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Todays Shoah
NAPHTALI PERLBERGER APRIL 17, 2015, 4:28 PM

his is a difficult day for me each year. Yom

HaShoah the day commemorating the Six Million who

perished in WWII. For too many of us, it is no more than a
history legend, far removed by geography and years from
those horrible events that were but 70 years ago!
For others, there is incredulity fostered by those who deny
it ever happened, call it the Jewish Hoax! Pretty soon, those
who can tell first-hand what happened, who have their
branded numbers on their arms, who have the nightmares
that punctuated the stillness of their childrens sleep, they
will all be gone!
My story is partially first-hand, but mostly secondary
through what I learned from my mother while I have
photographs that she preserved my father never talked

about it, had no photographs, had not a single known

relative with whom he could shed tears. While he moved on,
so-to-speak, his anger and frustration emerging in ways that
were indirect, my mother lived in the past her pre-war
relatives were her true family. It was the life that she had
before the storm troopers broke down their door on the
Second Night of Passover in the midst of their Seder that
was her reality. Her last visions of her parents taken off to
the trains at the Sommelplatz, her last sight of her brother
before his throat was cut, her last sight of her other brother
whose innocent Talmudic head was shaved in the public
square and then shot, blot out all the joy that she might
have had watching me and my sister grow up in America.
Unlike my sister, who was born here after we came to
America, I was born at the tail-end of the war in Krakow. My
father was still fighting in Berlin and was unaware of my
birth on a kitchen table in the apartment he left my mother
in, who was too afraid for my life to go to the hospital when
she went into labor. As an officer in the Polish division of the
Russian Army, and the son of the Rabbi of Wieliczka, he had
been sent to Siberia after he and his sister went East to
escape from the Nazi Blitzkrieg in September 1939. He had
been in Berlin on Krisstalnacht, when his uncle and brother
were killed outside their broken into mens store, where my
father worked during the Depression and sent money home
to Poland. He fought at Stalingrad and liberated my mother,
whom he met, as his army swept across Poland on the way
to Germany. He was married under a chuppah an army
blanket held up by bayoneted rifles in a ceremony by the
only rabbi he could find from the ashes of Auschwitz.
After the war, as a Krakower, he wanted to stay in Poland,
even though his family had been slaughtered. His best

friend, Mottel, who he had met in Siberia, served in the army

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1945, was killed AFTER the war in the pogroms instigated

by angry Poles, who resented that the 3.5 million Jews had
only been reduced to a few hundred thousand! How dare
they survive and come back
And so we left Poland as did all of the tired and sick
remnants of Eastern Europe and headed West. But, at the
German border, the victors had not yet decided what to do
with the Jews, so we lived in a railroad car for several
months I was but a few months old until they opened up
the DP camps. We were placed behind the barbed wires of
Bergen-Belsen, the first of my three camps from 1945-1949.
There, my brother died little is spoken of the horrendous
conditions in which we Jews lived in the early days of the
DP camps if you want to read about it, google the
Harriman Report, delivered to President Truman, and see
what he saw, what Eisenhower saw when the camps were
visited sickness, starvation, little food, and death treated
like vermin, left to die, thousands died in the first year or two
under the care of the victors.
My own memories are vivid, even though I was so young,
especially when my brother succumbed to his illness and
was buried in the cemetery where Rabbi Shimshon Raphael
Hirsch was laid to rest in Frankfurt. I could not understand
the logic, the madness, that we were kept in these camps,
while the Germans walked the streets freely. In order to get
food, my mother actually taught me to recite at age 4, the

poem Lorelei, so that I could stand on a table in a

brauhaus and be given by the carousing Germans enough
money to buy steins of beer, which came with food. I rode
around a makeshift bicycle my father had made for me,
looking for God, so that he could explain it to me!
When I began lecturing on the Holocaust as an adult first
as Chairman of Mens Organizations for Federation, then as
a reporter for the Jewish Times, then as the founder and
first president of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Children of
Holocaust Survivors, the stories I told were surreal. When I
spoke to survivors, they shook their heads and often cried.
When I spoke to American audiences, they marveled, but it
was clear that they saw them only as stories. It could not
happen HERE. It could not happen NOW.
For decades, as I spoke of my and may familys
experiences, it was in the framework of Yom HaShoah,
Tisha BAv, the High Holidays or in my kiruv work for AISH
HaTorah and Etz Chaim. I toned it down . . . I even avoided
talking about it . . . it was a downer! It did not resonate with
the newer generations, and the older ones born and raised
in America, would not accept the immediacy of any of this
ancient history.
But, as I spoke these past few months before organizations
like the Zionist Organization of America, at Orthodox day
schools and at the Institute for Jewish Ethics, ears perked
up. It was no longer as remote as it had been in years past.
We are in a present day dj vu, of the period between
1933-1939. Jewish flags and Jewish shops and places of
worship are being burned and defaced. Cemetery markers
are being toppled. Universities are the bedrock of AntiSemitism and Anti-Israel slogans, marches and campaigns.

