NO REINTERPRETATION

Just to add to Harold Gee’s letter (“Holocaust songs,” May 24) questioning whether the song “Ani Ma’amin” was actually sung by Jews being led to the gas chambers, I would like to recall an incident that happened in the 1980s when Holocaust remembrance was coming to the fore in the US.

In one of the first Holocaust Remembrance Day programs held in Rockland County by my late husband, Harry Reiss, the guest speaker Leon Wells, who was a survivor of the sondo commander brigade at Janowska, stated that he never heard anyone call out the Shema Yisrael prayer on the way to the gas chamber. Faced with an emotionally charged audience of survivors, he was immediately challenged and fist fights almost broke out in the hall.

Considering that in the first death camps, the Jews were rushed in without warning to what was called the himmelstrasse (road to heaven) amid blows and screams “shnell” (hurry) by the guards, it is questionable whether anyone had a chance to sing or even speak anything at all. Even later on in Auschwitz, the Nazi policy was to fool the prisoners till the very last minute. Nonetheless there may have also been cases where the Shema or Ani Ma’amin could have been recited.

What is really problematic is for people today to try to put their own imprimatur, reflecting their own world views, on these terrible events of 70 years ago. The unfathomable misery of those huddled children, women and men needs no reinterpretation from us. Let us continue to memorialize the dead by giving them the respect they are due. MARION REISS Beit Shemesh

The writer is the author of Not To Forget: The Story of Harry Reiss and the Creation of the Rockland Center for Holocaust Studies and is a Holocaust educator.