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DRAFT ARTICLE FOR STORAGE PURPOSES / OUT OF HIDING
IMAGE CAPTION: Having survived Buchenwald, the boy holding the flag in a refugee compound near Haifa maintained his family's 1,000-year chain of rabbis as Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel (1993 to 2003).
LULEK'S STORY
"I feel amazed when I contemplate the chain of miracles that happened to me."-- Rabbi Meir Lau ("Lulek")
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The iconic photograph of a boy clutching a Buchenwald banner was taken by one of the founders of photojournalism, Tim Gidal, on July 17, 1945. The date was the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, Tisha B'Av, an annual day of fasting to recall disastrous events in Judaism.
The cheerful and resolute child had disembarked from France with an English visa on a refugee ship that docked at Atlit, Palestine (south of Haifa, before the state of Israel was founded in 1948). At the time, the boy believed the only person who knew him in Israel was his brother who had endured the camps with him.
Entitled "Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, arrival at Atlit, Palestine, 1945," this image was purchased by Yosef Wosk from Tim Gidal when they met in Jerusalem in 1994, two years before Gidal died. Known only as “Lulek” in the concentration camps, the boy in the photo would become Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel 48 years later, at which time he invited the famously crusty Jewish photographer Gidal to a private reception in order to share emotional reflections regarding the photo.
When Rabbi Lau visited Vancouver for an event at Congregation Beth Hamidrash in February of 2008, Yosef Wosk showed him the photo and Rabbi Lau confirmed he was the subject. In Hebrew, on the back of the picture, Rabbi Lau wrote "With the help of Heaven. Vancouver, 22nd of Adar I, 5768. To Rabbi Yosef Wosk, may God give him life and guard him. Dedicated with the best of blessings and heartfelt wishes. Israel Meir Lau."
The Polish-born boy in the photo was two years old at the outset of World War II and almost eight years old when American soldiers liberated him from Buchenwald. As such, the little flag bearer was one of the world’s youngest survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.
For several years, the boy known as Lulek had been lovingly and steadfastly protected, first by his older brother Naphtali, nicknamed "Tulek", who was thirteen when the war was declared, then by an 18-year-old Russian who Lulek knew only as Fyodor. More than twice his brother’s age, Tulek had been told by his father that he must save Lulek so that one of them could continue the family’s rabbinical tradition that stretched for 37 generations. Another brother, Chiko, had left for Romania shortly before the war and their oldest brother, Samuel Yitzchak ("Milik"), was sent to Treblinka where their father also perished.
When Tulek and Lulek became separated in Buchenwald, Tulek’s parting words were to get to Eretz Yisrael. At age seven, Lulek wasn’t sure where or what that was. He found out more about this wonderland called Eretz Yisrael later when he was sent to a remarkable rehabilitation program for 426 displaced children at an abandoned sanitorium at Ecouis in Normandy, France.
Among the Jewish youngsters at Ecouis were Romanian-born Elie Wiesel, who introduced the term Holocaust, and Polish-born Robbie Waisman of Vancouver. Psychologists assumed such traumatized boys would not successfully re-integrate into society. Instead, Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and Robbie Waisman became a successful business man in Western Canada.
Born on June 1, 1937 as Yisrael Meir Lau, the diminutive "Lulek" would also become Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv and Chairman of Yad Vashem. His protective brother Naphtali, the heroic “Tulek”, served as General Consul of Israel in New York, as an assistant to both Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres in the Ministry of Defence, and wrote a memoir, Balaam's Prophecy.
"My earliest memory," Rabbi Lau told Mishpacha magazine, in 2006, “is that of my father, standing with the rest of the Jews in the courtyard of the main shul, as the Germans 'selected' those who would be deported that day. That's the image that stays with me always, wherever I go.
Everyone in the Jewish community of Piotrkow Trybunalski had gathered near the Great Synagogue where his father, the chief rabbi—and the last one—at age 50, was confronted by the chief Gestapo officer Herdorf who was always accompanied by a large and threatening dog with him. Of the 60,000 inhabitants of Piotrkow, there were 26,000 Jews. Nearly all of them perished. The synagogue still stands but for seventy years it has been used as a library.
"I'm a five-year-old boy, stretching myself up as high as I can, to see my father. He's standing in the centre, with his impressive beard and his black rabbinical garb, and all the Jews are crowded around him.”
"Suddenly a member of the Gestapo strides over to him and hits him hard on his back [with a rubber club]. My father reels forward from the blow, but straightens himself immediately. He's mustering all his strength so as not to fall at the feet of the German and cause his fellow Jews to lose morale.
"Then comes another blow, and another. My father makes a mighty effort not to lose his balance, to help the members of his kehillah, his community, keep up their courage."
The excuse for the beating was that his father had not shaved his beard. The older Jews had to shave their beards in the ghetto and he had been the only one who had refused. He did to uplift the morale of the community. If he had shaved his beard, Rabbi Lau has since avowed, the people would feel they would never be Jewish again.
"They used to see him as the spiritual leader of the city,” Rabbi Lau told interviewer Sophie Shevardnadze (granddaughter of Edouard Shevardnadze) in 2015. "He was a nice man, a very-very charming person…" Lau has also described his father as tall and handsome, with two Ph.Ds from the University of Vienna, and an author.
Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau can shut his eyes and still hear the sounds of barking dogs and boots pounding on pavement as children are torn from their parents' arms with the Gestapo wielding clubs and screaming, "Schnell, schnell!"
"The worst part of it was witnessing the humiliation,” he has said. “A child can't bear to see his father, the hero he looks up to and identifies with, being demeaned. Today, as I look back on those six years of war, it's clear to me that it wasn't the hunger, nor the cold, nor the physical pain of being hit, but the humiliation.
"To see your father beaten with a club, kicked by hobnailed boots, threatened by a dog, almost falling to the ground, degraded before everyone – that's a picture that stays with a child.
"But I hold on to the other part of the memory, too. I see my father, with tremendous moral courage, keeping himself from falling, not begging for mercy, standing up straight in front of the Gestapo officer. This erases my feelings of helplessness."
Some 24,000 Jews from Piotrkow were herded into cattle cars between October 14 and 21, 1942. Lulek's older brother, Naphtali, at 16, was grabbed in the street by the Nazis and forced to help build the railway tracks from Auschwitz to Birkenau.
At age six, Lulek accompanied his mother and another brother from their house next to the Synagogue to Jerusalimska Street in the ghetto. She saved him on several occasions, and had always comforted him as best she could. Once, returning to their empty house at 21 Pisudski Street, he had heard a scream in the street. “I stood on the bed to look. A young woman with a baby in her arms was lying in a pool of blood in the street while a Gestapo man was kicking her, looking for jewelry.” His mother soothed him back to sleep.
Initially, Lulek's mother managed a community kitchen in the ghetto. Eventually, she went into hiding with Lulek for three days in the attic of a deserted house. His mother made honey cookies for when the Gestapo troops searched the house. That way children could be persuaded to say absolutely quiet. Ten people in an attic, above a bathroom, were not found.
Lulek's father believed his family would never be able to escape from the city if he stayed with them. He was too well-known. "They would search ever place until they found me," he told them. "If I try to hide, they will also find other Jews who have a chance to survive."
