Eyewitness to Holocaust horrors loved freedom
To late survivor, Passover was about recalling blessing
He’s been gone almost 13 years, yet he vividly comes to mind on a morning such as this with Passover starting at sundown and Easter just around the corner.
His name was Eric and he was 87 the day we met, a consummate gentleman whose soft-spoken demeanor offered no hint of the horrors he’d known, except when he cried.
He could never forget the sound of that knock on his door when the Nazis, on their mission to “rid Austria of its Jews,” told him he had to go with them for “questioning.”
His Ph.D. from the University of Vienna meant nothing.
He was shoved onto a freight car, bound for the savagery of concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.
A deeply religious Jew, Eric refused to eat on Yom Kippur even though he was starving, and he would later weep whenever he recalled the day he sailed into New York harbor, bound for Ellis Island and a life of glorious freedom.
“You don’t know what it means to someone like me to tell my story to someone like you,” he said, “because now I know that when I’m gone there’ll be one more person who heard it from an eyewitness.”
Here’s what our friendship was like: Every year an Easter card arrived here from him, followed by a Christmas card every December, and he would receive cards from here on Passover and Hanukkah.
We both knew nothing more had to be said.
He comes to mind this morning because Passover was his favorite holiday, commemorating the Israelites’ exodus from Egyptian bondage under Pharaoh.
For Eric, nothing was more precious than freedom, and nothing dismayed him more than a sense that younger people no longer cared to hear the heart-wrenching stories told to them at Passover Seders by his generation.
Impatiently, irreverently, some would even quip: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!” Eric had a response. “Some of you may consider it strange that we spend a whole evening discussing events that happened 3,000 years ago, eating uncommon food, identifying with people of a foreign country who lived in a civilization utterly unrelated to ours.
“You may wonder why I talk about these matters?
“I do it first because I have a deep sense of loyalty to victims of the Holocaust; I don’t want them to be forgotten. I am one of the relatively few living witnesses who can testify to what happened to innocent human beings only because they were born as Jews.
“The second reason is to once again recall the blessings of freedom we enjoy in this wonderful country. Do you realize what it means to be deprived of life, liberty and property without due process of law, presumed guilty because of your religion?
“Feeling secure and confident, you can’t imagine such a transformation could ever happen in this country. Please don’t think I’m a killjoy, but when I was 50 years younger in Europe we, too, could not imagine an overnight obliteration of human rights was possible.
“After reaching the saving shores of this country I have felt blessed at every awakening by the precious gift of freedom.
“Let’s remind ourselves that, for all our social discord, we remain the longest-enduring society of free people, governing ourselves without kings or dictators, the marvel and mystery of the world.
“This freedom we celebrate tonight never came cheap or easy. But for my generation, the price will never be too high.”
Eric was 97 when he died, leaving a note instructing his family to “ask my friend at the Herald” to deliver his eulogy at Temple Shalom in Newton. It remains a sacred trust. So please understand these are not the words of a columnist.
These are the words of an eyewitness, shared this morning in his honor and his memory.
Though he be dead, yet shall he speak.
Happy Passover.