This essay is derived from interviews with three survivors discussing their attitudes toward religion after the Holocaust.

OF PARCHMENT AND INK

From the Shavuous Service

A Survivor

"Do you still believe in God?" The question arises regularly when Holocaust survivors speak--especially when they address American students. Many students who have read survivor texts, from Elie Wiesel's Night to Alicia Appelman-Jurman's Alicia: My Story, seem intrigued by a survivor's faith or lack of it. And considering the apparent religious magnitude of the Shoah, there has been relatively little theological reaction from Jews about the place of God in the Holocaust. Included in those responses to theological questions, survivor testimonies rest on a different plain than rabbinical, academic or professional ones. Less unequivocal, emphatic or certain, some of them reflect the experience of the Holocaust in their syncretic confusion of opinions. Unlike more imperious answers, they echo the conundrum-like nature of the epoch, even from profound religious commitment. Conundrum implies a question without an answer, a problem without a solution, or a problematic situation that is unresolvable. Immersed in this religious conundrum, perhaps a variation on the question of God, is a question about the meaning of the Holocaust.

Richard Rubenstein, among those theological voices who have addressed this subject most controversially, wrote:

Rubenstein joined a venerable group of Jewish doubters, some even Talmudic, and a line of western thinkers that reaches far back into ancient history all proclaiming the death or disappearance of God. Even Elie Wiesel, in what is perhaps the most quoted passage in his signature work, Night, seemed to echo Rubenstein's sentiments: "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp . . . . Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever." After the Holocaust, such questioning voices assume chilling new depths. And here is Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, the opposite pole from the doubters and questioners:

It is Job again: do not presume to ask of God the reasons for his wrath. Who is Job--who are we--to judge the need or rationale for punishment, the meaning of God’s actions? More to the point, this seems to assume what Job's "friend" did, that Job must have committed some crime, some indiscretion or sacrilegious or sinful act. The meaning of Job’s suffering—and then the meaning of the Holocaust—is clear: suffering is always God’s punishment. Suffused with purpose and intention, human suffering carries a lesson, a moral, a divine and justifiable retribution for transgression or iniquity. Considered from this perspective, God has instilled the Holocaust with meaningfulness.

At the root of this discourse, whether biblical or contemporary, rests the fundamental assumption, represented by Job’s friends, that some meaning must be ascribed to suffering. Perhaps the most chilling prospect from a particular reading of Job is the terrifying suggestion that either God acts on whim, or the world, godless, is stochastic or random, with no reasonable meaning whatsoever. Many Orthodox Jews, including some survivors, in the prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Amos, or Hosea, have argued intractably, that the Holocaust must be viewed as God's just punishment on a people gone astray. Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, quoting a survivor interview in Reeve R. Brenner's The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors (1980), cite a stark, extreme statement of this position:

Marcus and Rosenberg offer seven theodicies which survivors have presented to explain God's place in relation to the Holocaust. This one suggests retribution, closely bound to another, "the suffering servant" theodicy of Isaiah.

Rejecting such traditional explications, Rubenstein raised the question that plagues some Jewish theologians: after Auschwitz, can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God? An affirmative answer places Auschwitz, Hitler, the SS--as Rabbi Weinberg and Brenner's survivor seem to readily admit--in the position of God's instruments--a prospect if not blasphemous, then almost obscene to many. In this vein, the Holocaust presents little or no crisis of faith or theology. The typology of Jewish history and suffering remains constant: the Nazis, cast in the mold of the Amalekites, (Exod.17:8-16), continued the behavior of prototypical antisemites. This position has gained strength in recent years, grown with the forceful insistence of leading Orthodox rabbis in Israel who ultimately accuse secular Zionists for the Holocaust. Some argue that Jews then and now have failed to obey the "Mitzvot genocide batorah," the commandment of genocide in the Torah, the order from God in Genesis to destroy all the Amalekites. It is a holy war, a Jewish jihad.

But for many survivors who have pondered the question, such systems of symbolism abstract the experience, pose little if any resolution and unsatisfactorily meager answers to colossal theological questions. Some Jews became apostates after the war; some became even more religious than before; others abandoned Judaism only to return to it later, perhaps after the birth of children. There are those who, like Elie Wiesel, questioned God, indeed, are or were angry and openly express that. Anger at least presupposes existence. Others reject that existence.

Curiously, those who draw upon the Holocaust to justify either position, who argue most vehemently for or against the presence or absence of God, tend to be of the post-Holocaust generations. Survivors rarely enter the discussion with such certainty. Rubenstein, for example, at a conference nominally on the Church struggle and the Holocaust, revealed the origin of his denial, a powerfully dramatic experience, yet once removed from the Holocaust. In 1961, days after the erection of the Berlin Wall, Rubenstein visited Probst. Dr. Heinrich Grueber in that city. The only German to testify against Eichmann and himself a concentration camp victim, Grueber explained the Wall to Rubenstein in theological terms. He believed God was punishing a sinful Germany; homeless Germans would now pay for those whom other Germans had made homeless. As Rubenstein listened raptly, the good Probst. finally asserted that Hitler had been a tool of God, sent to exterminate Europe's Jews. Rubenstein then realized that Grueber represented the logic of Covenant Theology applied to the events of the twentieth century. "He [Grueber] recognized that, if one takes the biblical theology of history seriously, Adolf Hitler is no more nor less an instrument of God's wrath than Nebuchadnessar."

Ultimately, such beliefs probe for the meaning of the Holocaust and find it, mysteriously, in God’s unfathomable mind. And, just as for Job, a lesson emerges, a presumed revelation. And a revelation of sorts seems to have come to Rubenstein as he discerned that "If one takes Covenant Theology seriously, as did Dean Grueber, Auschwitz must be God's way of punishing the Jewish people in order that they might better see the light, the light of Christ if one is a Christian, the light of Torah if one is a traditional Jew."

