6 | JANUARY 27 • 2022 1942 - 2022 Covering and Connecting Jewish Detroit Every Week To make a donation to the DETROIT JEWISH NEWS FOUNDATION go to the website www.djnfoundation.org The Detroit Jewish News (USPS 275-520) is published every Thursday at 32255 Northwestern Highway, #205, Farmington Hills, Michigan. Periodical postage paid at Southfield, Michigan, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send changes to: Detroit Jewish News, 32255 Northwestern Highway, #205, Farmington Hills, Michigan 48334 MISSION STATEMENT The Detroit Jewish News will be of service to the Jewish community. The Detroit Jewish News will inform and educate the Jewish and general community to preserve, protect and sustain the Jewish people of greater Detroit and beyond, and the State of Israel. 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Suite 205, Farmington Hills, MI 48334 248-354-6060 thejewishnews.com Publisher The Detroit Jewish News Foundation | Board of Directors: Chair: Gary Torgow Vice President: David Kramer Secretary: Robin Axelrod Treasurer: Max Berlin Board members: Larry Jackier, Jeffrey Schlussel, Mark Zausmer Senior Advisor to the Board: Mark Davidoff Alene and Graham Landau Archivist Chair: Mike Smith Founding President & Publisher Emeritus: Arthur Horwitz Founding Publisher Philip Slomovitz, of blessed memory | Editorial DIrector of Editorial: Jackie Headapohl jheadapohl@thejewishnews.com Associate Editor: David Sachs dsachs@thejewishnews.com Social Media and Digital Producer: Nathan Vicar nvicar@thejewishnews.com Staff Reporter: Danny Schwartz dschwartz@thejewishnews.com Editorial Assistant: Sy Manello smanello@thejewishnews.com Contributing Writers: Nate Bloom, Rochel Burstyn, Suzanne Chessler, Annabel Cohen, Keri Guten Cohen, Shari S. Cohen, Shelli Liebman Dorfman, Louis Finkelman, Stacy Gittleman, Esther Allweiss Ingber, Barbara Lewis, Jennifer Lovy, Rabbi Jason Miller, Alan Muskovitz, Robin Schwartz, Mike Smith, Steve Stein, Julie Smith Yolles, Ashley Zlatopolsky | Advertising Sales Director of Advertising: Keith Farber kfarber@thejewishnews.com Senior Account Executive: Kathy Harvey-Mitton kmitton@thejewishnews.com | Business Office Director of Operations: Amy Gill agill@thejewishnews.com Operations Manager: Andrea Gusho agusho@thejewishnews.com Operations Assistant: Ashlee Szabo Circulation: Danielle Smith Billing Coordinator: Pamela Turner | Production By Farago & Associates Manager: Scott Drzewiecki Designers: Kelly Kosek, Kaitlyn Schoen, Deborah Schultz, Michelle Sheridan PURELY COMMENTARY essay Caught in Ice, Light, Silence J anuary is the month that tries our souls, often bringing the year’s worst weather to Michigan. It turns post-holiday defla- tion into a sense of lingering dread, a looming despair fueled by bitter winds, intermi- nable lake effect snow and some of the calendar’s shortest days. Each January, the physical cold I feel is accompanied by the harsher and icier winds of history. Sometimes they buffet me as I walk across a frozen park- ing lot on the Grand Valley State campus or crunch my way through drifting snow between buildings. More often they penetrate a warm classroom or the harbor of my office when I pause to remem- ber the many thousands who once marched through the snows of Poland in 1945. For a host of reasons, Yom HaShoah, which usually falls in April, has become the day when most Jews mark the Holocaust, but I sometimes think that in our northern clime, Jan. 27, designated by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, may be the more appropriate com- memorative choice, marking the moment in 1945 when troops of the Red Army liber- ated Auschwitz-Birkenau. Liberation, though, is a misnomer. Ten days before the Soviets arrived, the Nazis had evacuated nearly all the camp’s prisoners, some 56,000 men and women, marching them west into the Polish winter. Elie Wiesel’s Night forever etched this infamous death march in our collective mem- ories, though his account seldom lingers over the cold felt by the malnourished and rag-clad victims. Still, when teaching Night during a Michigan winter, I always try to make this section visceral to my students by asking them to imagine setting out, right then, without their North Face coats and Ugg boots, for a march through the snow to Big Rapids, some 73 miles away. With no food or water, with Germans shepherds tearing at their heels and with pistol shots for those who faltered. THE TORMENTS OF WINTER For me, such a mental exer- cise always evokes Dante’s Inferno, where the deepest center of Hell is a vast frozen lake, Cocytus, in which trai- tors are embedded in the ice. Six hundred years later, what the poet could only imagine had been created by Hitler’s legions on the windswept Silesian plains. Among the many survivor accounts of Auschwitz there are some common observa- tions regarding the seasons: spring was a time of viscous mud that grabbed the pris- oners’ wooden-soled clogs; summer was when the camp’s pestilential stench hung over them; but it was the Polish winter that most tormented them, its very approach strik- ing fear in even the most vet- eran of haftlinge or prisoners. Primo Levi, writing of the onset of winter in the chapter “October 1944” of Survival in Auschwitz, recalls thinking that it would kill seven out Robert Franciosi continued on page 8