Remembering
the holocaust
Remembering the holocaust
is an unavoidable event, like the weather, if you live in Israel, but unlike the weather it’s expected, you know this
day is coming, it comes every year now, a day when you have to remember a bad thing that happened more than 60 years ago,
a thing that came suddenly, worse than a tsunami or the Atom bomb. Whole countries were devastated and it was done by human
beings like ourselves and all we can do now is have a ceremony, set off a siren and be silent for 2 minutes.
We did it, us, human beings;
the Germans are human beings just like any of us. How is it that we know more about what causes a tsunami, a thing that humans
don’t cause, than a holocaust, a thing that humans cause? What’s
the use of all our science if we understand everything excepting ourselves. Plato, 3000 years ago warned us to know ourselves
and yet we still don’t know ourselves. We don’t know what makes shmitler or
ping pong or ahmadindin (deliberate incorrect spelling, those despicable
examples of the human race) want to drop the atom bomb. We don’t know ourselves. We keep on surprising ourselves more
than nature surprises us.
But we’re good at
having memorial ceremonies to remember the foolish things we’ve done. Some people get out of it by saying it’s
all a lie, someone made it up.
That’s against the
law in Israel and Germany and some other countries, I think. Many people who lost loved ones mourn a personal loss, they know
it’s no fiction. My late father mourned the death of his sister and her family all his life. Every night I used to hear
him waking up and crying. If only he had managed to get them out of Lithuania before that terrible day on the 26th
August 1941 when they were brutally murdered by Lithuanians of the town of Posvil where Jews had lived for more than 600[i] years.
True Lithuanians. The Jews
of Lithuania were the real Lithuanian people, not the ones who murdered them. The act of murdering true Lithuanians makes the murderers traitors of the Lithuanian People, and those Lithuanian traitors still
live in Lithuania today and mock the graves of their victims, the true Lithuanians, the Jews.
The Lithuanians killed
the Jews, not the Germans[ii], because they said the Jews had betrayed them to the Soviets[iii] It was the same old story “if anything goes wrong blame
the Jews”. This is the cry of a traitor. A traitor doesn’t try to
find the true reason for a country’s suffering because he himself is that reason. He turns the attention away from himself
by blaming the Jews. Jews are patriots of a country and as long as they live traitors are in danger of being revealed.
This is the reason why
a Jew who brings honor to his country by being a great scientist, musician or artist goes unacknowledged and the Jews as a
group aren’t praised when one Jew brings honor by making a significant contribution to world culture or science[iv]. But when a Jew did something considered by the traitors as being disgraceful like being a communist,
the entire Jewish People in Lithuania were accused of being Communist. These are the methods how traitors get rid of true patriots.
The Lithuanian nation never praised the Jewish People for the honor they brought
Lithuania. You won’t find any Jews (they’re not singled out for honor as Jews) in any list of famous Lithuanians,
even In a book about the Jews of Lithuania written by Lithuanian scholars[v] .
Here is a short excerpt from Joseph Klausner’s introduction to the 3 volume
history of the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry:
“The amazing thing about the Lithuanian Jews is that despite
the political, social and spiritual changes which they underwent, they preserved their unique character. They weren’t
swallowed up and integrated by other Jewish groups to whom they were annexed by political circumstances resulting from wars.
Even though they were outnumbered ten fold in numbers of people and in numbers of communities and in terms of economic strength.
Lithuanian Jews remained as a homogeneous group with a common, unique spiritual and moral tradition, that combined into a
specific way of life. Moreover, by force of these characteristics, the Lithuanian Jews, who were nothing more than a small
enclave in the midst of much bigger Jewish groups to the East and West of them, reached spiritual domination over Russian
Jewry and a tremendous influence over all the Jewish people.”
They knew Bible and Talmud and they were even in the forefront of the Jewish Enlightenment
movement; the first modern Hebrew novels were written by Lithuanian Jews like Abraham Mapu. In the words of Prof Joseph Klausner
“Already 80 years before the war the great
Hebrew gramarian, Joshua Steinberg, preached sermons in the “Holy sanctuary Synagogue”, the synagogue of the enlightened
Jews in Vilna. Once when I was in Vilna, about 60 years before the war, with my own eyes I saw a Jewish wagoner sitting by
the sidewalk reading “the Painted Eagle” by Abraham Mapu. “ An uneducated Jew wasn’t known in Lithuania. This is why Lithuanian Jewry were the leaders of the Jewish intelectual world.
