12 August 29 • 2019
jn

Holocaust survivor Bill Kaye 
celebrates his bar mitzvah 
with his grandson. A

ny Jewish boy who’
s had a bar mitzvah 
knows the long road of preparation 
and the work involved in reaching this 
time-honored milestone. Ask male family mem-
bers and friends, and many may reluctantly 
admit the process was a struggle — mastering the 
Hebrew, learning the Torah portion, getting the 
chanting just right and spending hours in study 
instead of hours at play.
But what if a young man was faced with a 
different struggle? Not one of mere perceived dif-
ficulty, but one of actual life and death? Such was 
the fate of each Jewish youth during the Second 
World War among those millions poised on the 
edge of manhood, most who tragically never 
reached that plateau. And for the survivors, their 
bar mitzvahs, normally a time of joy and achieve-
ment, went unacknowledged, lost to the reality of 
simple survival.

Yet, it’
s a testament to the resiliency of life when, 
at 91, William “Bill” Kaye, a survivor of Auschwitz 
and Buchenwald, joined his eldest grandson Elijah 
to finally celebrate his long-deferred bar mitzvah, 
something Bill promised himself when his grand-
son was born.
“I said to myself, if I’
m around for Elijah’
s bar 
mitzvah, I’
ll join him,
” said Bill, who lives with 
wife, Ellie, in the spacious Clinton Township home 
he designed. 
Born Wolf Kornblum in Lodz, Poland, in April 
1928, Bill was 11 years old when the war broke 
out. While others were heading east, his family — 
father Nathan, mother Tsivia (Sylvia) and older 
brother Mordechai — decided to stay in Poland. 
Eventually, they, along with extended family mem-
bers, were moved into the Lodz Ghetto.
“In the ghetto, we heard about the death camps 
like Treblinka and the gas chambers,
” Bill said in 
accented English. “But we wanted to ignore the 
terrible things we heard.
” 
Many of those incarcerated were forced to 
work in factories producing armaments for the 
Germans. Life was nothing short of overwhelming 
misery as people endured years surrounded by 

jews d
in 
the
on the cover

At Long Last …

JUDY GREENWALD CONTRIBUTING WRITER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JERRY ZOLYNSKY

continued on page 14

