Israel Matzav

The last night of the town of Ozerow

Here's the story of the last night of the town of Ozerow, as told by Rabbi Ben Zion Wacholder, the father of A Mother in Israel (Hat Tip: Mrs. Carl). This is from the first link.

Everyone in the town knew it—tomorrow the Hurban of Ozerow would take place. Ozerow would cease to exist. People recalled the destruction of the first Temple by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and that of the Second Temple by Titus, the wicked emperor of Rome. People recalled the other Hurban, which had taken place 28 years before, almost to the day. On that October day of 1914, a tzarist commander, mimicking the parched earth policy of the Russian general Kozukow in the war against Napoleon, sprayed the houses with naptha, and burnt the entire town to its foundations. “Got wet hubn rahamunes,” God will have pity on the remnants of Israel. Was not Ozerow rebuilt, replacing the rotten wooden houses with those made of white rectangular stone, with a new synagogue, sporting intricately carved pillars and a large Beth Hamidrash, which had become the envy of the surrounding shtetlach?

This time, not a single building was to be destroyed. Only the people would be taken away. There were some 5,000 souls whose ancestors had lived in this town since the 16th century. In addition, many newcomers, mostly young people who had somehow escaped from the liquidation of the Nazi ghettoes of Warsaw and Lodz, or who were exiled from Vienna and Vlatzlavek (Włocławek) by the Germans.

Frequently in my nightmares, I find myself conversing with my father and mother, my younger brother and sister, and many of the townspeople. All were to be taken to the railroad station at Yashitz and loaded into freight cars for transport to the “East.” At that time, no one in town had an inkling of the existence of Oświęcim, Majdanek, or Treblinka, or imagined the existence of extermination camps. Tomorrow nearly the entire population of the town—men, women, and children—would disappear. They would be slain or shipped to place from which, to my knowledge, no one, not a single person, escaped to tell the story of exactly what happened to them. The eyes of the people mirrored the quiet hope, the unexpressed confidence that they were leaving their ancestral home only for a brief interval.

Millenia of Jewish history had embedded into the Jews of Ozerow a faith in God’s love of Israel. Just as God had vowed never to destroy the world He had created, so He would never impart power to the tormentors of the Jews to destroy them utterly. God knows, the people of Ozerow had sinned. They had ceased to study His Torah—even before the war the hadorim were becoming empty. Only middle-aged and elderly people attended daily Mincha services regularly and lingered on to listen to the local Talmudic lecturer. But God would not forget his people. Tomorrow will be what it will be: today was Sabbath and the joy of the day of rest emanated from their faces.

Read the whole thing.

Especially for those who recall the controversy a while back about the Poles' role in the Holocaust this story should be quite enlightening.

Labels: Holocaust, Holocaust survivors

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:55 PM