Holocaust survivor vexed by feelings of sympathy

Moshe Kraus survived the Holocaust because he sang with a beautiful, arresting voice — an escape from death that, at age 95, still wrecks his heart.

Late one winter afternoon, he’s at the dining room table overlooking Ottawa’s Rideau River, hands folded on the linen, when he asks wife Rivka for a tissue. And he begins, tip-toeing back in time to the place of tears.

Born into a family of Hasidic Jews, a cantor for 70 years, Kraus was a child prodigy who, at age nine, travelled around towns in Czechoslovakia, returning home from concerts with pockets full of money, which he had no interest in. But this is not the story sealed in sorrow.

In 1944, at age 22, he found himself in Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany. Inevitably, he began to sing, with a repertoire of uplifting songs that made him popular in the barracks, where slaughter and starvation were everyday occurrences.

One day, the camp commandant, Josef Kramer — the notorious Beast of Belsen and a terrifying-looking SS officer — overheard Kraus singing. He ordered the young man brought to his lavish house, about 10 minutes’ drive from the camp, the following Sunday. When Kraus arrived in his ragged pyjamas, he found Kramer dining alone, in his underwear.

He gave the starving young Kraus some leftover food, and asked if he knew the work of Joseph Schmidt, a famous Austro-Hungarian tenor popular in Germany. Kraus did, luck would have it.

“Sing!” the commandant ordered. So Kraus sang a song in the Schmidt style, in German, looking up with some apprehension at the final note.

“Would you believe it?” recalled Kraus.

“This murderer, he could kill a man like nothing, he cried.”

And so, for months, this became their routine. He would sing for Kramer every Sunday, a grim perk that spared Kraus from the genocide. And he knew some other Jew was dying so he could live and sing for an evil man. About 50,000 people died in Bergen-Belsen.

“I was only waiting when would come my day when they would burn me.”

This turn of events was so critical to Kraus that he titled his recent autobiography, The Life of Moshele Der Zinger, How My Singing Saved My Life (www.baico.ca).

When the camp was liberated in 1945, Kraus was so weak, he fell into a coma and was hospitalized until he regained his strength. Upon his release, he said he was notified that Kramer was about to be hanged. And the old camp commandant wanted Kraus present.

“He walked out very proud,” he remembers of the execution in a prison yard, the big-time Nazi about to die ingloriously for the fallen Reich. “He smiled, I smiled back. I bent my head. They hanged him. I couldn’t take it. I cried,” Kraus said.

“He saved my life. OK, he was an unbelievable man. But he saved my life. I cried and God forgive till today why I cried.”

The Nazis killed his parents, four of his siblings, 32 of his aunts and uncles, and more than 100 of his cousins. Shedding a tear for the Beast of Belsen perhaps proved that all that horror and misery had not killed everything human inside Moshe Kraus.

And yet, now an old man, he still seeks forgiveness for his sympathy.

He has often spoken to groups about his Holocaust experiences, taking seriously his role as witness.

“I can’t seem to completely numb those horrendous feelings from the Holocaust,” he writes in the book’s introduction.

“I just can’t believe it still hurts after all these years. There is no answer as to why.”