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Fifteen
Arnold Roth, Jerusalem
Email: roth@runbox.com
Most Jewish teenagers growing up in Australia during the 1960s were,
like me, children of concentration camp survivors. Our parents were
involved in owning small businesses or were employed. There was hardly a
professional among them. At birth, we lacked even a single grandparent
in most cases. Almost all of my friends were named after family members
who perished in the Holocaust.
It was clear that we were everything to our parents, and
no one needed to tell us why. Top of their priorities list was ensuring
that we gained the best possible education. It is hardly surprising to
know that several of the largest and most successful Jewish schools in
the world were started in the tiny Melbourne Jewish community in the
years right after World War II. The community's interest in Israel was
unlimited. The occasional Israeli film and Israeli visitor to
Australia’s distant shores were memorable events.
***
The Six Day War between the Arab states and Israel
happened when I was 15. The weeks of rising tension leading up to it
left an indelible mark on me: the grainy television images of Egyptian
and Syrian troops on the march; Nasser's strident speeches and his
unilateral blockade of the sea lanes to Eilat; the massing of Egyptian
forces on Israel's Sinai border and of the Syrian army on the Golan
Heights; U Thant's disgraceful capitulation in removing the UN’s
peace-keeping forces from Sinai precisely when they were most needed.
And the blood-curdling threats of one after another of the Arab
dictators and monarchs: “The existence of Israel is an error which must
be rectified... This is our opportunity to erase the ignominy which has
been with us since 1948... Our goal is clear -- to wipe Israel off the
map.”
Fifteen marked a turning point in my life. A few months
after Israel’s stunning defeat of those forces intending to carry out
(once again) the liquidation of the Jews, I enrolled for the first time
in a Jewish day-school. My ideas about being a Jew in the world, about
history and how it affects our lives, about the Holocaust and the chain
of Jewish life, began taking adult shape.
***
My mother grew up near Lodz in a town located close
enough to the Polish/German frontier to have been overrun by Nazi forces
on the first day of the war. Among the men rounded up by the invaders on
September day in September was her father, the grandfather whose name I
was given. As a father myself, I have to breathe deeply in calling to
mind the image of my mother throwing herself at the feet of a German
soldier, begging, screaming for her father's life to be spared.
On the day the Nazis marched into Poland and began the process of
destroying a world, trampling a unique culture into the mud, murdering
Jews by the millions, my mother had just turned 15.
***
My awareness of my parents’ lives begins, in a certain
sense, with the end of the war: their four or five years as displaced
persons in post-war Germany, their long journey to Australia as a young
couple with no English, no marketable skills and no roots beyond their
few personal ties and their very Jewish sense of community.
An unexpected photograph changed this for me a few years
ago.
I have a cousin, a kibbutznik. She is the daughter of my father’s oldest
brother. She was born in Tel Aviv in the 1930s, shortly after her
parents fled pre-war Poland. Returning as a tourist to her parent’s
roots, she traveled to the city of Krakow in 2000, and via a chain of
circumstances ended up in possession of four photocopied pages which she
shared with me. These were Nazi documents -- census forms which the
Germans required the Jews in the Krakow ghetto to complete prior to
dispatching them to the death camps.
The first page had been completed in the distinctive
handwriting of my father, of blessed memory. A small snapshot attached
to the form showed him as I had never seen him before: virile, handsome,
young. Two other pages were the census forms of two of my father's
sisters. Their names were known to me from a family tree I had put
together years earlier with my father's help, but until that moment they
were nothing more than names. Now I gazed at the portraits of two
vibrant, attractive young women.
My oldest daughter, Malki, had just completed a
family-roots project at school and I knew she would be interested. She
glanced at the pages and she said exactly what I had been thinking: that
she bore a striking resemblance to my father's beautiful sister Feige.
Unlike my parents, Feige did not survive the Nazi murder
machine. Whatever potential her life contained, whatever talents she was
developing, whatever gifts she was planning to give the world -- all
these were overturned by a massive act of violent, barbaric hatred: the
genocidal murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis.
***
Some months after we gazed on those extraordinary
pictures for the first time, Malki sat down and quietly (without telling
us) composed the words and music of an infectiously upbeat song: “You
live, breathe and move – that’s a great start!... You’d better start
dancing now!”
Living in the land promised to the Jewish people was a
source of deep contentment to this grand-daughter of Holocaust
survivors. The discovery of Feige’s picture enabled Malki, I think, to
gain a strengthened sense of her personal role as a link in an ancient
chain.
***
Arafat’s intifada war against Israel's civilian
population broke out around the time we received those precious pages.
From the diary she kept, it's evident that the almost daily toll of
injuries and deaths weighed heavily on Malki's mind. She writes of
having to leave her classroom to weep in privacy upon learning of
another terror attack… and another and another. We, her parents and
siblings, were unaware of the depth of her empathy for the victims of
the war raging in her precious land. The turmoil and pain were deeply
personal to her. Though born in Australia, Malki had lived in Jerusalem
since age two. She felt deeply connected to Jewish history.
In August 2001, my daughter and her friend Michal
interrupted the activities of a busy summer vacation day to grab lunch
in a crowded Jerusalem restaurant called Sbarro.
If she had noticed the man with a guitar case on his back
striding through the unguarded door and positioning himself next to the
counter where she was engrossed in tapping out a text message on her
cell phone, would Malki have recognized the hatred, the barbaric
ecstasy, on his face before he exploded?
Michal and Malki were buried the next day. The closest of
friends since early childhood, they lie side by side forever on a hill
near the entrance to Jerusalem.
Malki was fifteen.
***
Her diary is full of questions: How can such terrible
things happen to our people? Why is our love for the Land of Israel not
better understood by outsiders? What kind of Divine plan calls for
teenagers to be injured and killed by people for whom we hold no hatred
at all? How can such intense hatred even exist?
The unbearable question marks left behind by my daughter
scream at me every day.
***
Jewish life, viewed from a distance, is an astonishing
saga of tragedy, achievement, grandeur, destruction and greatness,
played out over millennia. There is a risk we lose this perspective when
we are the individuals living it.
Those of us raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, and
who have experienced the tragedy of a child’s death by hatred, struggle
to understand the nature of the Divine role in our lives as individuals
and as a people. There are times, according to Jewish wisdom, when you
need to know that God's hand is at work even when the evidence is
difficult to see, even when there are more questions than answers.
***
[Malki Roth's memory is honored by the Malki Foundation
that supports families wanting to provide their severely disabled child
with quality home care. More information at
www.kerenmalki.org] |
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