COMMENTS OF ARTHUR LENK, AMBASSADOR OF ISRAEL
TO SOUTH AFRICA, Yom Hashoah,
Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day,
Pinelands Jewish Cemetery, Cape Town, 16 April 2015
Our dear honored Survivors,
My brothers and sisters in Cape Town’s Jewish Community,
Government and public officials, members of the diplomatic community, Ladies and Gentlemen,
This year, Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day highlights the Anguish of Liberation and Return to Life as we mark seventy years since the end of the Second World War.
Abba Kovner told the story of a Jewish woman he met in Vilna, when he arrived at the site of the destroyed ghetto with liberating soldiers from the Red Army. For almost a year, the woman and her young daughter had hidden in a small nook, and finally came out from their hiding place for the first time upon liberation. As the woman broke down in tears, relating their experiences for the first time, her child asked her, surprised: "Mame, men tor shoyn weinen? – Ima, is it okay to cry now?"
On 8 May 1945, when the Germans finally surrendered to the Allied Forces, great joy spread throughout the world. The most horrific of wars had finally come to an end – ending destruction on a scale unprecedented in history: 60 million dead; millions of refugees of every nationality spread throughout Europe; economies and infrastructures shattered. Soldiers from the allied forces joined together on the smoldering ruins of Berlin. Throughout the continent, and in many cities around the world, military parades and celebrations were quickly organized. Yet one community did not take part in this general euphoria – the Jews of Europe. For them, victory had come too late.
This day of liberation, the one for which every Jew had longed throughout the long years of the Shoah, was for most actually a time of crisis and emptiness, a feeling of overwhelming loneliness. They were finally able to grasp the sheer scale of the destruction on both a personal and communal level. In the spring of 1945, it had become horrifically apparent that some six million Jews had been murdered – about one-third of world Jewry. While many of our families were already safe like mine in the United States, or those of many others far away from Europe in South Africa or Eretz Israel, those who had survived in Europe were generally alone. Thousands of survivors of the camps and death marches, liberated by armies in Germany, Poland and in other countries, were in a severely deteriorated physical condition and in a state of emotional shock.
Others emerged from places of hiding, many shed false identities they had assumed or surfaced from partisan units having fought for the liberation of Europe. In the wake of international agreements that ended the war, some 200,000 additional Jews began to make their way back westward from the Soviet Union, where they had fled and managed to survive.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
With liberation, troubling, existential questions had to have been central in the minds of survivors: How does one go back to living a life, to rebuild homes and try to reunite families? And having survived, what obligation did they bear towards those who had not – was it their duty to preserve and commemorate their legacy? Were the survivors to avenge their deaths? In fact, the overwhelming majority of survivors took no revenge on the perpetrators, but set on paths of rehabilitation, rebuilding and creativity, while commemorating their world that had been obliterated.
Survivors travelled far and wide in search of family members, friends and loved ones who might also have also stayed alive, against all odds. Many decided to go back to their prewar homes, but encountered utter destruction. In some places, especially in Eastern Europe, Jews met with severe outbreaks of anti-Semitism – some 1000 Jews were actually murdered by locals. The most shocking episode was the Kielce pogrom – a violent attack in July 1946 by Polish residents against their Jewish neighbors – in which 42 Jews were murdered, some sole survivors of entire families, and many others were injured.
The Kielce pogrom became a turning point in the history of the She'erit Hapleita, the surviving remnant, as survivors began to be known, in Poland. For many, it was a final proof, as if the emerging enormity of the Shoah was not enough, that no hope remained for rebuilding Jewish life in Europe. It is deeply disturbing that we are hearing echoes of similar conversation in different places around our world, especially in Europe, about living safely as Jews in 2015.
During the months following the 1946 pogrom, the flow of migrants from Eastern Europe increased dramatically. In any way they could, Jews made their way west and south. Young surviving Jews, together with representatives and soldiers from Eretz Yisrael, aided and directed this mass migration that came to be known as Habricha, "The Escape" – a large-scale attempt to transfer as many Jews as possible to territories controlled by British and US troops in Germany, as a step towards leaving Europe. These refugees joined tens of thousands of Jewish survivors liberated in Central Europe, who were gathered into DP camps across Germany, Austria and Italy. Often, these camps were established at sites of former Nazi concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald.
Activities in these camps were a powerful expression of survivors' efforts to return to life after the war. As early as the first days and weeks after liberation, many survivors began to somehow recover and organize themselves, despite the grief, physical weakness and extensive hardships. They often formed new families and communal leadership, set up educational and foster-care facilities for children and youth, published dozens of newspapers and magazines, collected testimonies on the fate of Jews during the Holocaust, and became a significant factor in the Zionist movement which culminated only three short years from the end of the war in the establishment of the Jewish state, the State of Israel.
Haverim,
About two-thirds of the survivors who chose to leave Europe after the war set their sights on Eretz Israel. The remaining third immigrated to the US, Latin America, Canada, Australia and many settled here, in South Africa. Reaching Israel remained a formidable struggle, due to policies imposed by the British that barred them from entering Mandatory Palestine. As part of the effort to break through borders and prohibitions, an illegal immigration movement – the Ha'apala – was organized, guiding survivors to old vessels across various Mediterranean ports and sailed for Eretz Israel. These survivors were key founding fathers and mothers of the State of Israel. Israel and our successes for the past 67 years is the ultimate victory over the Nazis and a proud living legacy for the survivors.
The Ha'apala, as well as resettling in other countries, was a pivotal stage in the survivors' postwar recovery process, taking their future into their own hands. There should be deep pride and respect that Holocaust survivors contributed, each in their own way, to building a better world for themselves, for their children and for future generations that would never have to live through the horrors of the Shoah. I fully identify with the words of survivor Riva Chirurg, who lost dozens of family members in the Lodz ghetto and at Auschwitz, said "If more than 20 people, second and third generation, gather around my Pesach Seder table, I know I have done my share."
Thank you very much.