The Great Partnership by Jonathan Sacks

Author:Jonathan Sacks [Sacks, Rabbi Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4302-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

10

A Meaningful Life

It is as if

We had come to an end of the imagination,

Inanimate in an inert savoir.

Wallace Stevens1

The sad sight of human life untouched by transcendence.

Rebecca Goldstein2

Max Ostro was a young Jew living in Poland when the Nazis came. He and his family were rounded up. Together with one of his brothers and his father, he was herded into a cattle truck in a train bound for Treblinka. No one came back from Treblinka. It was an extermination camp. There, many of Poland’s three million Jews were gassed, burned and turned to ash.

In the train, barely able to breathe, his father held his two sons. He said to them, ‘Mein kinder, if you stay on the train you will die. It belongs to malach hamoves, the angel of death. I want you to davven maariv – pray the evening prayer. Then I want the two of you, when the opportunity presents itself, to jump. The Nazis will shoot. But one of you will survive. This I promise you: one of you will survive.’

The sons prayed. Both jumped from the train. The Nazis saw the movement and started firing. Max’s brother was killed instantly. Max, under cover of darkness, survived.

The family had hidden a sum of money which Max was able to recover, and with it he paid a farmer to hide him in his hay barn. Max survived this way for some time. Then came November 1944. The Nazi effort to round up and exterminate all remaining Jews intensified. Max later told his son that he had a dream at that time. In it he saw the Rebbe, the holy teacher his father had admired. The Rebbe told him, ‘It is no longer safe for you in the barn.’

So Max came to an arrangement with the farmer. He had himself buried in a grave in the ground with only a narrow space open to the sky. Through it Max was able to breathe. Once a week the farmer would come and bring something for Max to eat and drink. He survived like that, buried alive, for two months until the war came to an end.

Max eventually came to Britain, built a business, married and had two children. He went to the synagogue regularly, prayed every day, lived his life as an Orthodox Jew and gave much of the money he made to charity. He never spoke bitterly about the Holocaust, and though he sometimes wept for the family he had lost – he was the only survivor – he and the other survivors in Britain became a kind of extended family to one another.

I did not know Max well – I saw him from time to time at gatherings of Holocaust survivors. I knew his face, but not his story. While I was writing this book, he died and I went to comfort his son Maurice, whom I knew. That was when I heard his story. A book has been written about it.

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