Lulek is haunted by the memory of being separated from his mother, Chaya Lau, in November of 1944. At age seven-and-a-half, in November, Lulek found himself on a train platform where Germans were once more shouting, "Schnell, schnell!" He remembers his mother giving him an abrupt shove, sending him over to her husband and his older brother on the other side, away from the women and children. 'Tulek!' she called out to his brother. 'Take Lulek! Goodbye, Tulek! Goodbye, Lulek!'
His brother Tulek remembers the moment differently. "At the last possible moment," he has said, "I tore Lulek out of my mother’s arms."
Lulek only knew that he had been separated from his mother. He took out his rage on his brother, Tulek, hammering on his chest with my little fists. Tulek could barely restrain him. Lulek had no way of knowing this was a calculated gamble, hoping his life could be saved if he could somehow survive with his brother as a labourer. It was a terribly cold at the train station. His mother was pushed towards the train. The gates were closed. The women were likely sent to Ravensbruck. "The last picture I remember," Rabbi Lau said in 2015, "was the fog of the locomotive and beyond this fog we saw mother."
When they made it to the Czenstochova (Stokowa) labor camp for the Hassag Werke, a factory for the repair of tanks, at first Lulek was hidden under a bed while the men went to work. Inevitably, he and some other children were discovered and rounded before the Gestapo leader named Kiesling. There were about ten children. This time it was Lulek’s turn to be brave. He had to somehow make himself worthy of not being murdered.
Possibly it was seeing his father’s show of pride in the courtyard of the main shul that emboldened him.
"We boys were standing in a row in front of the German commander, each of us with his father behind him. In my case, since I was already an orphan, my brother Naphtali stood behind me. The commander was shouting, 'What do I need these accursed children for? They're non-productive and they're costing me money. We'll have to get rid of them!'
"While the other boys trembled with fear, I used my foot to push some snow and gravel into a little pile. It was about two inches high, but I imagined that if I stood on this little hillock, I'd look taller and my words would carry more weight, and maybe then the commander wouldn't kill us all.
"I took a step forward, stood on my 'platform,' and said, 'Sir! Why do you say we aren't productive? In the Piotrkow ghetto, I worked in the glass factory for eight hours a day nonstop, carrying huge bottles of drinking water for the workers in the factory, where the temperature was 140 degrees. For a whole year I did this, in snow, in storms, in heat, carrying heavy bottles into that blazing hot room. And then I was only five and a half years old. Now that I'm so much bigger, I can do more than that. If I could work in the Hortenzia glass factory, why can't I work here?'
"If witnesses hadn't told me that this really happened, I wouldn't believe it myself; I would think my memory was playing tricks on me. But the fact is that the Nazi officer was convinced. The Almighty gave me confidence and put the right words into my mouth.
"This was my first speech. He was amazed – a child, a Jewish child, dares to speak to him! And this was the end of 1944, and still, a Jew has opened his mouth and said something.
"As a result of my little speech, the commander let it be known that he would redeem any child in the camp for a price of 1,000 marks. Our mother had foreseen circumstances like these and provided us with two diamonds and a gold watch."
A Jewish dentist had filled her tooth with a half-carat diamond, and she had sewn a two-carat stone into the lining of her coat. These valuables were transferred to her sons and proved to be lifesavers, first in the Czenstochova munitions factory, later in Buchenwald. They facilitated the subterfuge that he was Polish rather than Jewish.
Meanwhile, the heroism of Lulek's brother was seemingly inexhaustible. In January of 1945, when they were being loaded onto another train station, a Gestapo officer noticed how young Lulek was. He was separated from Naphtali and flung into a group of about fifty women, with a few children, on train car slated to be detached and sent elsewhere from the rest.
Naphtali was in a crowded car of all men at one of other end of the transport. At night, at each station, when the train stopped, Naphtali somehow managed to extricate himself, crawl along the tracks and call out, "Lulek! Lulek!" He counted the cars he checked each time. After doing this seven times, he finally located his little brother, in the women’s car, clinging to a feather pillow his mother had given him. Once he had been located, Lulek had to crawl over dead bodies to be extricated. The brothers were able to crawl back to the men’s car. In the darkness, before they climbed in, Naphtali had the foresight to fill a hat with snow for some clean water to drink.
The women’s car was later detached.
The brothers were headed for a new concentration camp near the city of Weimar, in north-east Germany. The first thing they saw was a group of men in striped uniforms, shoveling snow. "We asked them where we were," Rabbi Lau later recalled. “In reply, they drew their forefingers across their throats.”
Tulek understood this would be a place for men only. Malnourished, Lulek didn’t have even one tooth. He was much closer to being a baby than a man. Although he was a child of seven-and-a-half, he looked more like a five-year-old. Knowing the Gestapo would likely kill Lulek on the spot, Tulek emptied his sack of belongings and said, "Lulek, get in."
In this way, the future Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel was smuggled into Buchenwald, carried in a sack over his brother’s shoulder. When they got off the train there was an oven into which they had to toss all their belongings. They imagined the worst. Tulek quickly concocted a story. Lulek was a Polish boy who had been unfairly captured while playing with some Jewish friends. They conversed only in Polish.
The gold watch their Mama had given Tulek was used to bribe one of the German wardens to ignore the presence of Lulek who would otherwise have been deemed dispensable.
"We were taken to a tunnel equipped with a row of showerheads. By 1945, everybody knew what to expect from showerheads in a Nazi camp, and we prepared to die a miserable death. One of the men in our group suddenly fell down dead. Ever since we left the Piotrkow ghetto, he'd been keeping a cyanide capsule hidden under a temporary filling in his tooth, and he'd decided this was the moment to use it. But the showerheads were turned on, and ice cold water sprayed out. I don't know how to describe the life-giving warmth we felt from that icy water."
After they had been doused in chlorine, the Czech vaccinator at the end of another long queue realized Lulek was too small for a full dose of vaccine. Clearly his brother, Tulek, was lieing when he said the boy was fifteen. The line-up had to proceed quickly. They had only seconds to decide Lulek’s fate. "I am a communist," said the man. "I don’t want to kill him." Instinctively, Tulek told the truth. Lulek was given a half-dose. Only then were the boys certain this medical officer was a fellow prisoner.
Tulek's prisoner number was 117029 and Lulek's was 117030. In most other camps, such numbers were tattooed onto the left arm but in Buchenwald, unless a prisoner had previously in Auschwitz, the numbers were sewn into their shirtsleeves. "I was humiliated," Rabbi Lau later wrote, "when I found out that other deported persons had read tattoos. Nobody was going to believe that I had been in camp! So I wrote my number on my arm with ink but it disappeared after the first bath."
Sometimes it was twenty degrees below zero. The men wore wooden clogs, without socks. Often, they would be forced to stand outside for three hours with no blanket, no sweater. No medicines. Rotted teeth. The beatings. The diseases. "They talk about those who were murdered and those who survived," Rabbi Lau has said, as an old man, “but how did they survive? I am not even talking about mentally surviving—or psychologically. But physically, you cannot explain it. As much as we will tell you about the Shoah, you will never fully comprehend it. Never. Even those who were there cannot really understand. So, explaining it is impossible.”
"Many ask, 'Why did you not escape?' I wouldn't know where to go. I did not know the alphabet in any language until I was eight. I never went to school, not even one day.
At first, they joined about 2,000 men in Block 52 where the stench was unbearable. It was customary to relieve oneself right in the barracks.
