I feel such a whirlwind of emotion as we remember the greatest evil and hatred we have known, and commit to carry forward the legacy of those murdered during the Holocaust. It is a day of sadness, resolve, and even anger. Then, a few days later we are celebrating the greatest miracle in our time – Medinat Yisrael. In just three years, the Jewish people rose from the ashes! Celebrating Israel’s independence combines two very different elements – memory and celebration. First is Yom HaZikaron, on which we remember those who were killed making the State of Israel policy. Then, we rejoice in the existence of Israel. The two days, contradictory in tone, are marked side by side to remind us of the price of the freedom that they celebrate each year.
As
amazing as it is for us to celebrate this week on the Jewish calendar, I can
only imagine what it was like to live through this period in history and, even
more so, to live through both the Shoah and the establishment of the State of
Israel.
Avraham Carmi did.
Carmi
was born in Poland in 1929. When World War Two broke out, he and his mother
fled their hometown for Warsaw. They stayed with his uncle, the manager of a
Warsaw Jewish cemetery. They remained in his flat at the cemetery for three
years, and then spent a month hiding inside a dug grave.
Avraham and his mother subsequently spent seven months hiding in basements and underground bunkers in the ghetto, until in April 1943, at the height of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, soldiers discovered them and took them to Treblinka and shortly thereafter to the Budzyn labor camp in Eastern Poland. There, they were separated – never to see each other again.
In Budzyn, Avraham worked as a slave laborer in an airplane factory. The factory was managed by Poles, and one day - out of the blue - a foreman approached him and said he wanted to "do something" for Carmi. With a boldness that still bemused him years later, he asked the foreman to go to the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw and retrieve his mother's jewelry, which she had buried there. The foreman did it. Avraham used the jewelry as currency to keep himself alive until the end of the war. (It turns out that the Polish foreman was actually a Jew, who looked Aryan enough to pass as a non-Jew to survive the war. The two reunited in Israel in the 1960s.)
After the war, Avraham took the circuitous journey through Europe and then a British detention camp for illegal immigrants to Palestine. He arrived in time to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. He was captured and spent 11 months in a Jordanian prison camp. Following the war, Avraham became a teacher and then an inspector for Israel’s teacher training colleges. (See HERE for more about this special individual.)
Avraham Carmi’s story is an inspiration and a challenge. In his lifetime, he and so many others have experienced mei’avdut l’cheirut, from slavery to freedom. They went from the lowest depths of horror, in which they had no control whatsoever, to rise from the ashes to seize the day and literally bring about redemption with their own hands.
What
about us? Obviously, we need to learn, know, and tell the stories of those who
traversed the road from Holocaust to a Jewish State. For me, the lives of those
like Avraham Carmi help me appreciate where we have been as a people these last
100 years and to resolve to rise to the challenge to do what it takes to ensure
we thrive as a Jewish nation far into the future.
P.S.
See HERE for my class on “How
Should We Celebrate Yom Ha’Atzmaut?” with sources HERE.
