In the diary that he kept in the Warsaw ghetto, teacher and educator Chaim Aharon Kaplan wrote, “In these days of our misfortune, we live the life of Marranos. Everything is forbidden to us, and yet we do everything.”
With these words, which have been chosen as the central theme for this year’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance day, Kaplan expressed the struggle of the Jews to maintain their human spirit under the impossible conditions in which they found themselves
Everywhere the Nazi regime reached, it worked to rupture the very structures of Jewish life and annihilate its spirit and culture. The Jewish community found itself moving anxiously between self-preservation and disintegration, between dire crisis and persistent efforts to create communal frameworks that might facilitate continued physical and spiritual existence.
Under the conditions, where life and death existed in such close proximity, many Jews were unable to do more than struggle for mere survival. Yet, simultaneously, some were able to demonstrate astonishing spiritual strength. Facing the dissolution of the fabric of life, they nevertheless clung to the essence of existence by preserving a way of life grounded in moral values and the cultural dimensions befitting a decent society.
Despite externally imposed hunger, humiliation and isolation, the inhabitants of the Jewish ghettos built self-initiated organizations for mutual aid and support, medical care and culture, fulfilling the Jewish value of כל ישראל ערבים זה לזה .
In a place where education was prohibited, small study groups were established. Youth groups were set up and underground journalism blossomed, as did cultural undertakings, such as theatrical performances, lectures, literary evenings and poetry readings.
These undertakings were not always well received by some within the Jewish community.
In January 1942, Vilna ghetto archivist Herman Kruk wrote in his diary, “Today I received a formal invitation from a group of founding Jewish artists in the ghetto announcing that the first evening of the local artistic circle will be held… in the auditorium of the Real Gymnasium at Rudnicka 6. A dramatic and vocal musical program will be presented… I felt offended, personally offended… Here…in the shadow of [the] Ponary [massacre], where, of the 76,000 Vilna Jews, only some 15,000 remain – here, at this moment, this is a disgrace.”
Yet a mere two months later, Kruk entered the following in his diary: “…life is stronger than anything. In the Vilna ghetto, life begins to pulse again. Under the overcoat of Ponary, a life creeps out that strives for a better morning. The concerts prevail. The halls are full. The literary evenings burst their seams, and the local hall cannot hold the large number that comes there.”
There is a lesson to be learned here:
We derive our strength as a people from a unity, which is rooted in our history, our heritage and our culture. Our spiritual fortitude is a necessary condition for our physical fortitude. Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, realized that. In the early days of the State when faced with an imminent threat of physical annihilation, and every possible resource was needed for its physical protection, Ben Gurion made a conscious decision to invest huge sums of money in establishing a robust national educational system that would accommodate every child. His decision to invest in education, culture, employment and other non-military aspects of society building may have been viewed at the time, as the most counterintuitive thing to do. Yet they were the wisest things to do. Ben Gurion realized - as did those Jews in the Ghettoes and Concentration camps who, against all odds, maintained the Jewish spirit - that no matter how many tanks and rifles the nascent Israeli army had, without preserving our heritage, we would be doomed, both as a people and as a State.
The atrocities perpetrated in the name of Nazi Germany elicit challenging questions regarding the abyss to which humanity can descend. At the same time, the horrors of the period also illustrate how high the human spirit can soar. Even today, over 70 years after the Holocaust, we are inspired by the spiritual fortitude of those who upheld their values in a world which seemed to possess none at all.
"Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress," noted psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.
Many of those who struggled to maintain and preserve the human spirit did not survive the horrors of the Holocaust, but their deeds and actions are a reminder to future generations of the stamina and the nobility of the human spirit. They are the reason we exist today as a Jewish people and they are the reason that Israel today thrives as the nation state of the Jewish People.