Baruch Diament and the Torah
By: Yaakov Rosenfeld
On the train going to Lodz, frightened Jews sat huddled together, impatiently waiting for the moment when they would reach their destination.
It was in the summer of 5706 (1946), a short period after the end of the terrible war. “Two from a city and one from a family” survived the inferno, and those who tried to return and acclimatize in their old home, in the place where they grew up and were brutally displaced from, were soon to learn that their neighbors, the Polish gentiles, were similar in their wickedness to the Nazis.
In the city of Ostrowiec, where seventeen thousand Jews lived on the eve of the Holocaust, were several dozen Jews, heartbroken, bereaved, orphaned, weak, and destitute. Their hearts were broken but full of hope, full of dreams. They wanted to rebuild themselves, but the cruelty of the Polish killers crushed their ambition.
In those months, the Poles massacred the Jews, the nation of survivors, and conducted pogroms. The survivors of Ostrowiec held poor feelings from the first moment that they saw their former neighbours’ looks of horror, but they finally came to the decision to flee only after the terrible massacre that took place in the neighboring metropolitan city, Kielce, on Tammuz 4, 5706 (July 4, 1946).
The Jews therefore boarded the first train that left for Lodz (since many Jews lived in the city of Lodz at the time, which instilled some confidence in the refugees) with most of them pretending to be Christians, lest they be killed.
Among the passengers sat Chaim Chostecki and his wife Dorka, disguised as gentiles, and they watched in horror as the Polish rioters, with a lust for robbery and murder, ran from car to car looking for Jews.
The ride was terrible and full of terror. Most of the Jewish passengers fled the train in the face of the bloodthirsty rioters, but out of the corner of his eye Chaim Chostecki noticed a Jewish man standing in the aisle, as if rooted to his spot and with his hands he was protecting something covered and hidden.
The rioters noticed the man, whom Chaim knew from Ostrowiec; his name was Baruch Diamant. They approached him and began to shake him and check what he was hiding.
Baruch Diamant did not run away nor did he try to escape, since with the treasure he was guarding he could not escape, and leaving it on the train did not even occur to him, even at the cost of his life!
It was a Torah.
In his arms, Baruch held a Torah that has been saved from his burning town and he intended on escaping with it to Eretz Yisrael.
Like Moshe Rabbeinu (the biblical Moses) who dealt with Joseph’s coffin while everyone else was collecting loot, Baruch Diamant of Ostrowiec dealt with the abandoned Torah while everyone was packing their personal belongings during the hasty escape.
Baruch did not take anything else with him in his flight, but he did not for a moment think of abandoning the Torah, and was willing to sacrifice his life for it.
Gentiles, the wicked Poles, stood around Baruch Diamant, and their eyes burned with flames. They decided to simply throw him off the moving train and thus end his life, but at the last moment Chaim Chostecki jumped on them.
Chaim had a European appearance, and fake papers also assisted him, and therefore he did not have to fear for his life, but he was also an upright Jew, a Jew who, even after everything he had been through, could not see the murder of his Jewish brother and the desecration of the Torah, and protected Baruch Diamant.
He stood in front Baruch and roared at the rioters in fluent Polish “Leave this Jew to him! I’ll settle accounts with him! It’s a waste of your precious time, run to the other cars already!”…
Thus Baruch Diament survived. Thus the Torah survived.
Source: “Zachor” compilation 3.
