A Horrible Summer Journey with the Rebbe of Sanz, during the Holocaust
Marking thirty years since his passing, Tammuz 9, 5754 – Tammuz 9, 5784 (June 18, 1994 – July 15, 2024)
The holy Rebbe of Sanz (the Sanz-Klausenberger Rebbe)
Eighty years have passed since that terrible journey.
From a historical perspective, eighty years is not a long time at all, and perhaps that is why it is so difficult today to understand how these people, almost our contemporaries, survived this journey and how they recovered from it. How did they manage to move on and to rebuild?
Today, on the thirtieth anniversary of the passing of the holy Rebbe of Sanz z”l, who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust personally and lost his entire family and community in it, we return to the journey made on foot that the Nazis forced upon thousands of battered and broken Jews.
In the summer months of the year 5704 (1944), exactly eighty years ago, the Jews of Hungary and Romania were deported to Auschwitz. The lucky ones among them were chosen for work, and the rest were quickly and brutally murdered.
After the holiday of Shavuot in the year 5704, the tragic journey of tribulation began in which many of the marchers did not survive and were left lying dead on the sides of the road.
The marchers, after being brutally separated from their families, were broken in body and soul. It is known that they knew very well where their loved ones, and they themselves, were being taken, their lives depended on them. They didn’t know if they would survive the walk, or if their legs would collapse and a shot would cut off their lives.
At that time, the light of a wonderous man shone upon them, a truly righteous person, a “wonderful light from above” – he too shared their fate. The rebbetzin (his wife) and their 11 holy children were killed by the wicked ones in Auschwitz, and he remained alive.
Countless testimonies tell the amazing story of the Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam z”l, who walked then with the Jewish People in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
The Sanz-Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam with his son, the current Rebbe in Netanya, Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech Halberstam
The Rebbe at the time was a beacon of light of strength and faith, and he strengthened heartbroken Jews in his special way, in his closeness to G-d that did not wane or weaken even one iota, even in times of hardship and distress.
The holy Rebbe sprinkled the dew of faith and joy on broken and crushed souls, and when the moment of liberation came, he did not sink into thoughts and reflections on what was and would no longer be. Only one thing occupied the pure heart of the holy Rebbe, a heavenly angel of great majesty: how to rebuild the world. And he built, as a thousand ordinary people cannot build. And he established, what people cannot imagine. The Rebbe traveled between the displaced persons camps and built new worlds, entire communities of thousands of Holocaust survivors, institutions for men and women. He was the father of thousands of orphans, and only after he finished his duty among the rest of the refugees did he turn to think about himself. He then built a new and magnificent royal home, a large and holy home with the righteous rebbetzin, also a Holocaust survivor, the daughter of the Nitra Rebbe, may G-d avenge his blood.
Much has been said and will be said about those days when the holy Rebbe worked with his body during those “world-shattering days,” but now, in preparation for his thirtieth yahrzeit (anniversary of passing), we will quote an excerpt from the testimony of a Holocaust survivor who marched along with thousands of Jews on the same journey. The witness, Rabbi Asher Brenner of Kiryat Ata, told the author and Holocaust researcher, Yehoshua Eibeshitz, his memories of those days, which you only have to read. There is nothing to add:
I, Asher Brenner, born in the town of Turgamash, was taken, along with my whole family and all the Jews of the community in our town, on the Shavuot holiday of the year 5704, and we were taken by the Germans to the extermination camp in Auschwitz.
I was a boy. Almost a child, in front of my eyes stood my mother and my sisters – by Dr. Josef Mengele, may his name be blotted out – on the side destined for destruction. My mind almost failed me. The troubles that fell upon me, a young boy, with such suddenness, stunned me and dulled all my senses.
I was all scared and confused.
Then the Supreme Providence (G-d) summoned me for spiritual rescue.
I was placed in the same company as the Klausenberger Rebbe.
Like the rest of us, he also wore the same striped shirt of Auschwitz prisoners. And he suffered even more than us, because he stood his ground with amazing willpower: he did not eat non-kosher, he strictly observed putting on tefillin (phylacteries) every day, and he organized group prayers.
And when Shabbat came, which we prisoners sometimes even forgot about its existence, he managed with many tricks to avoid desecrating it, and at the same time he never allowed someone else to do the work quota in his place. All this infuriated the kapos who harassed him greatly and murderously beat him.
However, little by little, the attitude of the kapos toward him changed. The Rebbe acquired the stature and reputation of a holy man and many of the kapos who initially bullied him – now after standing by his character, his perseverance and devotion, and maintaining his religious principles and human values – showed him kindness.
Together with him, along with thousands of other Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz, we were taken to Poland. It was in the summer of 1944, after the failed uprising of the Poles.
We were brought to Warsaw to clear the remains of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, where I remained for about two or three months.
