I once met a fellow who was born in Germany, but managed to get out in 1938 in the nick of time. Some people don’t think of such a person as a survivor in the same way as someone who survived the death camps, but Shmuel (not his real name) lost his entire family; he was the only one who managed to get out. And after three years in Nazi Germany, he lived on the run for two more years before finally escaping to Cuba. It is a mitzvah to hear such people’s stories in order to remember, and I asked him what made him realize it was time to get out, when the rest of his family could not see the writing on the wall.
It was a standard German-Jewish Holocaust story: ‘it can’t happen here’ or ‘the Jews have been through this before; we’ll get through this as well’…. And to be honest, he wasn’t overly concerned when Hitler came to power in 1933; he was a young man with his whole life ahead of him, and everyone around him was saying it wouldn’t last, and that the Jews were the mainstay of the German economy, whom Hitler needed to get the country back on its feet. And he accepted all of this – until one sunny afternoon in Hamburg.
He could hear them before he could see them: loud laughter and yelling; a large crowd having a good time on one of the major avenues, and even a few passing policemen seemed to be enjoying a good time. He was in a motor vehicle and so thought he would be able to pass un-noticed, but someone spotted the driver and pulled all of them out of the car. A few seconds and a bloody nose later, he was on his hands and knees with a scrub-brush trying to erase words scrawled in red paint on the sidewalk.
Trying to avoid a beating, he scrubbed with enthusiasm while he took in the circumstances: they were in front of a German police station and they were scrubbing a red Star of David that had been scrawled on the sidewalk. Had someone secretly scrawled the Star of David in an act of defiance? Or were the Germans taking pleasure in making Jews rub out their own symbol? All he knew was that he was determined to rub out the star as quickly as he could and get out of there. And all the while he was scrubbing, as the occasional boot came flying out of the crowd kicking one of them or one of the brushes, he kept thinking what a dumb thing it was for someone to scrawl a Star of David in such a place, and how easy it was for someone to act out their own private little act of defiance, without considering that someone else would have to pay the price.
The beginning of the Holocaust in Germany and Austria was like that: a mixture of what made sense, and what made no sense. And the Jews were constantly trying to make sense of it all. And all the while he was on his knees, surrounded by a crowd of jeering Germans he was able to scrub because it made sense: what else would German policemen do upon discovering such a piece of graffiti on the street in front of their station? So he scrubbed harder, trying to avoid the boots that came his way, determined to finish blotting out the Star of David and get home.
Finally, some time later, they were finished, and no trace was left of the red paint: the sidewalk was clean and the people seemed to be satisfied. And then a German police officer with a big grin on his face came out with a bucket full of… red paint, and forced one of the Jews to take a paintbrush and scrawl a new large Star of David on the pavement. And then he looked at all the Jews on their hands on knees, backs breaking from exhaustion, and screamed out “scrub!”, as the crowd howled with delight. And in that moment, Shmuel knew: this was not about logic, and whatever would follow would not have to make sense. There was no purpose to their hatred; they just wanted to break the Jews. It was time to get out.
There is a powerful message hidden in this story, which may help us to understand an oft-overlooked mitzvah that appears in the first of this week’s double portion