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Dr. Fred Rosnner--Kristallnacht: Personal Reflections

I received the following email at work:

This past Shabbos, at Shalosh Seudos in Young Israel of Far Rockaway, Dr. Fred Rosner, a renowned authority on Medical Halacha and the Rambam, discussed Kristallnacht, which happened 68 years ago today (11/9/38). Dr. Rosner was a child when his family, living in Berlin, experienced first-hand the brunt of Nazi cruelty. Dr. Rosner titled his talk, "Kristallnacht: Personal Reflections". Please pass this on, and share this with others. Many thanks to Golan Ben-Oni for his help in transcribing Dr. Rosner's heartfelt address.

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November 9th, 2006 is the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht. On that night in 1938, the Nazis unleashed gangs of storm troopers to carry out widespread attacks on Jews, Jewish-owned property and synagogues throughout Germany and Austria. At least 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Dachau. Hundreds of synagogues were set on fire or completely demolished and thousands of shops and homes were destroyed, looted, set on fire or otherwise desecrated. Among them were my family's house and store on Dragonerstrasse. Our belongings were thrown out onto the street, our piano was smashed, our cabinets broken and our store produce ruined.

This was Kristallnacht, the night during which the German Reich sent its well
organized and heavily armed storm troopers all across Germany and Austria to kill Jews and destroy Jewish property. These were carefully planned atrocities meant to terrorize the entire Jewish population. Synagogues were burned, windows were smashed, homes were ransacked and Jews were rounded up, beaten and killed. There was no place to hide.

The Nazis called it Kristallnacht — night of shattered glass — an almost poetic
appellation for that night of arson and terror and murder. But another horror of that awful night was what happened around the world. Nothing! No one cared. No country in the world was willing to accept even a fraction of the several hundred thousand German Jews. Even the United States of America closed its doors and the Jewish people were shut out in their greatest hour of need.

Many years ago, President Kennedy visited Berlin. At the "wall" he made a
famous speech in which he said "Ich bin ein Berliner." He had no right to say that. But I do. I was born in Berlin on October 3, 1935 into a very large family, my father being one of ten siblings and my mother one of six siblings. On October 28, 1938, less than two weeks before Kristallnacht, my father and my paternal grandfather were deported to a concentration camp in Poland called Zbancion (Neu Benshen) from which my grandfather never returned.

In Berlin on the night of Kristallnacht, my maternal grandfather witnessed the
window and chandelier breaking and subsequent burning and total destruction of the synagogue across the street from his apartment on Grenadierstrasse. He saw the Torah scrolls, Bibles, prayer books and other sacred objects thrown onto the street, doused with gasoline and set on fire. He collapsed in a state of shock, lapsed into a coma, never regained consciousness and died several monthslater. He lies buried in what was East Berlin, in the famous Weissensee Cemetery.

Less than a month after Kristallnacht, on December 8,1938, my brother, sister
and I were taken by train to the German-Holland border where we miraculously were able to cross into Holland. Two hundred children and no adults were on that last train from Berlin to Holland.

On April 18, 1939, my brother and I were shipped to England with the
"kindertransporf where we spent the entire war in relative safety. England did not accept girls at that time; as a result, my sister remained in Holland but was later smuggled to Belgium by a Christian family that pretended she was their daughter. Here she joined my mother who had also smuggled herself to Belgium to escape the terror in Berlin. In the Spring of 1939, having bribed his way out of the Polish concentration camp with his gold watch, my father returned to Berlin, traced my mother and sister to Belgium and joined them there. As a result, my parents and sister were hidden "underground" in Belgium by several Christian families, moving from hideout to hideout every few months to remain ahead of the Nazis who were constantly searching for Jews. Most of my parents' numerous brothers and sisters and their children as well as my two grandmothers were apprehended in Antwerp, Belgium and deported to the
concentration camps in Theresenstadt and Auschwitz from which they never returned, Several hundred members of my family were murdered in Auschwitz. Only a handful survived to be liberated by allied forces. To this day they have concentration camp numbers tattooed on their forearms and horrible memories indelibly and forever emblazoned in their hearts and minds.