After reading Joseph Klausner’s article I’ve come
to the conclusion that Lithuanian Jews were so closely aligned to the Land of Israel that they turned Lithuania into Israel.
They were proud of their land, Lithuania. Vilna had streets named Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Lebanon. Speaking Hebrew the Jews
felt that they were back in Israel. Israel wasn’t an abstract place or a distant land, for them Lithuania was Israel,
they made it their homeland as if God had given them Lithuania as the promised Land.
It’s not surprising
that Jews from Lithuania were the first Ashkenazi Jews to immigrate to Israel. The most famous of these waves of immigration
was the immigration of the students of the Vilna Gaon who settled in the Old City at the beginning of the 19th
Century.
I want my children to be proud that they descended from Jews
who come from Lithuania. Today us Lithuanian Jews don’t have to create an Israel out of a foreign country as our ancestors
did because the real Israel exists.
This is it. Father now I know that you brought me into this world
so that I can go back to your land the land of Israel, but I’ll never forget the wonderful land of Israel that you and
many generations of Jews before you created in Lithuania. So I really must learn about Lithuania and all the wonderful things
you did there as part of that amazing effort to turn it into a land of Israel.
How actually does one create a land in another land that isn’t
actually that land? The geography is different? The climate? The history? How is it done?
Well it can’t really be done but you can do the same things
in your adopted land as you did in your homeland which was the study of Torah. First of all you study Torah to know the word
of God of course but the Lithuanian Jews studied Torah because that is what the Jews did in the Land of Israel. By studying
Torah you can fulfill the precept of living in the Promised Land because that’s why God brought you there.
Wishing
a great no newsday
Yours
truly
Leon
Gork
[i] The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews, edited by Alvydos Nikzentaitis
(and others) Rodopi, Amsterdam, New York NY 2004 p.2 introduction
[ii] “When the Jews were led along the paths from the town to the woods,
the sounds of shooting and screams of terror could already be heard. These Jews being so led immediately realized what was
happening and started to throw anything heavy of their belongings at their captors and then attacked them with their hands,
legs and teeth."
At this point the murderers started to go wild; they tore babies from their
mothers and split their heads against the trees on the road. The leading Jews were beaten and slain with belts, rifle butts,
and knives. The rest were then shoved with brute force to the ready and waiting pits, and shot. Many were thrown into the
pits alive, having been shot in the legs and arms to immobilize them. Later in the darkness, the wounded crawled out of the
graves and tried to escape, but the murderers organized and chased after them and virtually all perished.
Only one woman succeeded in escaping, a Mrs. Moroz. She hid herself and with
the help of Lithuanian acquaintances she succeeded in getting to the Siauliai Ghetto and from there to the Kaunas Ghetto.
Also on 26 August 1941, forty persons succeeded in jumping the Ghetto fence and escaped, but all except three were recaptured
and murdered.
There was an internal debate in the Pasvalys municipal council on whether to
keep the Jews in the Ghetto or to execute them. The matter was put to the vote, and by a large majority, it was decided to
execute the Jews.
Mrs.
Sheina Gertner, a survivor who was an eyewitness until the last hours of the massacre, gathered and hid the dust from the
grave in the Zadeikiai Forest, and in 1973 this dust was preserved in the basement of Yad Vashem
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In his first appearance on radio Kovna at the time of the invasion, the priest
Ambrazavicius, then head of the "Provisional Government", began his speech with the words "Lithuania thanks the liberator
of Europe, Adolph Hitler... as for the Jews, the subject will be finished..." Together with the Bishop Brizgys , he appealed
to the Lithuanian population to cooperate with the Germans who "came to our country to liberate us from the Soviet yoke..."
http://www.lithuanianjews.org.il/HTMLs/article_list4.aspx?C2014=14065&BSP=14055&BSS6=13971 |
[iv] The Vanished World….preface
x, “The Lithuanian capital, Vilnius – occupied by Poland from 1920 to 1939 – was known around the world
as the Jerusalem of the North, and many internationally eminent Jews lived in or were from Lithuania, among them the philosophers
Emmanuel Levinas and Aaron Gurwitsch, the painter Chaim Soutine (a close friend of Amedeo Modigliani) in Paris and Arbit Blatas,
the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz, the violinist Jascha Heifetz and the art critic Bernard Berenson, one of the most sophisticated
twentieth century students of the Italian Renaisance.”
[v] The Vanished World of Lithuanian
Jews, edited by Alvydos Nikzentaitis preface xi
