Since 2014, we’ve taken our Rutgers students on life changing experiences to Poland. Poland trips are unique growth experience in that the combination of visiting Holocaust sites and Jewish communities of yesteryear, makes one’s heart completely open. Anything that needs to be said can be expressed in Poland.
On the final day of our 2014 journey, we sat in a circle in the women’s barracks in Auschwitz – Birkenau. We asked students to give testimony of their grandparents’ experiences. One inspired and growing student named Addie, addressed us. She told us how her grandmother arrived here with only her sister. The rest of her family had been exterminated. They made a pact to stay together through liberation, no matter what happened. Sadly, her grandmother’s sister died sending Addie’s grandmother, then a 15 year old girl, into a deep depression. She decided that there was no future and she must kill herself. The quickest and most painless way to do so was to throw oneself onto the electrified fence.
As she approached the fence, she felt a smash over her head. She looked up to see an enraged SS officer shouting at her. “You dirty Jew!” he shrieked, saliva spewing forth from his mouth. “You’re trying to take the easy way out! Well, I won’t let you!” He beat her over the head till she fell unconscious. Somehow, she was dragged back to the barracks. A few months later, she was liberated.
Addie told of the conflict of emotions. If not for the SS officer’s horrible cruelty, her grandmother wouldn’t have survived and Addie wouldn’t be alive to talk to us that day.
We marched out of Auschwitz that day to the tune of Yaakov Shweckey and Yonatan Razel’s “vehi she’amda.” As we approached the entrance of the camp, when cattle cars of death brought so many of our people to their final journey, we sang the high note over and over again. “Vihakadosh Boruch Hu Matzilaynu Miyadam,” Hashem saved us from their hand. We sang these words for 15 minutes, with a deep and elevated feeling not unlike one might experience at the close of Yom Kippur. I looked up at the night’s sky to notice a clear night, for the first time since our trip began. A full moon shined forth. I couldn’t help but think that the moon is a metaphor forKlal Yisroel. Sometimes we are big, sometimes small, but no matter what, we always come back.
The Gemara, Taanis 23A tells us of Choni Hameagel, the great circle maker who demanded that he wouldn’t leave the circle he had drawn in the dirt, until Hashem would give rain to the Jews of Eretz Yisroel during a drought. When Choni was older, he saw a man planting a carob tree. He asked, “How many years does it take until this tree bears fruit?” The man replied, “Up to 70.” Choni asked, “Why do you plant it?” The man said, “I came into a world with carob trees and I am planting them for my offspring.” The Gemara goes on to say that Choni slept for 70 years and woke up to a man harvesting the carob tree. It was the planter’s grandson.
Life is full of planting, plowing and preparing the ground to accomplish our aspirations and to realize our dreams. So often, we labor and toil, yet we see no results. Our efforts bear no fruit. Yet Choni’s story tells us that if we put in the hard work, if we struggle for the right thing, we will see the results. It just might take a lifetime, 70 years.
When Addie’s grandmother and so many others were in Auschwitz, they had no idea that anything would become of them. Surely they thought, they were the end of their family line. How could Klal Yisroel, the Jewish people, rebound after the horrors they experienced? There were no dreams, no hopes, no future.
Yet their tears, their struggles, efforts and toil DID bear fruit. Here was Addie, her granddaughter, inspiring a group of 46 students who walked out of Auschwitz as proud Jews, ready to actualize their inspiration. Addie has since married a Ben Torah and she and her husband have a beautiful family of their own. Addie’s grandmother’s carob tree had taken 70 years to grow and now it bears the most amazing fruit.
Rabbi Meir Goldberg is the director of Meor Rutgers Jewish Xperience.