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Bombs and missiles dropping daily in Sderot, targeted

against civilian populations everywhere, suicide bombers,
stabbing fanatics, and random killings and maiming of Jews
in Israel, in Europe and even in the United States are now
commonplace. A Jew cannot walk the streets of Europe
with a kippah without being attacked! And, when Islamic
terrorists attack a secular newspaper in France in the name
of Allah, they do not hesitate to find a Jewish supermarket
on the Eve of Shabbos, and kill and take hostages.
What of Israels perennial ally, the United States? The
current President has abandoned Israel, refused to attend or
send anyone to France when most other world leaders
marched arm-in-arm, has made alliances with not only
Saudi Arabia who funds terrorism but Iran, his new
friend! Do we forget that Iran is Persia? Do we forget that
Saladin (and later, Arafat, declared that treaties are to be
entered into with armies and nations stronger than they
were, and as a tactic of war, would keep the treaty only
until it was stronger than its contractual partner, and then
destroy it? Do we forget that Iran held American hostages
during Carter/Reagen era? Do we forget that Iran publicly
cries out, at the highest level of government: Death to
America! Death to Israel.
PM Netanyahu is vilified because he asks that a condition
be met with the enemy claiming to want peace it is a
simple request admit publicly that the State of Israel has
a right to exist! This demand came just two days after Iran
said that the destruction of Israel is non-negotiable. The

Administration has rejected such a linkage. Increasingly

polarizing American Jewry, whom the Democratic Party
seeks to maintain in its quest for the White House in 2016,
President Obama, the consummate politician, has in the last
few days reiterated that the security of Israel is a priority for
the United States. While this pledge is being mouthed,
billions of dollars in aid, the sale of rockets, the funds to
rebuild tunnels and re-arm Hamas, are being extended to
Israels sworn enemies.
On this Yom HaShoah, as a living survivor whose age of 70
mirrors the passage of time that is but a blink of any eye,
the danger to World Jewry is palpable. Anti-Semitic attacks
have been reported as rising some 40% just in the last year!
Hamas-PLO are infiltrating the agencies of the UN and the
ICC, and calling on Israel to be convicted of war crimes, of
being forced to recognize its bid for independent statehood,
and all the while, refusing to recognize Israels legitimacy
and dedicated to its destruction, and the extinction of Jews
worldwide.
70 70. The age of yayin which has the gematria of 70.
Wine, like so many things, has a dark side and a spiritual
component. It can be used as a sacrament, or it can be
abused, and spawn violence and erratic behavior. It is the
70 nations, and it is the 70 souls that went down to Egypt,
and it is the Elders who were the leaders of the Tribes of
Israel under Moshe.
We are at a crossroads on this the 70th anniversary of the
Holocaust! The Shoah is not just a distant memory, or some
tale or legend. It is not a thing of the past. It is, as so much
of history before it, a moment in history that is as the
proverbial words instruct: He who does not learn from
history, is condemned to repeat it! Let us recognize the

signs before it is too late. Let the negotiators with Iran not
forget the tragic mistake of Chamberlain. Let not we be
blind and passive
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to the scourge of violence sweeping across the Middle East,

across the landscape of Europe and seeping into the safe
harbor of the United States. Germany was not an
aberration. It was a warning! Just as that cultured society
could descend into barbarism and acts of horror, so can it
happen anywhere. Annihilation of peoples, the breakdown
of civilizations are not merely the result of hordes of
barbarians, without breeding, education or culture,
overrunning empires of the West. History has proven that it
can, and has, and God forbid, will happen even in those
civilized societies where democratic ideals are found on
paper and behind glass for all to see.
Let us stop the Shoah that looms on the horizon, by naming
our enemies, confronting and destroying their designs
before they are hopelessly malignant. Let us stop
negotiating with those who use such methods as tactics of
war. Let us redouble our efforts to keep the Lights of
freedom, justice and human liberty ever burning, before they
are snuffed out forever!