After my group finished its work, we were led hundreds of kilometres on foot. We went through almost all of Poland. We passed through cities where, before the Holocaust, there were famous Jewish communities such as Sochaczow, Kutno, Lodz, Poznan…
Wherever we found ourselves, the blessed and heartwarming influence of the Klausenberger Rebbe radiated upon us. It affected our behavior among ourselves, between each other.
In Posen, we were crammed into cattle cars. We traveled from Posen to Dachau for eight days. During the eight days of the trip, we did not receive any food or drink. Many died in the packed car. People died of starvation or lack of air to breathe. Piles of corpses piled up in the trailer, many were bereft of all human emotion and value, but he, the Rebbe, breathed into us the spirit of holiness and faith (…) It was precisely this faith that saved and sustained us, and thanks to it we remained alive, and thus I arrived at Dachau curled up and shriveled, partially alive, partially dead (…)
From that transport of thousands of prisoners who arrived from Warsaw on foot, only a small handful remained alive.
(…)
In the hospital barracks where I lay, an important rabbi, a scholar from Hungary, died. I will never forget the strong impression made on me by the moving eulogy delivered by the Rebbe. Despite the great exhaustion and weakness we were subject to, and despite our natural indifference to death, the obituary left a very strong impression on us. The obituary proved to us the high value of the humiliated human dignity, the dignity of the destroyed Jew rose and grew in our eyes.
Then came Rosh Hashanah of the year 5705 (1944). In Muhldorf, at great risk, the Rebbe organized a large minyan (prayer quorum). We prayed as a group with great devotion. The Rebbe did not even give up holding a tish (chassidic gathering) and giving over words of Torah on the holy holidays.
In the “Davar” newspaper (of the Workers’ Union in Israel, September 25, 1959) there appears a frank conversation with the holy Klausenberger Rebbe, which the writer of the newspaper merited thanks to his connections and strength.
The writer, S. Shabtai, spent a whole day in Kiryat Sanz in Netanya, waited patiently, and was finally allowed to enter the inner sanctum. The conversation was wonderful, and the the writing of the author, who stood for a whole day and was stunned by “this great fire,” is equally wonderful.
Under the title “It is Better to Be Burned than to Burn” the journalist told:
And I came to the last question. During the morning prayer, I heard the Rebbe repeat several times the words “ahavat olam ahavtanu” (with eternal love You have loved us)… and before my eyes stood his wife and eleven children who perished in the years of loss and the Holocaust. I asked him, “Rebbe, I heard you pray and repeat the words ‘ahavat olam ahavtanu.’ How do you reconcile what happened to you, to all of us, to the people of Israel with that ‘ahavat olam ahavtanu’?”
The Rebbe replied:
I was already asked this question back in the days of the war. We were 5,000 people who were taken from Auschwitz to Warsaw to clean up the ghetto. One day, one of the Jews said to me: “Rabbi, do you still say today, ‘Ata bachartanu’ (You chose us)? I answered him: ‘Today I understand that you chose us more than ever before. If we were not chosen, we would be like them, Nazis. And we were chosen not to be like them. It is better to be burned than to burn. For what is ‘good’? Is ‘good’ to devour? Do we envy animals?”
A copy of the article by S. Shabtai
Supreme holy words, “I am the man who saw affliction from the rod of His wrath” (Lamentations 3:1). Not only did he not lose his faith and it was even whole, but “he understood our choice more than ever before”…
And if we have already presented this rare conversation, which hundreds of thousands of secular readers must have been shocked by its amazing messages, we will quote a few more lines, precisely from the author’s preliminary conversation with Rabbi Shmuel Unsdorfer, head of the Sanz Yeshiva in Montreal, Canada:
The conversation with Rabbi Unsdorfer
The Rebbe once said: In his day he never thought of fixing the world. But “that they will force him to do so.” The Rebbe was in the extermination camps and when the day of liberation came, he saw piles of dead bodies around him. “Was there nothing I could do to bring them to the grave?”; and there were sick people around him. “There was nothing I could do to take care of them? Not to organize sick visits for them?”; and around him were young people, most of them orphans. “There was nothing I could do to take care of them materially and spiritually? I would have had to establish yeshiva and schools for them, take care of their livelihood, raise them and provide for them.”
In 1946, the Rebbe moved several hundred people who were connected to him from Germany to America, and treated them as a grandfather would treat his own followers. He knew the lackings of each of them, simply and without prompting. They come to him in all their matters, regarding livelihood and family life, work and raising children. “He carries each of them in his head.”
When the Rebbe separated from his people, on the last Shabbat, it was the night of Kol Nidrei (the eve of Yom Kippur) and not Shabbat… People wept with tears. “The Rebbe is our father, he is everything to us, for whom does he leave us?”
And Rabbi Shmuel (Unsdorfer) tells me: You must have seen how the Rebbe talked with me before he put on the tallis (prayer shawl). Do not think that he spoke to me of heavenly matters. He told me that with G-d’s grace he had already managed to find a source of income for the young man that came with us.
