A number of years ago, I met a wealthy businessman named Yaakov (not his real name…) from Caracas who was spending Pesach with his family at a hotel in Florida. Over the course of the festival, we struck up a friendship, and I discovered he was a Holocaust survivor who had been first in the Janowska road camp and later in Auschwitz. Towards the end of the week I summoned up the nerve to ask him if there was anything in particular that stood out in his mind as the reason he had survived. Without hesitation, he responded: “It was one mitzvah; the sukkos (festival holiday of Sukkoth, the feast of the tabernacles.) I spent in Auschwitz.
I guess my face must have registered surprise, because he immediately explained. When he arrived in Auschwitz in the middle of his thirteenth winter, one of the Kapos (barracks captains, often even more cruel than the Nazis… ) took a liking to him and arranged for him to be in charge of the daily rations to be given out to the prisoners at the end of the day. It was a job that would save his life. He spent the days in a small shed attached to the large barracks, responsible for dividing up the bread and soup to be given out to each inmate at the end of the day. In addition to having access to food he was also often put into difficult situations having to respond to prisoners desperate for food….
One day, while preparing the rations in the dark winter night, he heard banging on the door of the shed, and opened it up to discover a man he knew to be a great Torah scholar and one of the eminent Rabbis of his area before the war, standing in the snow.
Before he could turn the man away (sure that he wanted scraps of bread), the man stepped into the shed, telling Yaakov he needed a favor.
“You know tonight is the first night of the festival of Sukkos, and I need two whole loaves of bread before you cut them up… so I can fulfill the special custom of making the (“Hamotzi'”) blessing over two whole loaves (known as Lechem Mishnah…) in the sukkah.”
“I was in shock”, recalled Yaakov, at the request. Not only was he asking for two whole loaves of bread, but he was even planning somehow on fulfilling the mitzvah of having a ‘meal’ in the Sukkah!”
“You have to understand”, he explained, a whole loaf of bread in Auschwitz was like a million dollars today. Can you imagine someone walking in off the street and asking for a million dollars? Even though he promised he would only take a bite, (the equivalent of his own ration) and then return the loaves to me, giving away those loaves would effectively mean I was risking my life.”
Even more intriguing however, was how on earth this Rabbi had managed to build a sukkah (a booth built to specific halachic specifications…) in Auschwitz- Birkenau.
As it turned out, that summer and fall of 1944 the Nazis were bringing hundreds of thousands of Jews (including the remaining 400,000 Jews of Hungary) in a last-ditch effort to complete the ‘final solution’ before the war would end.
In the twisted organizational logic of the lager camps world, the Nazis needed to have additional barracks to hold the new prisoners for labor until they could be exterminated. As such, prisoners were dismantling tiers of bunks in the barracks (prisoners there literally began sleeping in piles of bodies on the floor of the barracks) while rows of bunks were being reconstructed in the central parade ground.
Seeing the rows and rows of bunks outdoors and realizing the festival of Sukkot was coming, this rabbi had managed to secure some schach (plant shrubbery) and place it atop some of the boards of the semi-constructed bunks beneath the open sky in such a way as to construct a minimally kosher sukkah (booth) for the festival. However, the mitzvah of living in the sukkah can only be fulfilled by either sleeping (which was out of the question) or eating in the sukkah, which was his aim.
Seeing the hesitation on the boy’s face, and desperate to fulfill this mitzvah against all the odds, the rabbi begged him for the loaves, if only for a few minutes.
“I will give you these loaves”, said the boy (Yaakov) but only on condition you take me with you to fulfill the mitzvah of the sukkah.”
The rabbi, shocked by the impetuous response began to attempt to dissuade the boy from this condition. He would be risking his life by walking outside after curfew, and again for carrying two whole loaves of bread and of course for attempting to sit in a sukkah. But nothing he could say would dissuade the boy, so together the two of them, and old Rabbi and a student, risked their lives and sat, for a few brief moments, in a sukkah in Auschwitz.
(As an interesting post-script, ‘Yaakov’ told me that many years later he was in Chicago on business and got stuck there for Shabbat whereupon his host took him to the Tish of a great Rebbe, who turned out to be this same Rabbi, who happened to decide to tell this very story that very same night…).
What does it mean to sit in a