Each prisoner’s striped pajamas were adorned with a red patch on which there was printed a black letter. P was for Pollaks. R was for Russian. G was for Germany. J was for Juden.
The diamond was used to affix a piece of cloth from a dead Polish prisoner onto Lulek's sleeve. Tulek was sent to Barracks 59, the Jewish barracks. He was hitched to a wagon with three other prisoners and forced to haul corpses to the crematorium. When they became separated, a German named Hamman took pity on Lulek and he was moved to Barracks 8, for relatively privileged senior inmates. Then he was taken to Barracks 66, with mostly Russians. There he met a Russian boy, aged 18-and-a-half, from Rostov-na-Don, named Feodor Mickhailichenko, who soon became his main guardian.
In order to qualify as a labourer, Lulek was accorded the job of cleaning the entire barracks daily, arranging beds and mattresses, cleaning the toilets. Feodor gathered his Russian friends and made a speech: "Lulek has no father, probably has no mother. Now he’s going to lose his childhood also. We can save his childhood, at least, if not his parents. We will do the cleaning job instead of him." Thereafter Fyodor and his friends woke up one hour earlier, at 5 o’clock, before the work, and did all his work for him each day.
Buchenwald was a strange amalgam. There were political prisoners that included Konrad Adenauer, the anti-Hitler mayor of Koln who would later become the first Chancellor of West Germany. Leon Blum would be a Prime Minister of France. There were two Nobel laureates in literature, one from Spain, one from France. Tiny Lulek was once again deemed special and adopted almost like a mascot.
Promising to one day adopt Lulek if they ever escaped, Fyodor stole potatoes and cooked up soup for him and knitted him earmuffs with some stolen wool. "When the Germans yelled hats off at roll call in assembly," he later told Robert Krell, “my ears stayed nice and warm.”
In 2008, Rabbi Lau made contact with two of Fyodor's daughters Elena and Juliya who had made a documentary about him. Until that time, Rabbi Lau had never known his savior’s name. He had not known that the only time Fyodor had ever been beaten was not by German guards, but rather by some fellow Soviets. From this documentary he learned that Fyodor had once stolen a bicycle for him so that Lulek could have the have the experience of riding a bicycle.
Bizarrely, when Fyodor was teaching Lulek how to ride, they were on the bicycle together and fell together. "He was sitting behind me and we were injured and I had blood on my face. I was bleeding. I learn his friends had beat him because they were angry. They said, 'Why didn't you take care of the child? Look at his face, he’s bleeding because of you!'"
By early April, 1945, rumours had reached the prisoners that Germany was losing the war. The last time they saw one another in Buchenwald, Tulek said, "They're taking me away. This is the end of the world." Lulek felt every word was engraved on his heart. "You're going to be left alone now. But you still have friends. Maybe a miracle will happen and you'll survive. I just wanted to tell you: There's a place called Eretz Yisrael. Repeat after me: Eretz Yisrael."
The words meant nothing at the time. "Eretz Yisrael is the home of the Jews," Naphtali explained. "It's the only place in the world where they don't kill us. If you survive, there will be people who will want to take you to live with them, because you're a cute little boy. You're not going anyplace. Only to Eretz Yisrael. We have an uncle there. Say that you're Rabbi Lau's son, and tell them to find your uncle. Goodbye, Lulek. Remember: Eretz Yisrael."
In their last weeks in Buchenwald, some older boys hid Lulek, the youngest, in a rubbish box. Naphtali was put on a train. During the night he managed to jump out the window with two others, but instead of hiding, he says he walked for two days and two nights towards Buchenwald. “I did not want to lose Lulek,” he wrote. With supernatural strength, he crawled into the camp, and then he collapsed.
“He hadn't forgotten our father and the promise he had made to him,” Rabbi Lau says, “or the sound of our mother's voice shouting, 'Take care of Lulek!' Not a day in my life goes by without my thinking of Naphtali. He was given a mission: to save my life. And he carried it out."
[Lulek would not marry until 1956 when he felt financially secure as a journalist. He believes he has led a normal and satisfying life in the Holy Land. “Other people make plans, strive for success, while I have the impression that I have achieved more than I could ever have hoped for and will do nothing extraordinary to improve my status. I must be the only person in Israel who has never asked for an increase or a bonus. I am happy with what I have.”]
On April 11th, Tulek was put into quarantine with typhus. Lulek had the measles. They both heard the American planes flying low over Buchenwald. Liberation was another nightmare. The forces under General Patton were bombing the Buchenwald area.
Lulek's Russian protector Fyodor understood a bomb could easily destroy their barracks. From their barracks, they ran towards the main gate but it was still closed. Around them were many injured people and a heap of corpses. Fyodor threw Lulek to the ground and covered him with his own body during the bombings and a flurry of bullets.
In the confusion, they became separated. Tired of running, Lulek hid behind the corpses. Finally, an American command car broke through the gate. Naturally, when uniformed American soldiers appeared at Buchenwald in 1945, Lulek was frightened. More men in uniforms with guns. The liberators were themselves frightened. They looked at the ghastly corpses and the emaciated Jews with horror. Although Lulek wanted to flee, there was nowhere to go.
That’s when a Jewish chaplain wearing a helmet, Rabbi Herschel Schachter, got out of an army jeep and moved towards the pile of bodies. He had driven five miles to reach the site with his assistant, Private Hyman Schulman, after the German guards had fled as American forces arrived earlier in the day.
Schachter later recalled, “I caught a glimpse of a tall chimney with billowing smoke still curling upward… I scarcely could believe my eyes. There I stood, face to face with piles of dead bodies strewn around, waiting to be shoveled into the furnace that was still hot. It was just an incredible, harrowing sight. I stood there for a while in utter confusion and disbelief. I then began to really feel what this horror was all about.”
Lulek did not take flight. Rabbi Schachter, a Jew from the Bronx, took out his pistol and slowly walked around the pile. There he saw two eyes with life in them. He discovered an almost-eight-year-old boy, staring back, wide-eyed and distrustful. Trembling, Rabbi Schacter put his gun away. The American rabbi picked him up, held him tightly, and cried. He was mystified. What was a child doing in hell?
“How old are you, mein kind?” he gently asked, in Yiddish.
"'What difference does it make?' Lulek answered. “I'm older than you, anyway.”
The American rabbi was startled. Perhaps this child was insane. Was it meant to be some kind of riddle. He played along.
“Why do you think you're older than me?”
“Because you can smile and cry like a small child,” Lulek replied. “I haven't laughed in a long time, and crying is not something I’ve done for years. So, which one of us is older?'"
Rabbi Lau himself used to question if this story really happened. For many years, like so many other survivors, he never mentioned the camps, not even to his uncle. The first time he began talking about his experiences was during the Eichmann trial. His brother Naphtali had been sent to attend the trial as a reporter for the Haaretz newspaper, but he found the strain too great and left Jerusalem. It was only then that Lulek and Tulek exchanged their memories of the camps for the first time.
Rabbi Lau had kept the details of liberation to himself until he heard Rabbi Hershel Schachter repeat the same story to President Ronald Reagan when the three of them were brought together on April 11, 1983 (exactly 38 years after liberation) in Annapolis, Maryland. The details that Rabbi Schachter repeated to President Reagan were the same as he recalled.
