The youngest survivor of Buchenwald became the Chief Rabbi of Israel, continuing a family line of 37 generations. Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, a story of Jewish courage.
The Story of a Jewish Child in a Concentration Camp
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
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In full army uniform, Rabbi Schacter got down from his jeep and stood before the pile of bodies. Many of them were still bleeding. Suddenly he thought he saw a pair of eyes, wide open and alive. He panicked, and with a soldier’s instinct, he drew his pistol. Slowly, carefully, he began to circle the pile of bodies. Then—and this I recall clearly—he bumped into me, a little boy, staring at him from behind the mound of corpses, wide-eyed. His face revealed his astonishment: in the midst of the killing fields, from within that sea of blood—suddenly, a child appears! I did not move. But he knew that no child in this place could be anything but Jewish. He holstered his pistol, then grabbed me with both hands and caught me in a fatherly embrace, lifting me in his arms. In Yiddish, with a heavy American accent, he asked me: “Wie alt bist du, mein kindt? How old are you, my boy?” [insert photo 4-B here]
I saw tears dripping from his eyes. Still, through force of habit, I answered cautiously, like someone perpetually on guard: “What difference does it make? At any rate, I’m older than you.” He smiled at me from behind his tears, and asked, “Why do you think that you’re older than I am?” Without hesitating, I replied, “Because you laugh and cry like a child, and I haven’t laughed for a long time. I can’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?”
http://www.ou.org/index.php/jewish_action/article/14536/
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