Disturbed by Rubenstein's story, Elie Wiesel, speaking at the same conference, offered a surprising, impromptu response instead of the talk on Holocaust literature for which he was scheduled. He began with the story of mad Moishe the beadle who came every day to the bimah, altar, in the synagogue in Sighet, Wiesel's city in Rumania. He pounded on the pulpit and said, "Ribbono shel Olam, Master of the Universe, I want you to know that we are still here." Daily, even as the transports started: "we are still here." Finally, only Moishe remained in the ghetto, and still he came to the bimah and banged his fist: "I am still here." Then, he stopped and murmured, "but you--where are you?" An anecdote? An allegory or metaphor? Wiesel elaborates: "What the Germans wanted to do to the Jewish people was to substitute themselves for the Jewish God. All the terminology, all the vocabulary testifies to that."

Typically profound, almost cabalistic, Wiesel's story implies a more mundane moral. If the "Germans wanted . . . to substitute themselves for the Jewish God," Jews were obliged to cling faithfully to that god, perhaps as a demonstration of the defeat of the Nazis, a symbol of victory, an audacious display of spite. How this midrash, or interpretation, connects to Moishe the Beadle, remains tantalizingly obscure. Similarly enigmatic is Wiesel's concluding allegory about Rabbi Ishmael, one of the ten martyrs in Roman times to whom God gave an option in the midst of his travail: if Rabbi Ishmael shed one tear, He would return the universe to chaos. But the rabbi did not cry. "Why didn't he cry? The hell with it!" Wiesel challenges. "If this is the price to pay, who needs it? Who wants this kind of world. Who wants to live in it. . . . But to be a Jew is to have all the reasons in the world to destroy and not to destroy." Presumably the moral to be taken from this story, as it might relate to the issue at hand, needs some transposition. The meaning of the story, and perhaps the lesson of the Holocaust, may lie in this parable, but it must present itself to many as simply inadequate to the task. To be a Jew, intimated Wiesel, is to have all the reasons in the world not to believe in God, and to believe in God. For after the Holocaust, almost as an echo to Emil Fackenheim’s admonition to Jews to remain Jews of the faith in order to withhold final victory from Hitler, it is incumbent on Jews to believe, in spite of the Shoah.

On balance, Rubenstein's point seems stronger, more concrete, more consistent, if devastating and depressing. Wiesel's eloquence and Talmudic style appear strangely inappropriate in his abstruse parables. In Night or his other novels, or in his essays that directly address Holocaust related questions, the literal assumes primary precedence; specific, human examples sharpen and reinforce Wiesel's purpose. Unlike that writing, however, this essay--admittedly an impromptu talk--lacks the intensity and assurance of those others. At least here, God's role in the Holocaust remains problematic for this primary emissary from the world of survivors.

When they emerge, questions about that role have been among the most torturous for victims of the Holocaust who survived. Few subjects receive such intense reaction--dismissal or engagement. From the midst of incredulity about her own survival in hiding, Erna G. voices her paradoxically ambivalent yet adamant refusal to attribute that survival to God:

Throughout the remainder of the interviews with Erna, there would be almost no discussion about religion. Even her childhood recollections of her Orthodox grandfather reveal fear and hostility--a severe man, dressed in black, with a violent temper who never held her or offered a kind word. And typically, she tries to mitigate the memory: "Maybe it was just too long ago and I don't remember." Erna seems to have bound Judaism's God to this image and to her experience of fear and disease, starvation and silence that meant survival for her. Pain and loss merge with religion and she finds no solace in it. Bereft of that comfort, visited by the physical losses of family, she mourns over the multiple deprivation of a religious heritage. Yet beneath an antipathy toward religion lurks a cautious, penitent attempt to palliate what she perceives as Judaism's failure. Much of that religious heritage had been absent from her life before the war. From religious grandparents came less observant parents, and the child had little awareness of ritual, having been born in France after her parents had emigrated from Poland.

Others, however, attest to the centrality of religious observance in their lives before the Holocaust: "Religion was part of your life . . . You kept your Sabbath, you were Jewish and you were kosher. That was a natural thing. And there were no questions." In Munkacz, in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Czechoslovakia, Agi R. recalls that there were no questions. She, like Wiesel, questioned and questions God, defying the idea of justice in His actions, yet acknowledging His existence--frustratingly unfulfilled in that concession. In the village of Betlan, in Transylvania, smaller than Munkacz but perhaps equally devout, there were no questions, either. There, Abe P. grew up in a family that lived and breathed religious devotion. His initial reflections announce his religious sensibilities and their links to his family life. His father, he begins, had "bord and peyas," (long) beard and side locks; his mother wore a sheitl, head covering; the region knew his grandfather as a "moira tzadek," one with an awesome or authoritative knowledge of interpreting the Law (Torah). Abe's childhood life revolved around religious education. He recalled in minute detail the table in his cheder, religious school, around which the students sat learning the alphabet; the weekly exams, the questioning, the "potches" (slaps) at incorrect answers, the Thursday night examinations and the Sabbath ones at home beginning with the weekly "wos hoben gelernt?" (what have you learned) query from his father. Any sign of failure and "God help you!"

His routine had already been established at a tender age, fixed like the natural course of events, like the God-ordained routines of the stars: 6 a.m., ready for cheder and davening (praying); breakfast at home then he and his siblings "put down the siddurim [Hebrew books] and picked up our goyishe [non-Jewish]--our secular--books and we rushed to school. . . [We] came home around 11 o’clock, ate lunch, rushed to school until 4 o’clock and we picked up our books and went back to shul [synagogue]. . . until 7 o`clock." Evenings were for study.

Abe boasts that his father endeared himself to Betlan's rebbe, religious leader, because of his piety, a sign of the profound respect the community and the son bore him. Partly a consequence of that respect, the idea of questioning either of those two religious figures simply was beyond imagining: "God forbid!" There were no questions or conversations probing the nature of God--an unthinkable topic. Lessons learned by rote filled his mind and "the worst thing you could say about [a peer] was `he doesn't know, he doesn't know Chumash [the Bible]’."