“I thought that it is my imagination, a fantasy,” Rabbi Lau recalls. “But he told it the same way. He saw someone looking at him with vivid eyes, he was afraid that it was a German that wanted to kill him. He took out his pistol and very carefully went around this heap, and he saw a child, hiding himself, full of fear. He understood that child must be a Jewish child. He took me in his arms, he embraced me and started to cry…”
After Rabbi Schachter had repeated his version of their meeting, the U.S. Navy orchestra played the Song of the Partisans. This was the sign for Rabbi Lau to come from behind the curtains onto the stage. He hugged Rabbi Schachter. Then President Reagan came forward to shake Rabbi Lau’s hand. The President of the United States spoke clearly, so that all the microphones pick up his words: “Let me touch a living legend.”
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Not a day goes by when the Holocaust does not re-enter Rabbi Lau’s awareness. For this reason, he cherishes a second photo, this one given as a gift by Robert Waisman and Robert Krell, via Elie Wiesel.
This second portrait was taken only slightly earlier in 1945. In this image, Lulek is holding a small suitcase, preparing for the journey from France to his new homeland.
"An American soldier donated an old suitcase to me from the army surplus storehouse," he has recalled. "It went with me to Eretz Yisrael, and it held everything I owned, as I wandered from one educational institution to another.
"By the time I got married, it was so shabby that my wife wanted to throw it out, but I refused to part with it. 'This was my house [referring to the little suitcase],' I told her. 'If our children ever complain, I'll show it to them and say, ‘This is what your father had when he was a boy.’
"I put it up in the storage loft of our building, and when we moved to another apartment, I came back for it. I climbed seventy-five steps to retrieve it, but I found nothing there but the handle. The suitcase had disintegrated. But I have the photo. Elie Wiesel, who was with me in Buchenwald, presented it to me at a Bundist event; he’d first seen it in Vancouver."
The story of how Elie Wiesel came present the framed photograph from Vancouver to Rabbi Lau at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York has been told by Robert Krell.
"We invited Elie Wiesel to Vancouver for an event. During that visit, Leon and Evelyn Kahn threw a cocktail party. Robbie Waisman had undergone gall bladder surgery but he and Gloria wanted to come. Marilyn and I picked them up and we brought them. Robbie got out of his wheel chair and walked in under his own power. I had asked Robbie to bring his photo album of the Buchenwald boys, with pictures mainly taken by American soldiers. “That night, Elie, Robbie and I found a corner to hide in and they identified everyone in the photos. One was of eight-year-old Lulek with the suitcase and another was the cover photo of the boys at Ecouis that we used for the book The Boys of Buchenwald, showing both Robbie (Romek) and Rabbi Lau (Lulek) on the cover.
"Later, when I was invited to speak at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, I told Elie I was coming. He asked Marilyn and me to attend an evening in honour of Rabbi Lau, who was then chief Rabbi of Israel. I reminded Elie of Robbie’s suitcase photo and wondered if Rabbi Lau had it. Elie asked me to bring it. I borrowed it from Robbie and made an 8 x 11 enlargement. At the event, when Elie was preparing to go on stage, we were sitting quite far back when I spotted a slight commotion with him motioning to get to him quickly. I ran down, passed it off and Elie calmly walked to the lectern. He made some beautiful, touching remarks to Lulek and then handed him the photo.
"I shall never forget it. Obviously, Rabbi Lau had prepared some remarks but he was speechless. He covered his face with both hands. For one of those minutes that seem like an eternity, he composed himself and then began a probably quite different address. He had not seen the photo before. He showed the photo to everyone and said, ‘Here I am with my possessions,’ he said. ‘That little suitcase was my apartment.’
"And from there he soared."
Returning to Vancouver, Robert Krell told Robbie Waisman about the occasion, whereupon Waisman wrote to his long-time friend in Jerusalem. The Rabbi wrote back to say he had placed the picture on the wall near his front door so that he would see it every day.
"It came as a complete surprise to me,” says Rabbi Lau. “As soon as my children saw it, they all said, 'There's the suitcase!' Now, when I leave my house every day, on one side of the door is the mezuzah; on the other side is this photograph. [A mezuzah fixed to a doorpost reminds a Jew they have a covenant with God.]
"Each time I see it, it says the same thing to me: 'Yisrael, look at Lulek. Now your task is to justify the fact that you were saved. You must carry out your parents' mission; you must keep the chain unbroken. This is from whence you came.' And across from the photo, the mezuzah tells me 'before Whom I'm destined to give an accounting.'"
The Holocaust can never be forgotten by those who lived it. Rabbi Lau has stressed it must also never be forgotten by those who didn’t live through it, particularly Jews.
In 2017, he told interviewer Sophie Shevardnadze:
"The Germans did not want to only annihilate the Jewish people physically. They wanted to annihilate Judaism and not only the Jews. Also, the Jewish culture and tradition. A proof of that is that the first thing they did ten months before the war began was the Kristallnacht. 1046 synagogues throughout Germany were destroyed in one night. This was planned in the night between the 8th and 9th of November 1938. This is what makes the Jewish people so special and what makes them a people: Their synagogues and the Torah scrolls, the siddur, the Tanach, the Chumach, and everything else. They destroyed the synagogues because they understand that this is how they can break the spirit of the Jewish people. They fought against the body and the Jewish spirit. Now you need to understand one thing: If I, G-d forbid, leave my tradition behind: no Tallit, no Tephillin, no synagogue, no Siddur, no Shabbat, no Sedder and no Chanukah, no Kosher and no Mikveh, and no nothing, I am letting them win. I will be doing exactly what they wanted to achieve. My grandfather wanted me to remain Jewish, and also my father. The Nazis did not want me to remain Jewish. They did not want any Jew to remain. So whom should I listen to? To my father and my grandfather? To my grandmother and my mother? Or should I have listened to those murderers? One thing is clear to me: if I want to help the Nazis finish their work, I must divorce myself from my Judaism, from my religion, from my tradition and my faith. Is that what I should do? Or should I show them, by hook and by crook, ‘I was Jewish, I am Jewish and I will remain Jewish?’ We shouldn’t play into the hands of our murderers. We must show them, and to the whole world, that we are a people with a rich history and with a great future. Am Chai Vekayam."
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Rabbi Meir Lau was in Vancouver for the inauguration of the Schara Tzedeck Cemetery Sanctuary, at which time Robert Krell had the pleasure of reuniting Lulek with Romek (Robbie Waisman).
Rabbi Lau’s memoir in Hebrew, Al Tishlakh Yad’kha El Ha’Na’ar, has been translated into many languages.
Rabbi Lau’s memoir in Hebrew, Al Tishlakh Yad’kha El Ha’Na’ar (Yediot Safarim 2011) has been translated into many languages, including English, as Out of the Depths: The Story of a Child in Buchenwald (Sterling 2011), translated by Shira Leibowitz Schmidt and Jessica Setbon. The title is a derivation of a quote from Akedat Yitzchak (The Binding of Isaac). Referring to the Holocaust in 2017, Rabbi Lau told interviewer Sophie Shevardnadze, “It was a very, very long and dark, six-year tunnel.”
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
IMAGE CAPTION: Having survived Buchenwald, the boy holding the flag in a refugee compound near Haifa maintained his family's 1,000-year chain of rabbis as Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel (1993 to 2003).
