Endings and beginnings: the black and white of life.
Sixty years later, the image still remains, burned into his memory, as if it were yesterday.
He was five and a half years old, but already an adult, standing in the central square (the umshlagplatz) of the Piyotrekov ghetto, next to the synagogue. His father, the Rabbi of the town, stood tall and proud in the middle of the square surrounded by the men of the village, distinguishable by his long full beard and his black rabbinic frock. The men were all on one side of the square and the women and children, by decree of the Nazis, off to one side.
Tension filled the air, with an intense, silent fear of the unknown, as they stood waiting in the square from where Jews were sent to… where?
Sixty years later Rav Yisrael Lau remembers watching as the commandant of the Gestapo approached his father, the Rabbi, with murder in his eyes. He stood opposite him and drew his mika, the meter-long rubber truncheon favored by the Gestapo, from his belt. Suddenly, without warning or provocation, he brought the truncheon full force down on his father