To say that Jewish life in Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Karpatorus) or in this small Transylvanian town revolved around religion would be a gross understatement. Judaism, ritual, piety were inhaled like air. "It was a way of life." Subcarpathian Ruthenia, a part of Hungary before World War I and of Czechoslovakia between the wars, had been a stronghold of Orthodoxy since the seventeenth century as well as of Hasidism since the late eighteenth century. Jewish Subcarpathian Ruthenia (ca. 45% of the population was Jewish) retained that tone until its destruction in the Holocaust.¹⁵ Numbers of Jews had arrived in Subcarpathian Ruthenia in the seventeenth century, fleeing from Galician pogroms begun in 1648 by Chmelnietski and his Cossacks. Poor and frequently downtrodden, they settled in the agricultural backwater towns and villages where the overwhelming majority remained at or below the poverty level in "primitive" conditions. From Galicia, too, emigrated key Hasidic rabbis in the late eighteenth century, establishing major schools or yeshivot in Munkacs, Sighet, Ungvar and Chust among other cities and creating consequent internal strife with traditional, non-Hasidic Jews. Despite, or because of that strife, the Jews of Subcarpathian Ruthenia maintained devoutly religious households and communities.

Hasidic sects, each with its own spiritual leader, rebbe, filled the region. Jewish communities there exuded religious orthodoxy, piety, and education steeped in Talmudic literalism. Occupied by the Hungarians in 1939 as a result of a treaty with Germany, life remained essentially the same, although the new authorities established quota systems and antisemitic laws. The gendarmerie along with the Arrow Cross Party became a frightening presence for Jews. Jewish men were conscripted into labor gangs and camps when the war started, but only with the German occupation in March, 1944, did the Holocaust reach its lethal peak there. By Fall, 1944, virtually all Jews in these occupied areas had been shipped to Auschwitz.

Abe and the two survivors who follow him here shared a type of religious education which included rote memorization, constant reverence, a rigorous educational schedule which, despite the different cities, remained essentially the same. There were "modern" Jews in these towns--Betlan, Volove--but "a so-called ‘modern’ Jew there, would be an Orthodox rabbi here [in the U.S.]."

Violence, pandemonium and confusion exploded into that life. Three interviewees had voiced a poetic, blackly ironic inversion of part of the ritual service of Shavuos which reads: "If the sky were parchment and the oceans ink, there would not be enough parchment and ink to magnify the name of God." In their twists, or variations on this reading, each of the three substituted either Auschwitz or the Holocaust for "the name of God." Unlike Emil Fackenheim's apparent call for the substitution of the "Commanding Voice of Auschwitz" for the commanding voice of Sinai, these variations resonate with resignation or even cynical despair. When presented with this rather stunning modification, Abe reacts by reciting the original text, describing the letters ("a double aleph-bet") and avoiding the implications of the change. And then he abruptly launches into his own description of a day in Auschwitz. "[It was] an insane world. Insanity was the order of the day. Sanity did not exist . . . Counted you . . .This counting; this Appell [role call] and constantly watching you. I don't know. I'm, I'm putting it now together. Over there, there is smoke and all kinds of things going on and here they're counting you over and over and over. Why are we so important? While other thousands of people are being killed."

A persistent motif, the preoccupation with the Appel, a reflection, perhaps, of what seemed a German preoccupation, seems to conceal another theme: those "other thousands" seem to be more important, to him, than himself and those with him. Why was he so "chosen"? Why did he survive, when those other thousands did not, were not counted, do not count now? Insanity seems to be an explanation, a rationale, which ultimately fails to assuage his sense of guilt and his puzzlement over that infernal counting. Given the insane world of Auschwitz, his survival seems senseless too. He bears a part of the nature of that place and his reflections on God have prompted this veiled confession.

But how does he feel about replacing the name of God with the name of Auschwitz? Without skipping a beat, rhythmically responding to that question, Abe somehow averts it: "When you davened [prayed] in Auschwitz, you davened with such gehunim, such intensity . . . . Oh--I davened every day alone . . . others watched us. A man at Buchenwald had a half burned siddur and it was his shield . . . ." Does he reply to the question of Auschwitz supplanting God? Is this his answer? A refusal, perhaps, to face the question directly, like the taboo against speaking God's name or looking into the holy of holies. "I was afraid. I was fresh out of a yeshivah; I had peyas to the last moment . . . . used to say tfilin [daily prayers] constantly . . . used to daven constantly with such concentration: `Please God, help us!’" He remembers, repeats the fact of davening perhaps in order to emphasize that such religious observance continued, indeed, heightened, in Auschwitz. "While I was in the camp I never stopped believing."

Sidestepping a direct confrontation with the question of divine responsibility for the Holocaust, Abe has sounded another primary motif: davening, constant, lonely, intense "full of tom [guts or energy]." He contrasts this with the prayer of American Jews, including his own, after the war. As he speaks, growing more agitated, angry, Abe reveals more of his inner torment, seeming to unearth secrets to himself, revelations that almost surprise him as they are spoken. After the war "I became a shaygetz [non-Jew] . . . I dropped out for a long time . . . I'm ashamed to say it. I even ate trafe [non-kosher]. That's when I questioned. No! Let's not put it that way because [growing agitated again] when I went to shul I still davened with kahunis [enthusiasm]. Let's put it this way: I rebelled . . . Who did I rebel against? I don't know. This is the truth. I don't know whether it was God. I was always--even though I rebelled--I was a superstitious person . . . I don't believe I rebelled--no-I would not put God in it . . . I rebelled against authority. I rebelled because I didn't have parents--anybody to account to. I said: `I'm gonna do whatever I want.’ . . . But it didn't last long."

Those questions about God's responsibility, God's role in the Holocaust, the substitution of Auschwitz for God in the prayer, and ultimately the meaning of the Holocaust hover around the discussion. Fixed on his post-war experience, Abe continues reflecting. "It was . . .[long pause] empty. An empty feeling. [In Yiddish] I didn't know anything. . . I didn't know exactly what [I was doing]." His silent rebellion, "a rebellion . . . without cause," internal, agonizing, which led him to distraction after the war, bound him to the Holocaust, amplified the loss, deepened the emptiness. Was it a rebellion against the experience, against the Holocaust itself? Or was it against the memory?