LULEK'S STORY
"I feel amazed when I contemplate the chain of miracles that happened to me."-- Rabbi Meir Lau ("Lulek")
*
The iconic photograph of a boy clutching a Buchenwald banner was taken by one of the founders of photojournalism, Tim Gidal, on July 17, 1945. The date was the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, Tisha B'Av, an annual day of fasting to recall disastrous events in Judaism.
The cheerful and resolute child had disembarked from France with an English visa on a refugee ship that docked at Atlit, Palestine (south of Haifa, before the state of Israel was founded in 1948). At the time, the boy believed the only person who knew him in Israel was his brother who had endured the camps with him.
Entitled "Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, arrival at Atlit, Palestine, 1945," this image was purchased by Yosef Wosk from Tim Gidal when they met in Jerusalem in 1994, two years before Gidal died. Known only as “Lulek” in the concentration camps, the boy in the photo would become Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel 48 years later, at which time he invited the famously crusty Jewish photographer Gidal to a private reception in order to share emotional reflections regarding the photo.
When Rabbi Lau visited Vancouver for an event at Congregation Beth Hamidrash in February of 2008, Yosef Wosk showed him the photo and Rabbi Lau confirmed he was the subject. In Hebrew, on the back of the picture, Rabbi Lau wrote "With the help of Heaven. Vancouver, 22nd of Adar I, 5768. To Rabbi Yosef Wosk, may God give him life and guard him. Dedicated with the best of blessings and heartfelt wishes. Israel Meir Lau."
The Polish-born boy in the photo was two years old at the outset of World War II and almost eight years old when American soldiers liberated him from Buchenwald. As such, the little flag bearer was one of the world’s youngest survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.
For several years, the boy known as Lulek had been lovingly and steadfastly protected, first by his older brother Naphtali, nicknamed "Tulek", who was thirteen when the war was declared, then by an 18-year-old Russian who Lulek knew only as Fyodor. More than twice his brother’s age, Tulek had been told by his father that he must save Lulek so that one of them could continue the family’s rabbinical tradition that stretched for 37 generations. Another brother, Chiko, had left for Romania shortly before the war and their oldest brother, Samuel Yitzchak ("Milik"), was sent to Treblinka where their father also perished.
When Tulek and Lulek became separated in Buchenwald, Tulek’s parting words were to get to Eretz Yisrael. At age seven, Lulek wasn’t sure where or what that was. He found out more about this wonderland called Eretz Yisrael later when he was sent to a remarkable rehabilitation program for 426 displaced children at an abandoned sanitorium at Ecouis in Normandy, France.
Among the Jewish youngsters at Ecouis were Romanian-born Elie Wiesel, who introduced the term Holocaust, and Polish-born Robbie Waisman of Vancouver. Psychologists assumed such traumatized boys would not successfully re-integrate into society. Instead, Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and Robbie Waisman became a successful business man in Western Canada.
Born on June 1, 1937 as Yisrael Meir Lau, the diminutive "Lulek" would also become Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv and Chairman of Yad Vashem. His protective brother Naphtali, the heroic “Tulek”, served as General Consul of Israel in New York, as an assistant to both Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres in the Ministry of Defence, and wrote a memoir, Balaam's Prophecy.
"My earliest memory," Rabbi Lau told Mishpacha magazine, in 2006, “is that of my father, standing with the rest of the Jews in the courtyard of the main shul, as the Germans 'selected' those who would be deported that day. That's the image that stays with me always, wherever I go.
Everyone in the Jewish community of Piotrkow Trybunalski had gathered near the Great Synagogue where his father, the chief rabbi—and the last one—at age 50, was confronted by the chief Gestapo officer Herdorf who was always accompanied by a large and threatening dog with him. Of the 60,000 inhabitants of Piotrkow, there were 26,000 Jews. Nearly all of them perished. The synagogue still stands but for seventy years it has been used as a library.
"I'm a five-year-old boy, stretching myself up as high as I can, to see my father. He's standing in the centre, with his impressive beard and his black rabbinical garb, and all the Jews are crowded around him.”
"Suddenly a member of the Gestapo strides over to him and hits him hard on his back [with a rubber club]. My father reels forward from the blow, but straightens himself immediately. He's mustering all his strength so as not to fall at the feet of the German and cause his fellow Jews to lose morale.
"Then comes another blow, and another. My father makes a mighty effort not to lose his balance, to help the members of his kehillah, his community, keep up their courage."
The excuse for the beating was that his father had not shaved his beard. The older Jews had to shave their beards in the ghetto and he had been the only one who had refused. He did to uplift the morale of the community. If he had shaved his beard, Rabbi Lau has since avowed, the people would feel they would never be Jewish again.
"They used to see him as the spiritual leader of the city,” Rabbi Lau told interviewer Sophie Shevardnadze (granddaughter of Edouard Shevardnadze) in 2015. "He was a nice man, a very-very charming person…" Lau has also described his father as tall and handsome, with two Ph.Ds from the University of Vienna, and an author.
Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau can shut his eyes and still hear the sounds of barking dogs and boots pounding on pavement as children are torn from their parents' arms with the Gestapo wielding clubs and screaming, "Schnell, schnell!"
"The worst part of it was witnessing the humiliation,” he has said. “A child can't bear to see his father, the hero he looks up to and identifies with, being demeaned. Today, as I look back on those six years of war, it's clear to me that it wasn't the hunger, nor the cold, nor the physical pain of being hit, but the humiliation.
"To see your father beaten with a club, kicked by hobnailed boots, threatened by a dog, almost falling to the ground, degraded before everyone – that's a picture that stays with a child.
"But I hold on to the other part of the memory, too. I see my father, with tremendous moral courage, keeping himself from falling, not begging for mercy, standing up straight in front of the Gestapo officer. This erases my feelings of helplessness."
Some 24,000 Jews from Piotrkow were herded into cattle cars between October 14 and 21, 1942. Lulek's older brother, Naphtali, at 16, was grabbed in the street by the Nazis and forced to help build the railway tracks from Auschwitz to Birkenau.
At age six, Lulek accompanied his mother and another brother from their house next to the Synagogue to Jerusalimska Street in the ghetto. She saved him on several occasions, and had always comforted him as best she could. Once, returning to their empty house at 21 Pisudski Street, he had heard a scream in the street. “I stood on the bed to look. A young woman with a baby in her arms was lying in a pool of blood in the street while a Gestapo man was kicking her, looking for jewelry.” His mother soothed him back to sleep.
Initially, Lulek's mother managed a community kitchen in the ghetto. Eventually, she went into hiding with Lulek for three days in the attic of a deserted house. His mother made honey cookies for when the Gestapo troops searched the house. That way children could be persuaded to say absolutely quiet. Ten people in an attic, above a bathroom, were not found.
Lulek's father believed his family would never be able to escape from the city if he stayed with them. He was too well-known. "They would search ever place until they found me," he told them. "If I try to hide, they will also find other Jews who have a chance to survive."
Lulek is haunted by the memory of being separated from his mother, Chaya Lau, in November of 1944. At age seven-and-a-half, in November, Lulek found himself on a train platform where Germans were once more shouting, "Schnell, schnell!" He remembers his mother giving him an abrupt shove, sending him over to her husband and his older brother on the other side, away from the women and children. 'Tulek!' she called out to his brother. 'Take Lulek! Goodbye, Tulek! Goodbye, Lulek!'
