Wearing an Israeli Flag at Auschwitz: Three Snapshots of a Death Camp

1944

Lena

Sepia

The family peers out of a brown boxcar.  Dirty, disheveled, disoriented, they wonder where they are, what will happen to them.

Call her Lena, barely a teenager, she and her family were stolen from their native Hungary, stuffed into a boxcar, taken to…?

Auschwitz, someone says.

What’s Auschwitz? they ask.

When the door rolls open, she faces that ghastly sight, the ramp, the barracks, barbed wire, smokestacks, smells the stench of burning flesh, feels the smudges of human fat on the ground and in the air.  Seeing long lines of Jews moving out, a selection of some sort sending them right and left, she huddles with her family, holding her older sister’s baby tightly in her arms.

At the mouth of the boxcar, the Striped Man – a Jewish death camp worker – drops his head and speaks sotto voce.  “Put the baby down,” he says, knowing, as they don’t, that the very old and the very young are marked for immediate extermination, as are mothers with children.

Quizzical, she turns to her sister, who nods.

In so doing, the man, who has warned her at the risk of his own life, saves hers.

Watching her entire family go one way, she is directed the other.  A last, fleeting look.  She never sees them again.

Later, she discovers that the average life span in the death camps is two hours.

However, young and healthy and able to work, Lena survives.

2000

Allison

Black and White

Fifty-five years after liberation, I was part of a group that took a group of teens to Prague and Poland, there to see cities and synagogues and dormant death camps, now state museums.

At Auschwitz, we encountered a woman named Mrs. Pollock, a survivor who was living in New York City.  There with her sons, she was recounting her experiences as a Hungarian teen taken into the mouth of Hell, there to experience terrors and privations, miracles and survival.

Fascinated by her reminiscences, quickly realizing that Mrs. Pollock was their age when she was taken, our teens gathered around her.  A de facto seminar emerged, question and answer, the teens asking for more.

Ma, one of her sons objected, you don’t have to.

I want to, she demurred, quietly but firmly, and continued.

Talking of life there, of how the Striped Man saved her.  Of blistering heat and bone-chilling cold.  Of dysentery and disease.

Of the kingdom of death.

At one point, Allison, one of our teens, now a mother herself and a Connecticut-based psychiatrist, asked if Auschwitz looked in 1944 as it did in 2000.

“No,” Mrs. Pollock said.

“Why not?” Allison asked.

“There was no grass,” Mrs. Pollock answered.

“Why not?” Allison pressed.

“Because we ate it all.”

2025, I

Zev

Color

As the last half of his senior year At Charles E. Smith, our grandson Zev, along with other teens, is studying in Israel, limudei kodesh, geography, history, current events.

Having attended classes, seen many places, Tzfat to the Gaza Envelope, with more to come, the tiulim turned toward north, into central Europe, to Prague and Poland.  To the Jewish Quarter and Krakow, Warsaw and Auschwitz.

Someone snapped a picture of Zev from behind, walking about, lanky and lean, striding past barbed wire, proudly draped in an Israeli flag.

Later, Zev wrote that “being at Auschwitz is really difficult.  It’s hard to comprehend that the Nazis killed 1.5 million Jews here, to see the gas chambers and crematoria that were used to murder so many people just because they were Jewish.  Seeing the place where they selected people for life and death feels very strange because it was literally as if the people were talking to the Angel of Death.

“I don’t understand how anyone could deny the Holocaust after seeing this.

“Wearing an Israeli flag at Auschwitz is incredibly meaningful, as it shows that no matter how hard they try to kill us, the Jewish people will live on.  I’ve never felt more pride in my Judaism.

“Am Yisroel Chai.”

2025, II

Zev

Darkness

A week or so after Zev sent us that photo, he was in the Old City, putting on his tefillin at the Kotel, visiting Orayta, the yeshiva where he’ll be returning for Elul Zman and a year’s Torah study before attending Brandeis.

There, during the Minchah Aleinu, the sirens sounded, and our beautiful, perfect, smart, hard-working, all-around great-work-ethic 17-year-old grandson had to run to the bomb shelter.

No, it isn’t over.

So while Zev may proudly wear his tefillin at the Kotel, and an Israeli flag at Auschwitz, Amalek still stalks Middle Earth.