No further discussion of the child ensues. Perhaps he decided to censor his story; perhaps the boy intruded as a distraction; perhaps Abe knows that to finish by telling of the child's death would be gratuitous and painfully exhausting; his silent question of why almost audible. Silence ensues, uneasy and long, more than a full minute, before he continues, shifting, or so it seems, to another subject. But the topic remains focused on his post-war religious sensibilities. As an assistant chaplain in the U.S. Army, Abe often conducted services for a small number of troops. "When I was a chaplain . . . [pause] it was nothing. It was another job. I used to daven. I used to daven by myself . . . No! I didn't daven, I just davened Friday nights." At this point, the pauses seem to indicate moments of decision. Should he divulge these feelings? Will his persona as particular interviewee, particular survivor, be altered? What will the interviewer think of him--questions raised silently, perhaps, but irrepressibly there. These moments appear to gain stress, create dilemmas for him, new and compounded struggles of how and what to tell.

Trying to explain his post-war ambivalence, he contrasts American Kol Nidre, Yom Kippur Eve services, with those in Betlan, his home town. He expresses contempt for the American version:

Order, meaning, feeling, understanding--Abe yearns for pre-war life which was exactly predictable, orderly, obedient, meaningful, unquestioned, full and feeling. As he discusses that, simultaneously aware that it has all disappeared, he reflects the dilemma of having nothing left but rebellion with no one to rebel against; no order, no sense, "an insane world", riddled with questions that frighten him, drained of feeling, rendering him afraid to feel again. Ghosts of the past and the way the world ended converge on his religious memories, finishing with thoughts of his parents and brother in the gas chamber. Where in these confusing and conflicted ruminations can a person with such a past address the question of religion and the Holocaust with any sort of certitude?

Ambivalence, an utter lack of unequivocal certitude, permeates much of Abe's subsequent narrative. Unprompted by a question, he reacts to the logic of his own rumination:

He appears to digress, speaking about the train from Theresienstadt to the labor camp at Schlieben, his consistent belief while in the camps, his post-war abandonment of Sabbath observation and his guilt over that. Again he grows agitated and then returns to the question about God, citing a Talmudic passage:

Like the survivor quoted by Marcus and Rosenberg, Abe demands there be an answer--an answer in the Torah or Talmud. Such an answer must be there yet he admits, almost in passing, that he "was never able to find an answer"; that while "my belief did not leave me" he nevertheless asked a fellow prisoner "how God could do this to us." The conflicts appear in thick clumps, rapidly thrown together, contradictions which are not contradictions. Searching desperately to resolve some of them, he has sounded a new, vexing theme: punishment. It lurks beneath this long portion of the interview about judgement, answers, hell breaking loose, disobeying the laws and, finally, the quote from a fellow prisoner, another former yeshivah student. When queried further about this question of God's punishment of the Jews, Abe almost loses control of his temper:

As the question of sacred punishment prompts strong reaction from him, he has nevertheless circled to an oblique argument that may support the idea. Hell breaks loose, a vehicle for the reproof of previous generations, a hidden agenda of God's which victimizes unsuspecting, even innocent Jews. "We may be paying for generations way, way back." To demonstrate his idea, Abe briefly describes the short life of Samuel, who, according to the Talmud, thus paid for the sins of previous generations. And the paradoxically inconsistent conclusion follows: "No survivor will accept this concept that God punished us because we were not religious enough." Shifting to a discourse on the crusaders, Abe draws yet another conclusion, in Hebrew: "The ones that God loves, He punishes them." He seems to have switched again, recognizing the possibility that to reconcile God and the Holocaust, one must acknowledge an element of holy retribution, and again continues with apparent contradictions:

Angry at the concept that God would punish Jews for a lack of piety, he nevertheless seems to lace his discussion with affirmation of the idea. He implies that the Jews disobeyed the eye for an eye commandment, the instruction to kill first when someone comes to kill you. Thus, they discovered the cost of transgression. As if in flight, Abe turns again to descriptions of davening, before, during and after the war. He describes his feelings at the birth of his son, his return to the fold with subdued gusto and when he describes his post-war rebellious attitude toward the lamentations of t'ish abuv he seems to become melancholy. Were the deaths in the Holocaust like those deaths, holy, sanctified, consecrated?

With that statement, Abe has, probably unconsciously, substituted God for the Germans and the Hungarians. He seems to mean that the Germans and Hungarians, to whom he was a "dirty Jew" or "a damned Jew," may have picked the Jews for destruction because they were disorganized, easy prey. Yet he identifies the perpetrator as "He" in a discussion of the Kinot (Lamentations) in which God's martyrdom of pious Jews in history is commemorated. Typically, Abe moves to peripheral topics, the resistance movement, isolated, individual acts of resistance in the camps, only to return abruptly to the question of whether he considers the Holocaust a secular or a religious issue. "I cannot answer that. I only know I was disliked" [referring again to the Germans and Hungarians who persecuted him.] After more seemingly discursive rambling--about Israel, the lesson of not turning the other cheek, the Exodus, the British quotas, Auschwitz, the ghetto--he returns to the question about the religious or secular nature of the Holocaust. His talking, perhaps, has covered his thinking, bought some time to address the subject.

Has Abe dialectically advanced to the opinion that the Holocaust came as a punishment from God? After adamantly, even angrily rejecting the idea, he seems to have reasoned his way to that point. He repeatedly refers to the superstitious aspect of his religious conviction, vacillating between deeply felt religious passion and occasional fear and superstition. Finally: "You don't know how to answer these complicated things. I don't know how to answer . .. [pause] I know this much: in the camp I was afraid to irritate the Ribbono shel Olam [God] [pause]" But how much worse could it have gotten? Why the fear of irritating God in Auschwitz?

With characteristic honesty, Abe has revealed the profundity of his ambivalence. Yes, he davened, a possible ticket to survival, but he couples that activity with cleaning himself of lice, a precise, physical and definite necessity for survival--like davening, a necessary but not sufficient element for living. Steeped in religious fidelity, his intensity of belief unquestionable, Abe nevertheless expresses another fundamental, equally basic source of his piety: he just did not want to die and feared irritating God for that reason. These emphatic avowals provide a tapestry of contrasts, contradictions, confusion and equivocal feelings. Perhaps such paradoxical views might exclude each other in different contexts. They do not in this one. Holding such simultaneous, conflicting attitudes emerges as a commonplace in many survivor testimonies. And in few other subjects does this pattern manifest itself so strongly as in the subject of religion or God in the Holocaust. The concluding remark about the insanity of speaking to college students echoes Abe's characterization of Auschwitz as an insane world, a world which seems to pursue him in his heart of hearts, afflicting his relationship with God. This world, too, is insane.