His brother Tulek remembers the moment differently. "At the last possible moment," he has said, "I tore Lulek out of my mother’s arms."
Lulek only knew that he had been separated from his mother. He took out his rage on his brother, Tulek, hammering on his chest with my little fists. Tulek could barely restrain him. Lulek had no way of knowing this was a calculated gamble, hoping his life could be saved if he could somehow survive with his brother as a labourer. It was a terribly cold at the train station. His mother was pushed towards the train. The gates were closed. The women were likely sent to Ravensbruck. "The last picture I remember," Rabbi Lau said in 2015, "was the fog of the locomotive and beyond this fog we saw mother."
When they made it to the Czenstochova (Stokowa) labor camp for the Hassag Werke, a factory for the repair of tanks, at first Lulek was hidden under a bed while the men went to work. Inevitably, he and some other children were discovered and rounded before the Gestapo leader named Kiesling. There were about ten children. This time it was Lulek’s turn to be brave. He had to somehow make himself worthy of not being murdered.
Possibly it was seeing his father’s show of pride in the courtyard of the main shul that emboldened him.
"We boys were standing in a row in front of the German commander, each of us with his father behind him. In my case, since I was already an orphan, my brother Naphtali stood behind me. The commander was shouting, 'What do I need these accursed children for? They're non-productive and they're costing me money. We'll have to get rid of them!'
"While the other boys trembled with fear, I used my foot to push some snow and gravel into a little pile. It was about two inches high, but I imagined that if I stood on this little hillock, I'd look taller and my words would carry more weight, and maybe then the commander wouldn't kill us all.
"I took a step forward, stood on my 'platform,' and said, 'Sir! Why do you say we aren't productive? In the Piotrkow ghetto, I worked in the glass factory for eight hours a day nonstop, carrying huge bottles of drinking water for the workers in the factory, where the temperature was 140 degrees. For a whole year I did this, in snow, in storms, in heat, carrying heavy bottles into that blazing hot room. And then I was only five and a half years old. Now that I'm so much bigger, I can do more than that. If I could work in the Hortenzia glass factory, why can't I work here?'
"If witnesses hadn't told me that this really happened, I wouldn't believe it myself; I would think my memory was playing tricks on me. But the fact is that the Nazi officer was convinced. The Almighty gave me confidence and put the right words into my mouth.
"This was my first speech. He was amazed – a child, a Jewish child, dares to speak to him! And this was the end of 1944, and still, a Jew has opened his mouth and said something.
"As a result of my little speech, the commander let it be known that he would redeem any child in the camp for a price of 1,000 marks. Our mother had foreseen circumstances like these and provided us with two diamonds and a gold watch."
A Jewish dentist had filled her tooth with a half-carat diamond, and she had sewn a two-carat stone into the lining of her coat. These valuables were transferred to her sons and proved to be lifesavers, first in the Czenstochova munitions factory, later in Buchenwald. They facilitated the subterfuge that he was Polish rather than Jewish.
Meanwhile, the heroism of Lulek's brother was seemingly inexhaustible. In January of 1945, when they were being loaded onto another train station, a Gestapo officer noticed how young Lulek was. He was separated from Naphtali and flung into a group of about fifty women, with a few children, on train car slated to be detached and sent elsewhere from the rest.
Naphtali was in a crowded car of all men at one of other end of the transport. At night, at each station, when the train stopped, Naphtali somehow managed to extricate himself, crawl along the tracks and call out, "Lulek! Lulek!" He counted the cars he checked each time. After doing this seven times, he finally located his little brother, in the women’s car, clinging to a feather pillow his mother had given him. Once he had been located, Lulek had to crawl over dead bodies to be extricated. The brothers were able to crawl back to the men’s car. In the darkness, before they climbed in, Naphtali had the foresight to fill a hat with snow for some clean water to drink.
The women’s car was later detached.
The brothers were headed for a new concentration camp near the city of Weimar, in north-east Germany. The first thing they saw was a group of men in striped uniforms, shoveling snow. "We asked them where we were," Rabbi Lau later recalled. “In reply, they drew their forefingers across their throats.”
Tulek understood this would be a place for men only. Malnourished, Lulek didn’t have even one tooth. He was much closer to being a baby than a man. Although he was a child of seven-and-a-half, he looked more like a five-year-old. Knowing the Gestapo would likely kill Lulek on the spot, Tulek emptied his sack of belongings and said, "Lulek, get in."
In this way, the future Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel was smuggled into Buchenwald, carried in a sack over his brother’s shoulder. When they got off the train there was an oven into which they had to toss all their belongings. They imagined the worst. Tulek quickly concocted a story. Lulek was a Polish boy who had been unfairly captured while playing with some Jewish friends. They conversed only in Polish.
The gold watch their Mama had given Tulek was used to bribe one of the German wardens to ignore the presence of Lulek who would otherwise have been deemed dispensable.
"We were taken to a tunnel equipped with a row of showerheads. By 1945, everybody knew what to expect from showerheads in a Nazi camp, and we prepared to die a miserable death. One of the men in our group suddenly fell down dead. Ever since we left the Piotrkow ghetto, he'd been keeping a cyanide capsule hidden under a temporary filling in his tooth, and he'd decided this was the moment to use it. But the showerheads were turned on, and ice cold water sprayed out. I don't know how to describe the life-giving warmth we felt from that icy water."
After they had been doused in chlorine, the Czech vaccinator at the end of another long queue realized Lulek was too small for a full dose of vaccine. Clearly his brother, Tulek, was lieing when he said the boy was fifteen. The line-up had to proceed quickly. They had only seconds to decide Lulek’s fate. "I am a communist," said the man. "I don’t want to kill him." Instinctively, Tulek told the truth. Lulek was given a half-dose. Only then were the boys certain this medical officer was a fellow prisoner.
Tulek's prisoner number was 117029 and Lulek's was 117030. In most other camps, such numbers were tattooed onto the left arm but in Buchenwald, unless a prisoner had previously in Auschwitz, the numbers were sewn into their shirtsleeves. "I was humiliated," Rabbi Lau later wrote, "when I found out that other deported persons had read tattoos. Nobody was going to believe that I had been in camp! So I wrote my number on my arm with ink but it disappeared after the first bath."
Sometimes it was twenty degrees below zero. The men wore wooden clogs, without socks. Often, they would be forced to stand outside for three hours with no blanket, no sweater. No medicines. Rotted teeth. The beatings. The diseases. "They talk about those who were murdered and those who survived," Rabbi Lau has said, as an old man, “but how did they survive? I am not even talking about mentally surviving—or psychologically. But physically, you cannot explain it. As much as we will tell you about the Shoah, you will never fully comprehend it. Never. Even those who were there cannot really understand. So, explaining it is impossible.”
"Many ask, 'Why did you not escape?' I wouldn't know where to go. I did not know the alphabet in any language until I was eight. I never went to school, not even one day.
At first, they joined about 2,000 men in Block 52 where the stench was unbearable. It was customary to relieve oneself right in the barracks.
Each prisoner’s striped pajamas were adorned with a red patch on which there was printed a black letter. P was for Pollaks. R was for Russian. G was for Germany. J was for Juden.