My parents and sister were liberated by American forces in the summer of 1944
in Brussels, Belgium. My brother and I in England had lost contact with them for eight years and were unaware of their exact whereabouts or whether they survived at all. A British soldier who landed in Normandy, France with the allied forces took temporary leave from his army unit to go to Belgium to search for my parents and sister. Miraculously, he located them in Brussels and shortly thereafter, my brother and I were reunited with them in 1946. Three years later we emigrated to the United States. On July 1, 1949, we arrived in New York harbor and were greeted by the Statue of Liberty. We adopted the United States of America as our homeland, became citizens, and have lived here ever since. My parents made aliya after my father's retirement.

Exactly fifty years after Kristallnacht, I received an invitation from a group of
German Jewish physicians to lecture at the First International Jewish Congress on Medicine and Halakhah in Berlin. I would like to tell you how I wrestled with the decision to accept or decline that invitation. I asked myself: Why should I accept the invitation to participate in this Congress on Medicine and Jewish Law? Why should I return to the city in which I was born but from which I was forced to flee at the tender age of three years? Why should I return to Berlin exactly fifty years after Kristallnacht which my family and 1 lived through? Many years ago, I swore never again to set foot on German soil, never to purchase German products, never to ride in a German car, never to read a German book, never to listen to German music, never to enjoy anything German. I steadfastly refused repeated offers by the Berlin municipality for an all-expenses-paid seven-day excursion to Berlin — an offer extended to all Berlin natives who were forced to flee their birthplace from the Nazis. Why did I accept the invitation of the organizers of that International Jewish Congress on Medicine and Halachah (Jewish Law)? What rational thinking or divine inspiration or guidance motivated me to return to Berlin in November, 1988, fifty years after I fled that city, exactly fifty years after Kristallnacht, the first all out assault by the Nazis on the survival of the Jewish people?

Before answering that question, let me tell you that in the United States, I have
been privileged to pursue a career in academic medicine. As a physician, I regard with abhorrence the participation of Nazi physicians in the medical or medicalized killing of millions of Jews and others. The heinous acts of medical experimentation and torture chronicled at the Nuremberg trials had a chilling effect on the world at large and the medical profession in particular. In his book, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Lifton recounts in great detail the medical horrors at Auschwitz and the involvement of German physicians in the torture and killing of thousands of innocent human beings. The Nazis began with a program of sterilization and "euthanasia" under which German physicians
actually carried out the murder of countless children and adults considered "unworthy of life," because they were physically or mentally ill, or socially undesirable, such as Jews, and climaxing with Auschwitz where doctors performed selections, both on the ramp among arriving transports of prisoners and later in the camps and on the medical blocks.

In Auschwitz, doctors supervised the killing in the gas chambers and decided
when the victims were dead. Doctors ordered and supervised, and at times carried out, direct killing of debilitated patients on the medical blocks. At the same time, they kept up a pretense of medical legitimacy, signing false death certificates listing spurious illnesses. Doctors consulted actively on how best to keep selections running smoothly; on how many people to permit to remain alive to fill the slave labor requirements of the I.G. Farben enterprise at Auschwitz; and on how to burn the enormous number of bodies that strained the facilities of the crematoria.

Then there was a radical escalation in both the vision and technology of mass murder at Auschwitz where Jews, Gypsies, and others were subjected to sterilization by injection, radiation, or surgery, to the injection of vaccines made from dental infections, to massive bleedings for blood-group experiments, to the use of human flesh for culture media and the making of lampshades and tobacco pouches, to brainwashing with chemicals, to deliberate infection with typhus, to the application of toxic substances to various parts of the body, to vivisections and to mass killings by phenol injections, gassing, shooting, and other cruel and inhumane methods. How many of my relatives were used to make lampshades or bars of soap? My twin cousins, who survived Auschwitz, were designated for human experimentation by the infamous arch-evil Doctor Joseph Mengele, known as the "angel of death”. He had a passionate fascination with twins whose lives had existential value. Twins were given desirable jobs and were not harmed because they were needed for Mengele's experiments and were kept alive for his anthropological research. About fifteen percent of the twins were killed, some as a consequence of the experiments performed on them. These experiments and killings were only a small part of the role Nazi doctors played in Hitler's Final Solution. In fact, doctors supervised the entire killing process at Auschwitz from beginning to end. How were physicians, sworn by oath and conviction to ease suffering, transformed from healers to systematic killers?