Can Holocaust experiences like Abe's be illumined by some theodicy? In a sense, that question stalks Abe and will stalk the others discussed here. Lawrence Langer has maintained that the biblical figures of Jesus and Job, "archetypal examples of the value of suffering for the growth of the spirit," demonstrate how "virtually useless" such traditional ideas are in confronting the Holocaust. The very language of the texts appears vapid when applied to Auschwitz and "betrays the limitations of all pre-Holocaust spiritual vocabulary." Yet, ironically, Langer used a portion of Abe's testimony in earlier interviews to make this point and suggests that Abe would not ask God questions about forgiveness or justice. In the interview that dealt primarily with his religious viewpoint, however, Abe approaches those two subjects, circumspectly and obliquely, but steadily. He draws no certain conclusions; takes no firm stand. Religion provides him with little consolation and less explanation: as a theodicy, an interpretation of events which might offer a consoling model, or "the justification of God's goodness and justice in view of all the evil in the world," his religious belief verges on irreconcilable differences with his experience.

Abe returns to his memory about the young man in Buchenwald who miraculously retained a half-burned prayer book:

The final emptiness: what is the meaning of clinging to God ("Siddur and God go together")? For life, for help, for survival--God saved him. But He did not save David, or the book, for that matter. Haunted by such memories and associations, Abe seems to confront a host of prospects about a world with God and Auschwitz: no sense, no reason in number identities, in Auschwitz the planet, the insane world created not by God but on his behalf--is that possible? Is it plausible? Is it reasonable? No answers, only questions and a missing family--no parents with whom to talk--missing children, missing books and, perhaps, the unspeakable, a missing God.

Alex E.'s family were not Hasids, did not follow a rebbe. He wore short peyas, his father wore a beard. Of the approximately two hundred Jewish families lived in his Hungarian town of , Alex remembers one lawyer considered a "modern" Jew who observed the Sabbath but did not attend daily services. Alex's grandfather sat and studied the Talmud all day while his children ran the store, the family business. Some of his uncles were rabbis in other cities and his family could trace its origins to King David. Like Abe, he followed a rigid daily routine of cheder, public school, eventually yeshivah, and when his grandfather would visit, with his caftan, black hat and silver cane, an event of consequence, there would be informal exams. The yeshivah he attended for a short time was thirty kilometers away, "the same place the ghetto was." No one even dreamed of raising questions about the universe or God, all enshrouded in mystery. About the rote memorization of the Torah and the Talmud he recalls: "[we] did not question what we were taught; I did not question what my parents told me . . . I accepted explanations given to us by our teachers and parents."

These seem to be troubled comments. Asked about the variation on the Shavuout prayer, the substitution of Auschwitz for God, Alex responds quietly and firmly: "That never occurred to me. . . . I can never describe what went on, but I can't describe God either. They are each indescribable in different ways. [Pause] I have trouble seeing it that way [Auschwitz and God] . . . There was not a replacement [of God by Auschwitz] . . . anger, frustration . . . anger towards God [which is] connected to the glory of God." But he has not remained angry. "I believed God is with me . . . reads my thoughts. . . is a matter of examining and talking to my conscience. I was praying in my thoughts." Praying, like Abe, every day in camp--morning prayers marching to work, thanking God for surviving each day; praying to find his family, to return home. He returned, found no family and no home.

Growing more thoughtful, Alex seems to contradict earlier statements, as if integrating his memories more deeply. "[Pause] Others were angry against God, against religion. But I didn't question [pause] not during the experience. I questioned after . . . about a year after liberation. [Pause] Is there a God? Was this preordained? . . . I was looking for answers . . . . What happened to me, the loss of my parents and my sister is something I cannot really question . . . I can question, but there is no way I can get an answer. And since I have to answer myself, I came to the conclusion--chose the conclusion--that I'm not to question. It was the will of God and I accept it."

In the Warsaw labor camp, where Alex cleared away the debris and rubble from the uprising and the war, he attended daily, secret services conducted in the barrack by the esteemed Klossenberger Rebbe. The Rebbe received special privileges, permission to remain in the barracks, for example, from the Blockeltester. As objectively as he can, Alex relates the resentment of the other prisoners to the Rebbe. He comes no closer to expressing anger, estrangement, disapproval or doubt about God or religion--just the brief comment about the resentment toward the old man, God's representative, His leader in prayer. Like the conclusion he chose, perhaps, he has chosen this figure as symbol, delegate or emissary of God against whom he may, however gently, vent his frustrations.

What follows concerns a small portion of a series of interviews with Meilech. Those interviews, running to some twenty-five hours, represent a minuscule portion of his memory, which in turn recalls a minute portion of his experiences. The focus of these selections is theological. Upon reviewing the remaining parts of Meilech's narratives, one might discover that much of them are also theological--less explicitly, perhaps, but poignantly, often bitterly, sometimes reverently grappling with universal questions through specific, concrete events.

Meilech was born in Volove, a small town in Carpatho-Ruthenia, in 1929. He was 14 when the Hungarian Police sent him to Auschwitz with his father, mother, younger sister and younger brothers in May, 1944. He was 14: a refrain he repeats at each interview. If survivors feel that there cannot be enough time, "not enough tape, not enough paper and not enough ink" to adequately convey their experiences, Meilech has devoted himself to simultaneously affirming that and attempting to overcome it by a series of interviews. He broke a forty year silence with a torrent of spoken memories.

As he speaks, one hears echoes of Hasidic homilies, theological similes, improvised metaphors as poetic as some of those in Meilech's tradition. His speech is laced with Hebrew quotations from the Midrashim, or from the Talmud or the Kinot laments. He quotes, then translates. Yiddish folk sayings and songs blend together with tales of beatings and a 14 year-old's incomprehension.

A scholar: "I am a magnet," he says, "any time I see a book about the Holocaust, I am drawn to it."

A comedian: "I have a good mind--and I'm modest." From deep, meditative wanderings that produce tears, he moves to jokes. They are usually Jewish jokes, long, expertly delivered.

