedies in his life. But his
transcendent message remains:
Failure is an opportunity; de-
spair is a sin.
In the midrash, Rabbi Jo-
hanan teaches: The eye has a
white and a dark part, but we
can see only through the dark
part. Through failure, we begin
Rabbi David Wolpe is the author to see. From darkness comes in-
of the newly published Teach- sight. Given time and faith, in-
ing Your Children About God. sight brings triumph. ❑