Hebrew scholar and Jewish academic Irene Lancaster reflects on challenges experienced by European Jews 80 years on from the liberation of Auschwitz.
My daughter has just turned 50. One of her friends from Jewish youth group, also 50, has marked her own birthday by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro for an Israeli charity.
Kilimanjaro is nineteen,341 feet. The UK’s highest, Ben Nevis, is 4,413 feet and the very best in England is Scafell Pike at 3,209 feet.
This is the one I managed to climb as a latest mother with my baby daughter when she was only just a few months old, and it was tough in any respect. But nothing like Kilimanjaro. And as for Everest …
What on earth compels us to go away our comfort zones for brand new heights, you would possibly ask. Is it simply because they’re there? For a worthy cause? For health reasons? Or sometimes is it because we simply need to survive?
This is story of the Exodus that we have just read at Shul. No doubt the kids of Israel would have preferred to remain in Egypt. They knew they were slaves, but that they had kind of gotten used to their situation and were much more afraid of the unknown.
However, thank goodness Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses) managed to influence them to go away. Had they stayed in Egypt, the Jewish people would have died out. The Egyptians worshipped death and eventually the Jews would have joined them. Better than death was to be pursued by Pharaoh through the Reed Sea, not to say the 40 years within the Wilderness, till they reached the Promised Land.
Exactly five years ago Christian Today asked me to explain the flight of my very own parents from the European Holocaust which worn out my father’s family and cruelly dispersed my mother’s family, with the British barring access to them greater than once.
My Dad had loved Poland. He was already a judge and a member of the Polish national table tennis team, and he was only 26. No-one else left, only him. And the others were all murdered by Poles.
So what of the eightieth anniversary commemorations just held in my mother’s home town of Krakow, near Auschwitz in Poland? During the Holocaust the Poles murdered a lot of their Jewish friends and neighbours so what’s there to commemorate in Poland, exactly?
On this eightieth anniversary, Christian Today paid tribute to those few Christians who saved Jewish lives in the course of the Holocaust and this was truly heroic. But many European Jews weren’t saved by others and perished. Others managed to survive through fluke or good luck.
For German Jews the choice to go away was particularly galling, as Jews had lived in Germany for two,000 years, predating Christianity. Many felt more German than the Germans. For them, Germany was definitely the Promised Land.
Poet Nelly Sachs from Berlin was one such. Born in 1891, she too needed to flee. One more week in Germany and she or he would have been sent to a concentration camp.
So through links with neighbouring ‘neutral’ Sweden, and after much bureaucratic haggling, she and her mother managed to catch the last flight to Stockholm, arriving in May 1940. Nelly was also approaching 50 at this stage.
Nelly was one among those German Jews for whom Germany was all the things and Judaism was incidental. But having realized the hard way what being Jewish meant in Europe, she devoted the rest of her life to pursuing Jewish themes in German.
In 1954 Nelly began a correspondence with Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan who also wrote in German and had left Romania for Paris in 1948.
In 1969 I used to be set to review German at Cambridge and was sent by Cambridge University to a German university for a term. On return I studied poet Paul Celan with Professor George Steiner. On April 20 1970, Celan committed suicide in Paris and in May his friend Nelly Sachs died in Stockholm.
Shortly after her death, in June 1970, I left Cambridge to go to my Polish uncle, who was one among the last remaining Jews to be deprived by the communist government on the time of Polish citizenship for the crime of being Jewish and needed to flee from Warsaw in that yr.
My parents tried in vain to influence the British authorities to permit Uncle Bronek to make his home here within the north of England, in sunny Southport to be precise, however the British were implacable. Jews weren’t allowed in. Entry to uncle wasn’t allowed and in Europe only Sweden offered him a house.
So, armed with just a few phrases in Swedish, in June 1970 I travelled to Stockholm, to seek out my uncle absolutely bereft. We could only converse in German and he told me that the Swedes were extremely unwelcoming, ‘even worse than the British,’ he said.
There was nothing I could do. This was a forced Exodus, from home, language, family and familiarity. Once just after the Holocaust, and now again 25 years later, Uncle Bronek had been barred entry to the UK and to his remaining family.
At least Sweden, though alien in every way, was a haven of sorts. Just because it had been, to some extent, for Nelly Sachs. She devoted herself to her mother and to her literary work, including her poetry.
In 1966, when everyone knew that an existential war was imminent between Israel and the Arab world, Nelly was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, jointly with the Hebrew-language novelist, Israeli creator, Shai Agnon who, like Celan, was originally from Eastern Europe.
Nelly wouldn’t have survived life within the State of Israel, where you wish a certain chutzpah, get-up-and-go, and penchant for argument.
At the Nobel ceremony, in front of the King of Sweden, Nelly told Shai Agnon that while he represented Israel, she represented ‘the tragedy of the Jewish people.’
In fact, Nelly couldn’t have been more mistaken. Tragedy, as she puts it, takes place in Israel day by day. But it’s well camouflaged by the truly heroic spirit of resilience that we associate with the 1948 War of Independence, the 1967 War which took place shortly after the Nobel ceremony and the behaviour of the Israeli hostages who’ve recently been free of the cages of Gaza.
Nelly’s existence was commemorated late within the day in her native Germany by a plaque outside her former home from which she had been kicked out. This plaque stated that she was a German who had won the Nobel Prize for her poetry extolling the German language and had decided to ’emigrate’ to Sweden.
The State of Israel has honoured fellow Nobel laureate, Shai Agnon, through study centre, Agnon House, situated in a residential area near where my displaced daughter lived for six months when Hezbollah fired rockets on the north of Israel.
Nelly Sachs has been translated greater than once into English and the newest translation is by an Anglican member of our Jewish-Christian dialogue group, Andrew Shanks, who picked my brain on the Jewish, German and Hebrew elements of her thought.
However his translation is, as he says himself, an approximation.
One of Nelly’s poems, which she recited on the Nobel ceremony on her seventy fifth birthday, known as simply ‘Flight’.
I provide my very own translation of salient passages:
‘In flight, what a beautiful welcome on the way in which. Wrapped in sheets of wind, feet in sands prayer that may never quite utter Amen. Flying without end…. In place of my homeland, I hold the world’s transformation.’
In modern Israel the transformation engendered by thousands and thousands of Jews losing their very own homelands and finding, after struggle and sacrifice, their latest home within the Promised Land, is best encapsulated in Israel’s civil society which is actually remarkable.
My friend’s daughter, a neighborhood GP, who attended Zionist Youth Group with my very own daughter, now living in Israel, wasn’t just climbing Kilimanjaro for the sake of it. She and others from everywhere in the world were climbing for charity, to assist SHALVA, an Israeli organization that helps disabled young people.
Some of us love poetry. I even have translated quite a little bit of it myself from quite a lot of languages. But just like the prudent mountaineer, it is best to not veer too removed from the sting. To me climbing Kilimanjaro for disabled children is poetry in itself and ought to be celebrated in its own way.
Holocaust survivors like my parents don’t need reminders of death; they do not need commemorations, ceremonies, monuments and museums. What they need is proof of life.
My parents are dead. But my daughters and grandchildren survive in them. The reborn State of Israel continues to thrive through the resilience of a gaggle of middle-aged people for whom Judaism means climbing the very best mountain in Africa to safeguard very young lives within the Jewish State: truly ‘the world’s transformation’ – an example to us all.
This can be the story of the Exodus.