A philosopher: "If I tell you jokes, I won't cry; or maybe I should cry and not tell you jokes." He smiles, laughs, and returns to the subject before his strategic digression. He glides with apparent ease from Auschwitz to humor and back to Auschwitz. Through it all, his persona as disguised theologian surfaces regularly.

It is an interview like a roller coaster, with the same rhythms, ups and downs of emotion with which Meilech lives from hour to hour. Everything in his life connects to his survival-- his business, his previous business, the robberies he endured, the financial disasters, the ulcers, the constant battle to climb out from beneath debts. Few survivors continue to grapple so explicitly and profoundly with the personal consequences of the Holocaust. "I still do not believe it, I don't understand it. I was only 14 and in many ways I'm still only 14, or 12, sitting around the table with my parents. But at the same time, I'm 56, or 120. What happened to my childhood? Why?"

Meilech thus voices the question that haunts all victims of the Holocaust, regardless of tentative answers. And having voiced the question, Meilech dwells on the answer for hours, circling, offering hypotheses, thinking aloud--"I'm talking to myself, you're listening in"--and concluding nothing. No answer suffices and the experience, the events, the epoch, the loss all remain somehow insane, shrouded in mystery. "It was a world of insanity. The positive became negative and the negative became positive. If you acted with kindness, you did the wrong thing. It was lunacy. Everything upside down." Like Abe, Meilech recollects an insane world.

He recalls, too, the intense Orthodoxy of his home, Volove, the district, the entire region of Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Karpatorus) whose history he has learned in some detail since the war. Geography shaped his life; where he was, the location of his village, determined the lives and deaths of his family. Volove lay near the major strongholds of Jewish learning in Subcarpathian Ruthenia: Munkacz (Mucachevo), Beregszasz (Beregovo), Chust (Khust), Ungvar (Uzhgorod) and Sighet (Marmasso Sighet). One commentator has written that "the region was very primitive, about one hundred years behind the times." Meilech's commentary on this interpretation typifies his spirit: "I think that man was wrong--it was at least two hundred years behind the times."

It was in that environment which frequently spurned secular affairs that Meilech's spiritual consciousness was formed. To the question: "Why haven't you continued the religious observance of your father, recreated some of that in your own home?" he responds with over two hours of rumination. It is not a question he has considered directly before and it continues to nag at him into the next session.

Meilech's voice assumes a tone of disbelief and sarcasm. So complex are these feelings that he returns to them again and again, clarifying, repeating but always expanding, as if trying to work through a satisfactory answer for himself. Enveloping themselves in religious traditionalism, rejecting the secular world, made his community--the learned rebbes, the elders, the teachers, his father and mother--vulnerable to violent invasion by that world. Yet, interwoven with his sarcasm, and bitterness are warm descriptions of a way of life now lost. To a man who knows each day that the world is too much with him--with everyone--such a past recalls both naivete and wisdom and he has struggled to retain its values and ethics, apart from religious practice.

With this introduction, Meilech sounds much of what will continue throughout his long testimony. An almost clinically objective tone pervades the description of life before the war. Later, Meilech includes the prospects of other schools in the town of Volove, not only Ruthenian and Czech, but Hungarian, German, Russian, and Jewish. The significance of this multiple choice, emerges from a personal perspective: he could have attended any of those schools--he spoke all those languages. His breadth of learning remains evident, and he will pride himself on how well he did in school and how devoted he was to his lessons and learning. That characteristic of his childhood connects to his life today. He was, as he noted, "two years ahead of my peers." In a sense, that has remained the case, somehow, regarding those of his own age, in particular survivors. Few have read so widely on the Holocaust. And despite a marked ambivalence regarding religion, a confession of agnosticism, he repeatedly quotes segments from Scripture or various midrashim or prayers, first in Hebrew and then in English.

The association of past and present appears immediately, tragically. The introductory remarks move from school, to cheder, to the Jewish population, to "when they took us away in 1944 I was 14." The memories are bound up with each other, intersected forever, inseparable and thereby tainting, "polluting" (Langer) any reminiscences of life in Volove before 1939. This phenomenon occurs again with his discussion of languages which leaps from Yiddish at home, Ruthenian in school, to "in the camps there was no talk . . . ."

The topic of religion equally entwines with the violence. Like Abe's community in Betlan, Meilech's revolved around religion, the same rituals and piety. His attitude regarding that piety became etched during the Holocaust. Ambivalence, like so many other "normal" words, hardly seems adequate, but his feelings remain divided and much of his narrative deals with his sentiments about the legacy of Judaism.

To fully appreciate the multiple layers of meaning behind these "reminiscences," one must hear Meilech's voice. These obviously gentle and warm memories--falling asleep in his father's lap, hearing his mother sing lullabies (a theme he elaborates on later), walking with his grandfather who bought him cherries--are not related with equivalent warmth; nor do they seem to evoke fond memories. Perhaps this is in part explained by the ending, the realization that there is no one to share the recollections, to participate and deeply empathize; there is no one, in short, who shared the experience of his home, who remembers his mother's voice, his father's beard, the stories they told, the worries and joys of his life. Who will share emblematic words from his home; who will recall the "secret" language of that household and family, a language steeped in meanings derived from their particular, private history?

In the face of these obstacles to speaking, acrimony, anger, remorse, disbelief, uncertainty and disappointment blend together as he tries to explain his abandonment of a communal religious heritage. Forsaking that heritage, or contemplating its disavowal, produces stress and a need to explain. For Meilech, such a discussion must encompass a definition or redefinition of his heritage of Jewishness, a defense of his rejection or semi-rejection, a circumlocution that skirts parts of the issue, and an honesty that confronts it head on. He speaks of it, bluntly, with passion and tears in the end. His response to the question of why he has not recreated part of Volove's religious ambiance delves deeply into his most hidden, often cynical-sounding thoughts. The answer winds around the subject, digresses, incorporates a battery of avoidance techniques, and finally, although not for the last time, engages the question.

