Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust by Yaffa Eliach

Author:Yaffa Eliach [Eliach, Yaffa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79449-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Based on a conversation of the Grand Rabbi of Bluzhov, Rabbi Israel Spira, with Aaron Frankel, January 1974.

Under the Blue Skies of Tel Aviv

ON AUGUST 25, 1942, THE GREAT AKTION TOOK PLACE IN THE ghetto of Bochnia. Five hundred women, children, and elderly people were shot at a nearby forest.1 At that time, Bronia was working at one of the ghetto’s many workshops. When she heard about the impending Aktion, Bronia and the children took refuge in a bunker together with Dora and her small children. They were in mortal fear that the children would cry and their hiding place would be discovered by the Germans. Bronia kept little Yitzhak at her breast and Dora, by profession a nurse, gave her small child Luminal.

In the bunker they heard terrible cries from next door. Leah Grossman and her children had been discovered. They heard her pleas to be shot first. They could hear the earthshaking lamentations of a mother witnessing the death of her beloved children, then the terrible silence following the volley of fire that pierced the mother’s heart. Leah Grossman was dead.

Early in the morning they crawled out of their bunker. Dora was carrying the body of her child, who had died from an overdose of Luminal. Bronia covered the eyes of her children so they should not see the dead covering the city streets.

When the ghetto returned to the strange normality that followed the Aktions, Bronia with a small pot of soup in her hands rushed to Feifush. As she neared his residence, her pulse quickened. Maybe he too was swallowed up last night by that beastly Aktion? But there, in his tiny cubicle, lying on a straw mattress on the bare floor, was Feifush.

Feifush was a young man from Palestine who had come to visit his parents in Poland. When the war broke out he was stranded in Poland. All his efforts to reach a port, or a neutral country, had ended in failure. His parents were now dead, murdered in their hometown. And Feifush, after much wandering and running from place to place, had found himself far away from his beloved Tel Aviv, dying from disease and starvation in the ghetto of Bochnia, where he had been befriended by Bronia. When Bronia brought him the soup, his only nourishment that day, he could hardly sit up. Bronia propped him up and fed him. As she fed him the soup, Feifush’s face became relaxed, and the pain in his eyes was replaced by a strange tranquility, an expression of peace and restfulness, rarely seen those days in Jewish eyes.

“You know, Mrs. Koczicki, when I lie here on my mattress in this corner of the earth where the sun never shines, I see my sunny Tel Aviv, the blue skies, the blue sea, the golden sands. But in my visions of my beloved Tel Aviv, I never see myself. Instead I see you walking in the streets of Tel Aviv, under its majestic blue skies, with your two children.

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