The Silent should be understood and not rebuked: there is much to be admired in the determined stance of voicelessness.

The Holocaust is a midnight caller who never takes leave. It visited destruction upon the Jewish glaziers, plumbers, stove-builders, cobblers, and seamstresses of Lithuania and Latvia on the Baltic Sea and upon the Sephardic Ladino-speaking craftsmen of the Greek islands of Corfu, Crete, and Rhodes in the Mediterranean. It claimed assimilated bankersand grain merchants of cosmopolitan Odessa on the Black Sea as well as the highly unionized and politicized working-class Jews of Marseilles and Cherbourg.

The Holocaust is a fiend who refuses to make way, descending again and again like a persistent, indefatigable incubus upon the few who unaccountably were overlooked and to scourge their offspring and loved for the survivors' temerity to have escaped the earlier roundup. It acts as an avenging spirit, an angel of death who retraces his steps to reclaim stragglers. The Six Million, then, were not the only victims: Thousands of survivors dispersed in all the world remain living victims - and witnesses.

There are those who say that a survivor who is not a witness is not a survivor; he has perished with the rest for his failure to testify. According to this thinking survivors who have refused to cooperate in this and other surveys are to be discommended and censured. But perhaps, as Elie Wiesel has suggested, profound Silence is at least as appropriate a response to the terrors they endured and witnessed. The Silent should be undrestood and not rebuked: there is much to be admired in the determined stance of voicelessness. Besides, the Mishnah teaches, "Do not judge your fellow until you have stood in his place." Still the respondents to this and similar studies on Holocaust survivors deserve our deepest gratitude for sharing their ordeals, experiences, and feelings with us.

The Holocaust is an abyss which never cries “Enough!”. It bolted down six million men, women, and children during the span of a few short years; starved in ghettos, shot in ditches, gassed in camps, burned in ovens. And like a ruminating beast bringing back its cud, it continues to feed heartily and voraciously upon the few it earlier disgorged – and upon those whose lives they touch. The Holocaust is an ongoing engulfment preying upon its victims in mind and body. As a consequence of Holocaust-related disabilities, mutilation, “experiments,” and illnesses – many survivors’ lives are still being cut short to this day: Their mental health and balance remain chronically constricted and impaired by all that they underwent. The Holocaust’s capacity is unrelenting and limitless, a vastness that never ceases to consume.

Upon the conclusion of the war the victorious allies fully expected the persecuted remnant of European Jewry, seen not as members of a single folk or people but as disparate and unrelated refugees, “persons displaced by enemy action,” to be repatriated each to his native land. But “repatriation,” a word with the same root as “patriot,” one who is zealous for his country, proved empty of meaning as pogroms, grisly footnotes to the history of the Holocaust, greeted the returnees. In Kielce, in central Poland, in early July 1946, a ritual murder accusation was believed by the local Christian population, and forty-one Jews who had barely escaped the Nazi hordes were massacred by the Poles as a posthumous offering to the Fuehrer, as endorsement of his Final Solution. Everywhere in Europe the hostility of local inhabitants made it evident to the Jews if not the Allied Forces that repatriation was impossible. Europe, in truth, was to be free of Jews – judenfrei.

Thousands of refugees, the remnant of the once great European Jewish community, aspired to leave their inhospitable, blood-drenched native lands behind them, to escape their shadows forever into an unknown life. They wished that the unspeakable memories of the civilized continent would also stay behind as unclaimed baggage. Now they found they were being repatriated from concentration camps to displaced person camps. For them liberation meant emigration. Of the four to five hundred thousand Jews of Europe only approximately fifty thousand decided to remain in Europe. More than ninety thousand made their way to the United States. Over fifty thousand found their way to other places, including Canada, South Africa, Australia, and Argentina. And between one hundred fifty and two hundred eighty thousand Jews, driven forward by the twin spurs of modern anti-Semitism and ancient memories, arrived in Palestine. There they outlasted British blockades and later, as Israelis, endured the ongoing ordeal of warfare with the surrounding Arab states.

For one person to be able to talk with another who has gone through such inhumanity and wickedness is an uncommon privilege. It is an indulgence, a bequest, and a trust. The dialogue becomes a most precious keepsake to be recorded for, and cherished by, all generations. Not to seize the opportunity when it comes may perhaps be judged a betrayal, surely more so than any unwillingness to talk on the survivor’s part.

One would wish to ask numerous questions on scores of subjects, to identify which subjects are forbidden and when one is going too far, where we should tread lightly and when we should not tread at all. We would wish to hear from the survivors’ own lips about their lives, their experiences, how they survived, and their feelings then and now: How did you re-establish your life and how do you spend your leisure? How did you begin your new family and how did you meet your husband or wife? How did you find other members of your family or village who also survived? How do you put the horrors you knew out of mind? How do you make new friends, and can you be friends with others who have not experienced what you have experienced or suffered what you have, others who are not survivors? How do you relate to your children and how do you see yourself as different from other parents? How do you earn a living and what are your politics? What books do you read? Can you read books on the Holocaust at all? And what are your ambitions, besides to be left to live in peace? And how do you feel you are different from others? Such an untidy tangle of questions begins at once to unravel in the mind.

This study attempts to a systematic inquiry into the manifold dimensions of the meaning and import of the Holocaust’s effect upon survivors. It chooses to focus primarily on religious questions, ultimate questions. Jewish questions, some as interesting as these, others probably less so, but not less important. We are especially concerned with how surviving European Jews construed and interpreted their Holocaust experiences and how they were affected religiously, in their faith and practices, by what they had undergone. But why should the Silent be willing to speak at all? And why should they agree to reflect on such questions as these?

-From the book The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors, by Reeve Robert Brenner. For an autographed copy, please contact Rabbi Brenner at 301-762-4241.