There are intimations of themes that will continue later in this lengthy discussion of religion and the associations surrounding it. At age nine Meilech was exposed to horrors that adults could not easily assimilate. At age ten he had heard about, if not witnessed, still more. The metaphor of the diabetic who loses his legs seems connected to the loss of his father in 1941 when he was taken to the labor camp; connected, too, to his growing questioning of religious practices upon which he and his family had stood. If this metaphor carries forward, it will perhaps explain much of Meilech's attitudes after his father's death--like the loss of legs. His words should not be dismissed lightly at this juncture. Questions about his father and mother and religion percolate beneath virtually everything that he will say. From age nine and ten, to age eleven, when he was "the man of the house," he had no father, no childhood, no ground upon which to stand and from which to grow. This concern with age broods beneath the surface of his testimony. It is a concern with lost childhood, with the years that disappeared and make him, in his own mind, four years younger than his chronological age.

At age 13, with his father back, he was sent away because his mother, the more traditional and pious of his parents, insisted that he go and learn, study Talmud at the famous yeshiva in Ungvar. And upon his return he was "cheated" of the warmth of a family homecoming. The reasons are unclear: perhaps the shock of his pregnant mother ("and it's black, black"). Having been away, alone, he returned home triumphant, a survivor of sorts already, only to be rejected, even accosted by his parents. "I'm still only thirteen," interjected out of sequence in the narrative of his journey home. A journey which must have been difficult at best for a lonely and bewildered 13 year old child; "and they weren't happy to see me." But there is no time to dwell on the boyhood emotions attendant of that stunning reception because "within three weeks they took us." And this childhood misery, obdurately bound to it, clearly emerges from religion.

Each word, as Elie Wiesel has noted, "contains a hundred words." The yeshivah at Ungvar, for example, with its long history of scholarly achievement and honor, carries associations so full they cannot be spoken to anyone not familiar with the region. When Meilech speaks of that school, he understands what it meant to his mother and cannot, does not try to communicate that to the listener. It meant fear and loneliness to him. When he speaks of returning home, the smells of the house, the greeting in dim light, the conditions under which they lived and to which they would be subjected within the next three weeks are not communicated. Those, too, meant different things to him than to his parents. Perhaps the secret theme running through this segment is his memory and fear of being alone--an orphan even before the D.P. camp--what Primo Levi termed a "memory wound."

Forced to confront the issue of his Jewishness, Meilech finally and clearly states the possible rationale behind his abandonment of ritual observance: "All this happened to me because I was Jewish." He will speak later of his mother's quite different definition of what it meant to be Jewish: social conscience, concern for others, and study. All these he has continued. His narrative continually affirms this as he quotes Hebrew texts, Holocaust literature, book after book to demonstrate his broad learning and scholarship. Has he not, then, maintained his Jewishness in practice?

The issue remains unsettled, probably can never be settled, for him. In a burst of memory that moves from resentment to rancor, from disdain to pathos, Meilech pours forth one of the several climactic statements that crescendos to a passionate silence. His narrative has gone quickly from ghetto to arrival at Auschwitz and back to 1941 when his father was sent to forced labor. In rapid spurts he has spoken of the arrival, then come to a halt, a long pause, another silence full of inexpressible meanings. Meilech attempts to communicate this welter of feelings.

By the time this torrent of words flowed forth, Meilech had discussed most of the events described here. He had commented in calmer, more reflective ways about the drive to work, the naivete and confusion of a 12 year old, his father's age and educational background, and the haunting statement made on the Appelplatz about the chimneys. This last he had mentioned several times before and would mention again. "Your" mother--not "Mama" or "my wife" or "our family" or "my children", but "your mother and brothers and sister." Meilech notes with an astute critical ear the strange statement. Later he will recall it with the same harsh edge to his voice and wistful, almost accusatory tone and look, but then try to mitigate the comments with references to the circumstances and his father's mental state at that moment. Yet it is "something I will never forget." Who were the mythical "they"? In historical context, the words, which fell like blows but were dimly felt, followed a deadening sequence of events which Meilech now knows were calculated to debilitate, disorient, and, ultimately, exterminate.

In the barracks at Auschwitz, an SS officer offered to remove those under 16 to easier tasks. Meilech's father urged him to go, perhaps they would put him in school. But he refused, and here he reveals why: "not that I'm worried about him [my father]. I don't want to be alone." Now, at age 56, there is a complex mixture of anger, regret, guilt, and confusion; the 14 year old's mind melds with the 56 year old's. How could his father have sent him away, albeit unsuccessfully? Had Meilech followed his advice, he would have died in the gas chamber with his mother and his brothers and sister. Had his father been more aware, more alert, more wise, he would have perhaps understood the need to conceal his son's true age as he had been secretly advised by the prisoner on the platform. Yet how could he not have felt concern for his father at that moment? His brutally honest admission of his own fear of isolation forces him to ponder the lack of feeling then.

How describe those moments, those hours when he lost everything, including his 14 year old identity? After "constantly" he pauses, not for a breath, but to search for a word, the word to describe accurately the conditions he recalls. "Rushed, harassed, being beaten" all spoken in rapid succession because none of them are adequate to the task. As if to compensate for the thinness of the words, the associations tumble out in thick bunches. After hours of painstaking description, of sharing stories, single words now serve as emblems, like poetic emblems, to evoke the fuller meaning--but still incompletely.

Among the repeated stories that become such reference points, one emerges with particular relevance to these themes revolving around religion, father, and family. Once again, the anecdote begins with a book, The Kinot, the lamentations recited on the Jewish holiday of Tisha Bi-Av, memorializing the destruction of the temple. Included are excruciatingly detailed descriptions of Jewish tribulations from the time of the Babylonian captivity; and passages have been added since the Holocaust.

Reconciling suffering with piety and righteousness seems impossible here. His narrative does not progress chronologically from the Babylonian Captivity, the destruction of the Temple, to 1943; they are grouped together in single sentences. Are they comparable? If the hand of God was at work in the one, was it also at work in the other? "For no reason" his father was shot. How could a people so steeped in righteousness suffer such a persistent fate? How could his father, his devout mother, his brothers and sister, the infant, suffer such horrible fates? If he wept at the reading of the Lamentations, the holiness of Jewish travail, did Meilech weep similarly over the destruction of his family and Volove? Was that, too, holy? 1943: blunt, harsh, and secular. All his descriptions, his recounting, bristle with the knowledge of brutality that ignored religious hostility, a hostility that might, at least, be intelligible. Was there talk of Jesus at Auschwitz? When they were herded to Sikirnitsa ghetto or onto the trains, or lined up at the platform, were they cursed as demons or anti-Christian? No, the structure of this portion of Meilech's story indicates another, more puzzling answer.