The diamond was used to affix a piece of cloth from a dead Polish prisoner onto Lulek's sleeve. Tulek was sent to Barracks 59, the Jewish barracks. He was hitched to a wagon with three other prisoners and forced to haul corpses to the crematorium. When they became separated, a German named Hamman took pity on Lulek and he was moved to Barracks 8, for relatively privileged senior inmates. Then he was taken to Barracks 66, with mostly Russians. There he met a Russian boy, aged 18-and-a-half, from Rostov-na-Don, named Feodor Mickhailichenko, who soon became his main guardian.
In order to qualify as a labourer, Lulek was accorded the job of cleaning the entire barracks daily, arranging beds and mattresses, cleaning the toilets. Feodor gathered his Russian friends and made a speech: "Lulek has no father, probably has no mother. Now he’s going to lose his childhood also. We can save his childhood, at least, if not his parents. We will do the cleaning job instead of him." Thereafter Fyodor and his friends woke up one hour earlier, at 5 o’clock, before the work, and did all his work for him each day.
Buchenwald was a strange amalgam. There were political prisoners that included Konrad Adenauer, the anti-Hitler mayor of Koln who would later become the first Chancellor of West Germany. Leon Blum would be a Prime Minister of France. There were two Nobel laureates in literature, one from Spain, one from France. Tiny Lulek was once again deemed special and adopted almost like a mascot.
Promising to one day adopt Lulek if they ever escaped, Fyodor stole potatoes and cooked up soup for him and knitted him earmuffs with some stolen wool. "When the Germans yelled hats off at roll call in assembly," he later told Robert Krell, “my ears stayed nice and warm.”
In 2008, Rabbi Lau made contact with two of Fyodor's daughters Elena and Juliya who had made a documentary about him. Until that time, Rabbi Lau had never known his savior’s name. He had not known that the only time Fyodor had ever been beaten was not by German guards, but rather by some fellow Soviets. From this documentary he learned that Fyodor had once stolen a bicycle for him so that Lulek could have the have the experience of riding a bicycle.
Bizarrely, when Fyodor was teaching Lulek how to ride, they were on the bicycle together and fell together. "He was sitting behind me and we were injured and I had blood on my face. I was bleeding. I learn his friends had beat him because they were angry. They said, 'Why didn't you take care of the child? Look at his face, he’s bleeding because of you!'"
By early April, 1945, rumours had reached the prisoners that Germany was losing the war. The last time they saw one another in Buchenwald, Tulek said, "They're taking me away. This is the end of the world." Lulek felt every word was engraved on his heart. "You're going to be left alone now. But you still have friends. Maybe a miracle will happen and you'll survive. I just wanted to tell you: There's a place called Eretz Yisrael. Repeat after me: Eretz Yisrael."
The words meant nothing at the time. "Eretz Yisrael is the home of the Jews," Naphtali explained. "It's the only place in the world where they don't kill us. If you survive, there will be people who will want to take you to live with them, because you're a cute little boy. You're not going anyplace. Only to Eretz Yisrael. We have an uncle there. Say that you're Rabbi Lau's son, and tell them to find your uncle. Goodbye, Lulek. Remember: Eretz Yisrael."
In their last weeks in Buchenwald, some older boys hid Lulek, the youngest, in a rubbish box. Naphtali was put on a train. During the night he managed to jump out the window with two others, but instead of hiding, he says he walked for two days and two nights towards Buchenwald. “I did not want to lose Lulek,” he wrote. With supernatural strength, he crawled into the camp, and then he collapsed.
“He hadn't forgotten our father and the promise he had made to him,” Rabbi Lau says, “or the sound of our mother's voice shouting, 'Take care of Lulek!' Not a day in my life goes by without my thinking of Naphtali. He was given a mission: to save my life. And he carried it out."
[Lulek would not marry until 1956 when he felt financially secure as a journalist. He believes he has led a normal and satisfying life in the Holy Land. “Other people make plans, strive for success, while I have the impression that I have achieved more than I could ever have hoped for and will do nothing extraordinary to improve my status. I must be the only person in Israel who has never asked for an increase or a bonus. I am happy with what I have.”]
On April 11th, Tulek was put into quarantine with typhus. Lulek had the measles. They both heard the American planes flying low over Buchenwald. Liberation was another nightmare. The forces under General Patton were bombing the Buchenwald area.
Lulek's Russian protector Fyodor understood a bomb could easily destroy their barracks. From their barracks, they ran towards the main gate but it was still closed. Around them were many injured people and a heap of corpses. Fyodor threw Lulek to the ground and covered him with his own body during the bombings and a flurry of bullets.
In the confusion, they became separated. Tired of running, Lulek hid behind the corpses. Finally, an American command car broke through the gate. Naturally, when uniformed American soldiers appeared at Buchenwald in 1945, Lulek was frightened. More men in uniforms with guns. The liberators were themselves frightened. They looked at the ghastly corpses and the emaciated Jews with horror. Although Lulek wanted to flee, there was nowhere to go.
That’s when a Jewish chaplain wearing a helmet, Rabbi Herschel Schachter, got out of an army jeep and moved towards the pile of bodies. He had driven five miles to reach the site with his assistant, Private Hyman Schulman, after the German guards had fled as American forces arrived earlier in the day.
Schachter later recalled, “I caught a glimpse of a tall chimney with billowing smoke still curling upward… I scarcely could believe my eyes. There I stood, face to face with piles of dead bodies strewn around, waiting to be shoveled into the furnace that was still hot. It was just an incredible, harrowing sight. I stood there for a while in utter confusion and disbelief. I then began to really feel what this horror was all about.”
Lulek did not take flight. Rabbi Schachter, a Jew from the Bronx, took out his pistol and slowly walked around the pile. There he saw two eyes with life in them. He discovered an almost-eight-year-old boy, staring back, wide-eyed and distrustful. Trembling, Rabbi Schacter put his gun away. The American rabbi picked him up, held him tightly, and cried. He was mystified. What was a child doing in hell?
“How old are you, mein kind?” he gently asked, in Yiddish.
"'What difference does it make?' Lulek answered. “I'm older than you, anyway.”
The American rabbi was startled. Perhaps this child was insane. Was it meant to be some kind of riddle. He played along.
“Why do you think you're older than me?”
“Because you can smile and cry like a small child,” Lulek replied. “I haven't laughed in a long time, and crying is not something I’ve done for years. So, which one of us is older?'"
Rabbi Lau himself used to question if this story really happened. For many years, like so many other survivors, he never mentioned the camps, not even to his uncle. The first time he began talking about his experiences was during the Eichmann trial. His brother Naphtali had been sent to attend the trial as a reporter for the Haaretz newspaper, but he found the strain too great and left Jerusalem. It was only then that Lulek and Tulek exchanged their memories of the camps for the first time.
Rabbi Lau had kept the details of liberation to himself until he heard Rabbi Hershel Schachter repeat the same story to President Ronald Reagan when the three of them were brought together on April 11, 1983 (exactly 38 years after liberation) in Annapolis, Maryland. The details that Rabbi Schachter repeated to President Reagan were the same as he recalled.
