The Singers of Bergen Belsen

Lately I have been thinking about choice. (I know, I know, let’s dive right in). It sometimes feels like we don’t really have a whole lot of it. Sure, we get some choice in what happens to us but not everything. We only get some choice in how people act towards us. We only get some choice in our personality, and makeup. We only get some choice in where life puts us, and sometimes no choice at all.

I started watching Star Wars (if you are a Star War aficionado don’t banish me to a forsaken star but so far, I am on team, not that into it). Do you know the scene where they are in the trash compactor about to get squeezed to death? Well, I must be somewhat traumatized from my grandmother’s story because when I watched that scene, instead of Luke, Han and Princess Leia, I saw my grandmother there. You see she was in Auschwitz, in an ammunition factory, a death march and in Bergen Belsen. Out of all those places, she said that Bergen Belsen was the worst. She told me about the darkness she felt from that place, the way all hope was sucked out of her then. She told me how she, a girl who tried to stay clean even in Auschwitz, had to sleep in a swampy barrack floor, covered with slime and mud. She told me how all the girls around her wailed as they laid down in exhaustion and the mud covered their ears and boney hips and knees. When I watched Star Wars, I thought of my grandmother and felt sad that she had no choice but to be in that horrible place for doing no crime other than being born a Jew.

Then I remembered what happened next to her. Above the sounds of the wails, she heard someone start to sing. Everyone got quiet. They stopped their crying, and the girl sang louder. My grandmother said she would know that beautiful voice from anywhere. It was her cousin Faigy. She sang to them songs that they grew up on like, A Yiddishe Mama and Tum Balalaika. They let themselves be comforted by the singing. Here is an excerpt from the book.

“I wonder what it sounds like to the SS soldiers standing outside the door. We are a few hundred girls with not one ounce of fat on our bodies, just skin and bones and a cave where our bellies used to be. We are a few hundred girls laying in a foot or more of mud and slime, in hell. Yet, there is a girl among us with the voice of an angel and she sings us to sleep like a mother to her children.”

After the book came out, someone stopped me in the grocery. She said her grandfather was in Bergen Belsen when he was only six years old. One story he told repeatedly was how a woman would sing him to sleep every night. When his family read my grandmother’s story, they thought that perhaps this was the woman who sang to him. Two days ago, I finally got to meet him. I was completely charmed.

When I got to his house, he was bringing pizza out to his wife on the porch.

“My mother was Italian,” he said. “I want to try making pasta next.”  He brought me out a chair and when I took my phone out to video him, he said, “Oh I should shave for this!”

Then he told me stories of his time in Bergen Belsen. Stories so sad, I don’t even have the heart to write. He told me his greatest fear was that no one would believe his stories, and he almost wouldn’t blame them, they were too horrible to believe. He told me how the hunger was the worst of all. He told me that even years after the war he went through the garbage to make sure nothing was thrown out. He told me how when he goes to a wedding, he thinks he is the only person at the smorgasbord that will take something to eat and won’t like it at all but will have to finish every bite.

 “Food is my religion,” he said with a laugh “now I became a cook also, I cook pretty lousy, but I love it.”

“He is great he is great!” his wife said.

But as a little boy, he was always hungry. It is one of the things he remembers most of all.

“You don’t understand what hunger does to you. We weren’t afraid to be beaten. We weren’t afraid to be killed. If someone died, we stepped right over him. People looked, maybe he has something in his pocket we can eat. 24/7 all you dreamed about was food. Killing doesn’t bother you, beating you doesn’t bother you; food is food is food. That’s all we thought about.”

He was so hungry that he couldn’t fall asleep at night. Only one thing helped. There was this woman, with the most beautiful voice and she sang him the most beautiful song, Tumbalalaika, and that was the only way he was able to fall asleep each night.

“Let me tell you what it meant to me,” he said. “Until this day, it happens sometimes on the radio they sing Tumbalaika. I have to park the car, I can’t drive, I am crying. Tumbalalaika to me is a like a holy song.”

Do you feel like that woman saved you in a way?” I asked him.

“How can I answer that?” he said pointing to the sky, meaning that only God could save him. “But it certainly made it less painful. It made hunger bearable. I was able to fall asleep.”

Just this week, Holocaust Survivor, Cantor Moshe Kraus passed away at the age of 100. He was known in Bergen Belsen as Moshele the Zhinger (Singer). He said people were singing but they were singing sad songs, so he decided to sing happy songs. And so, he would go from Barrack to Barrack and sing happy songs to them.

“I used to see a smile on a face, and I was so happy, I said ‘Moshe, you did a good thing’.”

There is a passage in the Talmud (Ta’anit 22a-b) where two people asked a great prophet, “who is worthy of the world to come?” and out of everyone, scholars, pious people, the prophet pointed to two jesters because they cheered people up when they were sad or depressed.

My grandmother always told me to study, to get an education, because “they can take everything away from you, but they can never take away what you put in your head.” I agree with her to a point. Knowledge is power, is agency, is valuable, but I don’t believe that it can never be taken away. We cannot always choose what happens to our minds and nor are we defined by them. Instead, I believe what she taught me more than what she told me: They can take everything away from you, but they can never take away what they put in your heart. You can’t ever choose where life puts you. You may be in the darkest of places. But you can choose to be the one inflicting pain on others or the one who sings to them a beautiful song so that despite the wrenching hunger, they can fall asleep.

Rumi said, “If everything around you seems dark, look again, you may be the light.”

Many people asked my grandmother what made her have the will to survive. She said it was the fact that other people were relying on her. She had to go on, she had to help others. She also said they when she loses hope, she starts to sing, and she sees there is so much beauty even in this hard world.

I do not know why the Holocaust had to happen. I do not dare think myself smart enough to grapple with those questions. I believe thinking I have an answer is just a lie. I rather the unknown, however painful it is, because that to me is the truth. I do know however, that I would rather be the person in the Holocaust than the person causing the Holocaust to others. Rabbi Lord Jonathon Sacks said that unlike other religions of surrender, we don’t accept the world the way it is. He said, “Judaism is a protest against the world that is in the name of the world that ought to be. To be a Jew is to seek to make a difference, to change lives for the better, to heal some of the scars of our fractured world.”

Use the pain that you didn’t choose to fuel change that you can. I do not mean in huge ways. I mean a smile, an encouraging word, a joke, an “I am here for you,” a song to help someone fall asleep despite his hunger. A song to make someone else’s pit more bearable. Extra points if it is a happy song. Because you cannot choose if you will be placed in a palace or a pigsty. But you can always choose if you are the one singing to others in it.

This is my comfort and I hope it can be a comfort to you.