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 19,341 feet. The UK’s highest, Ben Nevis, is 4,413 feet and the highest in England is Scafell Pike at 3,209 feet.
This is the one I managed to climb as a new mother with my baby daughter when she was only a few months old, and it was not easy at all. But nothing like Kilimanjaro. And as for Everest …
What on earth compels us to leave our comfort zones for new heights, you might ask. Is it just because they are there? For a worthy cause? For health reasons? Or sometimes is it because we simply want to survive?
This is story of the Exodus that we’ve just read at Shul. No doubt the children of Israel would have preferred to stay in Egypt. They knew they were slaves, but they had sort of gotten used to their situation and were even more afraid of the unknown.
However, thank goodness Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses) managed to persuade them to leave. Had they stayed in Egypt, the Jewish people would have died out. The Egyptians worshipped death and sooner or later the Jews would have joined them. Better than death was to be pursued by Pharaoh through the Reed Sea, not to mention the 40 years in the Wilderness, till they reached the Promised Land.
Exactly five years ago Christian Today asked me to describe the flight of my own parents from the European Holocaust which wiped out my father’s family and cruelly dispersed my mother’s family, with the British barring access to them more 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 80th anniversary commemorations just held in my mother’s home town of Krakow, near Auschwitz in Poland? During the Holocaust the Poles murdered many of their Jewish friends and neighbours so what is there to commemorate in Poland, exactly?
On this 80th anniversary, Christian Today paid tribute to those few Christians who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust and this was truly heroic. But many European Jews were not saved by others and perished. Others managed to survive through fluke or good luck.
For German Jews the decision to leave was particularly galling, as Jews had lived in Germany for 2,000 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 had to flee. One more week in Germany and she 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 of those German Jews for whom Germany was everything and Judaism was incidental. But having realized the hard way what being Jewish meant in Europe, she devoted the remainder 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 was set to study 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 visit my Polish uncle, who was one of the last remaining Jews to be deprived by the communist government at the time of Polish citizenship for the crime of being Jewish and had to flee from Warsaw in that year.
My parents tried in vain to persuade the British authorities to allow Uncle Bronek to make his home here in the north of England, in sunny Southport to be precise, but the British were implacable. Jews were not allowed in. Entry to uncle wasn’t allowed and in Europe only Sweden offered him a home.
So, armed with a few phrases in Swedish, in June 1970 I travelled to Stockholm, to find 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 as 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 author, Shai Agnon who, like Celan, was originally from Eastern Europe.
Nelly would not have survived life in the State of Israel, where you need 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 could not have been more mistaken. Tragedy, as she puts it, takes place in Israel every day. But it is 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 have recently been freed from the cages of Gaza.
Nelly’s existence was commemorated late in 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 close to where my displaced daughter lived for six months when Hezbollah fired rockets on the north of Israel.
Nelly Sachs has been translated more than once into English and the latest translation is by an Anglican member of our Jewish-Christian dialogue group, Andrew Shanks, who picked my brain on the Jewish, German and Hebrew aspects of her thought.
However his translation is, as he says himself, an approximation.
One of Nelly’s poems, which she recited at the Nobel ceremony on her 75th birthday, is called simply ‘Flight’.
I provide my own translation of salient passages:
‘In flight, what a wonderful welcome on the way. Wrapped in sheets of wind, feet in sands prayer that can never quite utter Amen. Flying forever…. In place of my homeland, I hold the world’s transformation.’
In modern Israel the transformation engendered by millions of Jews losing their own homelands and finding, after struggle and sacrifice, their new home in the Promised Land, is best encapsulated in Israel’s civil society which is truly remarkable.
My friend’s daughter, a local GP, who attended Zionist Youth Group with my own daughter, now living in Israel, wasn’t just climbing Kilimanjaro for the sake of it. She and others from all over the world were climbing for charity, to help SHALVA, an Israeli organization that helps disabled young people.
Some of us love poetry. I have translated quite a bit of it myself from a variety of languages. But like the prudent mountaineer, it’s best not to veer too far from the edge. To me climbing Kilimanjaro for disabled children is poetry in itself and should be celebrated in its own way.
Holocaust survivors like my parents do not need reminders of death; they don’t need commemorations, ceremonies, monuments and museums. What they need is proof of life.
My parents are dead. But my daughters and grandchildren live on in them. The reborn State of Israel continues to thrive through the resilience of a group of middle-aged people for whom Judaism means climbing the highest mountain in Africa to safeguard very young lives in the Jewish State: truly ‘the world’s transformation’ – an example to us all.
This is also the story of the Exodus.