“I thought that it is my imagination, a fantasy,” Rabbi Lau recalls. “But he told it the same way. He saw someone looking at him with vivid eyes, he was afraid that it was a German that wanted to kill him. He took out his pistol and very carefully went around this heap, and he saw a child, hiding himself, full of fear. He understood that child must be a Jewish child. He took me in his arms, he embraced me and started to cry…”
After Rabbi Schachter had repeated his version of their meeting, the U.S. Navy orchestra played the Song of the Partisans. This was the sign for Rabbi Lau to come from behind the curtains onto the stage. He hugged Rabbi Schachter. Then President Reagan came forward to shake Rabbi Lau’s hand. The President of the United States spoke clearly, so that all the microphones pick up his words: “Let me touch a living legend.”
*
Not a day goes by when the Holocaust does not re-enter Rabbi Lau’s awareness. For this reason, he cherishes a second photo, this one given as a gift by Robert Waisman and Robert Krell, via Elie Wiesel.
This second portrait was taken only slightly earlier in 1945. In this image, Lulek is holding a small suitcase, preparing for the journey from France to his new homeland.
"An American soldier donated an old suitcase to me from the army surplus storehouse," he has recalled. "It went with me to Eretz Yisrael, and it held everything I owned, as I wandered from one educational institution to another.
"By the time I got married, it was so shabby that my wife wanted to throw it out, but I refused to part with it. 'This was my house [referring to the little suitcase],' I told her. 'If our children ever complain, I'll show it to them and say, ‘This is what your father had when he was a boy.’
"I put it up in the storage loft of our building, and when we moved to another apartment, I came back for it. I climbed seventy-five steps to retrieve it, but I found nothing there but the handle. The suitcase had disintegrated. But I have the photo. Elie Wiesel, who was with me in Buchenwald, presented it to me at a Bundist event; he’d first seen it in Vancouver."
The story of how Elie Wiesel came present the framed photograph from Vancouver to Rabbi Lau at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York has been told by Robert Krell.
"We invited Elie Wiesel to Vancouver for an event. During that visit, Leon and Evelyn Kahn threw a cocktail party. Robbie Waisman had undergone gall bladder surgery but he and Gloria wanted to come. Marilyn and I picked them up and we brought them. Robbie got out of his wheel chair and walked in under his own power. I had asked Robbie to bring his photo album of the Buchenwald boys, with pictures mainly taken by American soldiers. “That night, Elie, Robbie and I found a corner to hide in and they identified everyone in the photos. One was of eight-year-old Lulek with the suitcase and another was the cover photo of the boys at Ecouis that we used for the book The Boys of Buchenwald, showing both Robbie (Romek) and Rabbi Lau (Lulek) on the cover.
"Later, when I was invited to speak at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, I told Elie I was coming. He asked Marilyn and me to attend an evening in honour of Rabbi Lau, who was then chief Rabbi of Israel. I reminded Elie of Robbie’s suitcase photo and wondered if Rabbi Lau had it. Elie asked me to bring it. I borrowed it from Robbie and made an 8 x 11 enlargement. At the event, when Elie was preparing to go on stage, we were sitting quite far back when I spotted a slight commotion with him motioning to get to him quickly. I ran down, passed it off and Elie calmly walked to the lectern. He made some beautiful, touching remarks to Lulek and then handed him the photo.
"I shall never forget it. Obviously, Rabbi Lau had prepared some remarks but he was speechless. He covered his face with both hands. For one of those minutes that seem like an eternity, he composed himself and then began a probably quite different address. He had not seen the photo before. He showed the photo to everyone and said, ‘Here I am with my possessions,’ he said. ‘That little suitcase was my apartment.’
"And from there he soared."
Returning to Vancouver, Robert Krell told Robbie Waisman about the occasion, whereupon Waisman wrote to his long-time friend in Jerusalem. The Rabbi wrote back to say he had placed the picture on the wall near his front door so that he would see it every day.
"It came as a complete surprise to me,” says Rabbi Lau. “As soon as my children saw it, they all said, 'There's the suitcase!' Now, when I leave my house every day, on one side of the door is the mezuzah; on the other side is this photograph. [A mezuzah fixed to a doorpost reminds a Jew they have a covenant with God.]
"Each time I see it, it says the same thing to me: 'Yisrael, look at Lulek. Now your task is to justify the fact that you were saved. You must carry out your parents' mission; you must keep the chain unbroken. This is from whence you came.' And across from the photo, the mezuzah tells me 'before Whom I'm destined to give an accounting.'"
The Holocaust can never be forgotten by those who lived it. Rabbi Lau has stressed it must also never be forgotten by those who didn’t live through it, particularly Jews.
In 2017, he told interviewer Sophie Shevardnadze:
"The Germans did not want to only annihilate the Jewish people physically. They wanted to annihilate Judaism and not only the Jews. Also, the Jewish culture and tradition. A proof of that is that the first thing they did ten months before the war began was the Kristallnacht. 1046 synagogues throughout Germany were destroyed in one night. This was planned in the night between the 8th and 9th of November 1938. This is what makes the Jewish people so special and what makes them a people: Their synagogues and the Torah scrolls, the siddur, the Tanach, the Chumach, and everything else. They destroyed the synagogues because they understand that this is how they can break the spirit of the Jewish people. They fought against the body and the Jewish spirit. Now you need to understand one thing: If I, G-d forbid, leave my tradition behind: no Tallit, no Tephillin, no synagogue, no Siddur, no Shabbat, no Sedder and no Chanukah, no Kosher and no Mikveh, and no nothing, I am letting them win. I will be doing exactly what they wanted to achieve. My grandfather wanted me to remain Jewish, and also my father. The Nazis did not want me to remain Jewish. They did not want any Jew to remain. So whom should I listen to? To my father and my grandfather? To my grandmother and my mother? Or should I have listened to those murderers? One thing is clear to me: if I want to help the Nazis finish their work, I must divorce myself from my Judaism, from my religion, from my tradition and my faith. Is that what I should do? Or should I show them, by hook and by crook, ‘I was Jewish, I am Jewish and I will remain Jewish?’ We shouldn’t play into the hands of our murderers. We must show them, and to the whole world, that we are a people with a rich history and with a great future. Am Chai Vekayam."
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Rabbi Meir Lau was in Vancouver for the inauguration of the Schara Tzedeck Cemetery Sanctuary, at which time Robert Krell had the pleasure of reuniting Lulek with Romek (Robbie Waisman).
Rabbi Lau’s memoir in Hebrew, Al Tishlakh Yad’kha El Ha’Na’ar, has been translated into many languages.
Rabbi Lau’s memoir in Hebrew, Al Tishlakh Yad’kha El Ha’Na’ar (Yediot Safarim 2011) has been translated into many languages, including English, as Out of the Depths: The Story of a Child in Buchenwald (Sterling 2011), translated by Shira Leibowitz Schmidt and Jessica Setbon. The title is a derivation of a quote from Akedat Yitzchak (The Binding of Isaac). Referring to the Holocaust in 2017, Rabbi Lau told interviewer Sophie Shevardnadze, “It was a very, very long and dark, six-year tunnel.”
Liberated from Buchenwald, Lulek was given a Hitler Youth uniform because he had no other clothing. According to his autobiography, Out of the Depths, an American soldier at Buchenwald also gave him a rifle which he slung over his shoulder after asking what he wanted to do with his life. “I want to take revenge,” he said, at age eight. “Hearing this,” Rabbi Lau writes, “he gave me his rifle, and I kept it with me on my trip through Germany to Paris, then on to Lyons, Marseille, Genoa.”
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
