A Letter from a Broken Heart – 80 Years Ago
By: Yaakov Rosenfeld
Much has already been written about the response of the United States in general, and of its large and wealthy Jewish community’s reaction in particular, to the horrors of the Holocaust. In many places, the American military intervention, which was too late, has already been discussed, and especially its refusal to bomb Auschwitz and the tracks leading to it. The Rabbis’ March in Washington, D.C. on October 6th, 1943, the 7th of Tishrei 5704, three days before Yom Kippur, which attracted a great deal of media attention, also did not receive a respectful response from the heads of government. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with whom the rabbis had requested a meeting, was “too busy,” according to the White House. It was later learned that Roosevelt had a few hours free that afternoon, but he avoided meeting the delegation. Stephen Samuel Wise, head of the World Jewish Congress, and Samuel Rosenman, the president’s advisor, speechwriter, and head of the American Jewish Committee, argued that the protesting rabbis, many of whom were Orthodox and recent immigrants, “did not represent American Jewry” and that the president should not meet with them. This case highlights a fact that is not often talked about – the mistake made by the leaders of American Jewry, mainly Reform, in its treatment of the Holocaust story. But the mutual Jewish aid, expressed in the acts of kindness and rescue by American Jews through the variety of aid organizations that were established at the time, will never be forgotten.
It is therefore important for us to read about the feelings, the heartbreak, and the longing of an American Jew whose entire family was left in the Valley of Tears, and who was tormented by the pangs of conscience and the pain of loss.
Eighty years after those days, we leaf through the newspapers of the time and find a painful letter sent to the editorial team of the Yiddish-American “Forverts” (Forward) newspaper. The letter was published exactly eighty years ago, at the end of the month of Shevat 5705, at the end of World War II, when Allied forces were fighting in Eastern Europe and had begun liberating the camps.
The letter speaks for itself, and we bring it in a free translation (originally translated from Yiddish to Hebrew, now translated from Hebrew to English).
The writer addresses the editor of the newspaper and asks to vent what is on his mind.
Boro Park, in those days.
22 years ago, I left the alter heim (“the old home” – a common Yiddish term in America for a Jewish town in Eastern Europe). My uncle, my mother’s brother, brought me here.
He was always my favorite uncle, and I am his favorite nephew.
We left a large family at home, and they were all requesting and demanding that we send them money from America.
If we didn’t send it, it would be terrible.
My family is made up of special people; we are related to rabbis, rebbes, respectable people, Torah scholars…
One of my uncles would say that he could trace our genealogy all the way back to King David…
They were proud people. Ever since I was a little boy, if I had been given the opportunity, I would have been happy to leave.
My uncle got here before me. He was already here before World War I. The family wasn’t happy with him for running away to America when he was a young Jew, but they took money from him, “pulled” it from him, and he sent more and more, beyond his means.
When I got here, I realized how precious family was to my uncle. He couldn’t tear himself away from it, even after he had been here for a long time.
More than once, when the letters with requests for money arrived, we argued. He demanded that I send a lot. I sent as much as I could, but he demanded more from me because the family demanded it. I was not only angry with him for asking me for more than I had, but also for sending the family more than he had, at the expense of his family here. I was angry with him and with them.
About seven years ago my uncle came to me and told me that six hundred dollars [a huge amount at that time] must be sent for my uncle, the one I never loved. He was the proudest of them all… The demand was for a dowry for his daughter-in-law whom I did not know, but from a rumour, I learned that she was “something rare.”
600 for a dowry, and in addition, the young man wanted to come to America to settle there with his wife, and he was assured that this would be done.
When I heard this, I was very angry. They are trading with in-laws there at our expense… Even if I had money, I would not send it, and my uncle, an old man who has to work in a shop for a living, is supposed to borrow money for this purpose! I told my uncle not to dare to do this. He was indeed angry with me, but he did not send the dowry. He could not have obtained such an amount himself.
Now I have learned that most of my family, almost all of them, to our terrible misfortune, died at the hands of the Nazis. We heard this from two cousins who escaped from Russia. My uncle was so broken, he lost his peace and the taste for life.
I cannot speak for myself. I left behind an old mother, sisters, brothers. A terrible disaster. But my old uncle simply tortures himself with feelings of guilt that he did not do enough to save them. He blames me too; he says that if I had not refused that request, at least we would have managed to save the niece.
We could have sent her a dowry, and then she would have emigrated to America, but who could have imagined such a disaster? Of course, if we had known, I would have sold my last shirt in order to save whatever we could have saved, but are we prophets?
I don’t care so much about my uncle’s complaints anymore, as much as the fact that he’s just eating away at himself. I would try to comfort him, but what comfort is there?
And here he accuses me, and I don’t know what to do.
Most eloquently
Yaakov S.