With this background, I again ask: why did I return to Berlin fifty years after Kristallnacht which I personally experienced as a young child? Why did I return after I foreswore never again to set foot on German soil? In fact, I had to assemble a Bet Din (Court of Law) to be “matir neder” or to absolve me of my vow never to return to Berlin or Germany. As an author and lecturer, I did not until very recently write or lecture about my personal experiences during those dark moments in Jewish history. The pain and anguish has not subsided over the last fifty years.

Throughout all those years I did not ever discuss the Holocaust even with my children and the few surviving members of my family including my brother, sister, and twin cousins. The fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht with the terrifying sound of synagogue windows and chandeliers being broken in every Jewish community in Germany and Austria compelled me to reassess my long silence.

When I received the invitation to participate in the International Jewish Congress
on Medicine and Jewish Law in Berlin, I did not know how to respond. My sister said:

"Absolutely not! Under no circumstances should you go back to Berlin, ever." My
brother said: "You're not going as a tourist. You are going to strengthen the Jewish community there, so go." When I consulted my father, he did not say yes or no but only responded: "If you go, visit your grandfather's grave in East Berlin"

I returned to Berlin for two reasons. On pure rational grounds, I went to Berlin to visit and pray at my grandfather's grave. It is the only grave whose location is known of all the members of my family who perished in the Holocaust. To me that grave symbolizes by grandmothers, uncles, aunts and countless cousins who perished in Auschwitz and who have no known graves. To me that grave also symbolizes the six million Jews and four million others who perished at the hands of the Nazis and who have no graves; no graves to visit and no tombstones to pray at. At my grandfather's grave, I came face to face with my past, fifty years later.

The second reason I returned to Berlin was to give strength and encouragement
to the small Jewish community of physicians of Berlin, a mere shadow of its previous glory of the 1920s and early 1930s. The fledgling Jewish community in Berlin might be compared to the dried bones which the prophet Ezekiel brought back to life, a symbol of the revival of the Jews and the Jewish state, as discussed in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 92b), From the ash-piles of old there arose a new Jewish community. From the recent piles of bones and limbs there was a rebirth of a German-Jewish community. From the emaciated bodies and darkness of their collective graves, a new light began to shine
forth. God's sacred spirit once again rests upon German Jewry.

During the darkest moments in Jewish history, the Divine Presence shows itself to comfort the Jewish people and promise them better times ahead. Even during the destruction of the Holy Temple, God was already planting the seeds for it’s rebuilding.

In Lamentations 2:8 it is written that while the Lord intended to destroy the wall of the Temple, He was simultaneously measuring the wall. Why was God measuring the wall as He was destroying it? One usually measures when one builds, not when one destroys. The answer is that God's love for his people is manifest even when He is angry and punishing them for their sins and transgressions. While allowing the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews to occur, He was already laying the groundwork for the return of the Jews from exile and the rebuilding of the Temple.

On Kristallnacht, over a half century ago, God already planted the seed for the rebuilding of His people after the Holocaust. I and others, the remnant of that generation, and our children and grandchildren, must help Judaism to re-flourish. Although Israel and the United States are presently the great centers of Torah learning and practice, other fledgling Jewish communities throughout the world are growing in numbers and in depth of commitment to their heritage. These communities need assistance from their brethren throughout the world. That is the second reason why I went back to Berlin.

Less than a month from now, Jews celebrate the holiday of Hanukkah, commemorating the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks. The light of Judaism, as the light of the Hanukkah menorah, shines forever. Its brightness may at times be dimmed a little as it was a half century ago, but the flickering flame is never extinguished. The Third Reich has come and gone and the miracle of our generation is that the Jewish people are still here as they have been for thousands of years. I returned to Berlin to help revitalize that flame and keep it shining brightly. The Nazis were unsuccessful in their attempt to blot out the light of the Jews.

Jewish physicians practicing medicine in Berlin today according to the highest
Jewish ethical and professional standards are in sharp contrast to the Nazi doctors who supervised medicalized killings. I returned to Berlin to show support for my Jewish medical colleagues in the conduct of their lives as committed Jews. I returned to Berlin to visit my grandfather's grave and to remember the atrocities that were perpetrated against my family and six million other Jews. The story needs to be told, and retold, to honor those who became its victims.

Daled Amos

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