One of the fascinating postscripts to the tragedy of the Holocaust was the saga of the many Jewish children who were hidden during the war, especially in churches and monasteries across Europe, but whose parents did not survive to find them when the war was over.
Some of these children were six or seven years old, and though Jewish by birth, had for all intents and purposes grown up as Christian children with little recollection of their parents or their Jewish roots.
One of the individuals, who worked tirelessly to locate these lost children and bring them home to their people, was rabbi Herschel Schechter, a chaplain with the U.S. eighth army.
It was difficult to find these children, much less to prove that they were really Jewish, but Rabbi Schachter had an ingenious way of discovering which children amongst the multitude of refugees were really Jewish.
On Sunday mornings, while he was stationed in Poland, he would take a jeep and a couple of burly soldiers to guard him (the locals were less than predisposed to help a Jewish rabbi take Jewish children back into the fold….) and visit the local churches on Sunday mornings during mass.
Europe at the end of World War Two was teeming with refugees, including tens of thousands of children taken in by the church. Rabbi Schechter would stride up to the front of the church in full U.S. military uniform, and, staring out at the hundreds of children crowding the pews, would begin to recite, in a loud, booming voice, the Shema Yisrael. And then their eyes would give them away.
A few years ago, I told this story to a large audience, and an elderly gentleman came over to me afterwards and told me, with tears in his eyes, how much it meant to him that the story was still being told, because he had been one of those children. And the reason, he said, that the experience had been so powerful for him at the time, was because until that point in his life, he had never felt like he belonged, and one day, in walks this army Colonel, and starts saying words I could not understand, but I just knew I belonged.