The Boy From Block 66: A WW2 Survival Novel Based on a True Story by Limor Regev

Author:Limor Regev [Regev, Limor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Autumn, 1944.

I turned fourteen in September.

I did not even remember it was my birthday. I had no awareness of the date or its meaning.

A year had passed since my bar mitzvah. One year - an eternity.

The Tishrei holidays passed us by. A new year of the Hebrew calendar began, without a prayer or the blowing of the shofar for the first time in my life.

Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in the Hebrew calendar, was just another day in Auschwitz. The apathy and our daily struggle for survival disrupted the centuries-old connection to the tradition from which we came. The struggle for survival in the camps was accompanied by an almost total disconnect from the past, even in the religious sense. Our detachment from the dimension of time, and the practical difficulty of keeping a tradition without a tallit, Tefillin, and communal prayer services all contributed to this indifference.

In addition, many of us had lost faith. God was not with us there, and I believe that a great many of the camp inmates found themselves in a particularly severe spiritual crisis, when not only was their physical world shattered, but also their belief in religion.

Was that why we were the Chosen People? Chosen to be gassed, starved to death, and die from deadly disease?

Eli Wiesel, who was also at Buna at that time though we did not know it then, aptly described the conflict in the hearts of many Jews, between tradition and religious belief and the sense that God had abandoned them. In his book “Night” Wiesel describes his feelings in the face of the cremations he witnessed on the day he arrived in Birkenau: “Why must I sanctify His name? The Lord God, King of the world, All Powerful God…Is silent. Why should I acknowledge Him?”

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