From his most telling remarks about the region, revealed by the lullabies of his mother, to be Jewish in Subcarpathian Ruthenia meant to be "righteous, just, and gaining knowledge." And for that, Jews were murdered. Within that general lesson, the personal one seems to nag incessantly. For the oldest, the task is to fulfil those wishes, continue the heritage of Jewishness. As "the oldest" he confronts his past, his tradition, his parents, the Holocaust, with a directness that tears him in different directions. "The oldest" remains 14, the "man of the house," the heir to the obligations of Judaism, but simultaneously a child.

Historically, from 1938, Jews became increasingly isolated, separated from the rest of the population of the region. So, too, was Meilech separated and isolated from his previous life. To be the oldest took on new meanings in 1941 and 1943. To be a Jew carried drastic repercussions. Separation and loss included separation from what being Jewish had meant. That has continued to stalk Meilech as he searches for words to translate the language of after into the language of before so that his experiences and his feelings might be adequately expressed.

There are two worlds in this description of "a beautiful spring day." One is the world of Meilech's parents, of pious Volove, of prayers and serenity. The other is the world of guns and bayonets, cattle cars and SS men. A world without words, whose language is violence and pain. A world without thinking where no one thought to offer consolation any more. A world without tears. It is the second world, however, that Meilech recalls as the world of God.

Do these three men share attitudes about God and religion during and after Auschwitz? Each came from pious homes, with minor differences in degree, perhaps blindly religious, saturated in rote learning and unquestioning obedience to authority. Yet that pre-war life provided purpose, order, meaning--meaning in every gesture, every ritual; every act had significance: from the growing of peyas, to the wearing of a skullcap; from the routinized Shabbos exams to the packed educational schedules. Every deed resonated with religious implications, unquestioned but significant, steeped in tradition and archetypal precedent. More than any other concept, perhaps order embodies the essence of these lives.

The Holocaust, as Abe indicates and as Meilech and Alex reveal in private, sometimes bitter and sometimes cryptic reflections, was--not "represented," not "symbolized," or "signified" or "embodied"--chaos, as literal as it could be, the antithesis of order and meaning. Auschwitz, its chaos, disrupted everything--shattered their pre-war lives and continued to plague their lives with that chaos, invading their minds, their prayers, their memories. No memory of life before remained untainted, "unpolluted" by the memory of what ended it. Like many survivors, Abe and Alex seem to have attempted to combat that lingering chaos with religion again--a difficult task in a country without religious fervor, among people (Jews) with no tom in their praying. They have tried, it appears, to combat the insanity that invaded and permeated their lives, made them seem purposeless. Meilech, in 1941, at age eleven consumed by fear and confusion, like Abe and Alex watched as chaos replaced or murdered order. Unlike the other two, he continued to question explicitly the function and efficacy of religion. Yet his questions remained couched in religious terms, in the words of the Scriptures or the Perkey Avot, in Hebrew, from Psalms and Rashi. Those texts and he have abandoned each other, yet he cites them in pained recollection, with the connections strained to breaking, the questions before his eyes, sad. Meilech is a seeker of explanation, a hunter of reason and meaning. He has found no satisfactory explanations, the harshest forms of reason within the German system of values and logic, and a desolate emptiness instead of a lesson.

Paradoxically, Meilech considers those texts both relevant and irrelevant after the Holocaust. "Was gewen is gewen und mer nichtum" what was, was, and is no more, a Yiddish proverb, seems to suffuse his narrative. That motif forms the discomfiting basis for Leon Wells’ Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy. Like Abe, Wells tormentedly contrasts American religious services, in particular Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur services, with those he recalls from Europe. He describes a life in the shtetl near Lvov as totally immersed in loving, warm, devotion and piety. It is a life informed by awe and education; revolving around fear, love and awe of God. Everything in Wells’ youth was wrapped in devotion—every move, gesture, word. The memoir unfolds through the Holocaust and after, focusing on Yom Kippur of each year: 1942, when thee first Aktion struck his village; 1943, when Wells was part of the opprobrious "Death Brigade"; 1944, after liberation, when the future disappeared along with any hope and when Wells realized he had no purpose or aim. At that Yom Kippur service in the old synagogue in Lvov, where the few survivors gathered not for religious reasons "but rather like animals who herd together. Not thinking, not feeling . . . [as] a potent survival instinct," Wells knew that he could no longer cling to his faith. In the starkest possible contrast to previous Yom Kippur services, there was "no joy or thankfulness to God. . . nor was there any discussion about God or religion in general."

As he traces the history of subsequent Yom Kippurs, Wells continually draws upon passages from Job which question the justice of God’s plan, the value of righteousness and the prospect of blind faith in the face of a potentially malevolent world. Disillusionment melds into anger and despair as Wells realizes that he, the survivor, remains in mourning, alone in it. Awe disappeared from his life; betrayal haunts him night and day—dreaming and waking. In the awful shadow of his awareness of all this, with the day of awe upon him, he concludes that "the Nazis . . . were God’s messengers . . . ." Corresponding with a friend and fellow survivor of the Death Brigade, Wells feels his doubt transform into contempt—for the chasidm, the Belzer Rebbe who had emphatically told Wells’ father not to leave Poland (in 1937). Questions rise up, only to culminate with Wells ruminating on the absurdity of the artificially added conclusion of The Book of Job (Job, 42:17). It is a happy ending about which Wells writes with sarcastic bitterness: "Weren’t some survivors after the war much richer than they ever could have dreamed of being before the Nazis . . .? Most remarried and had children. As the saying goes, ‘God gives and God takes.’" Just as readers of this ending find mindless solace in it, so Wells views those who urge him to find happiness in his survival.

And finally, on Yom Kippur, 1994, the service in America has virtually no resemblance to Kol Nidre before the war, "no sense of awe." Wells may be Abe speaking when he writes "Dead is dead. It is all gone . . . as it was on the first Yom Kippur after my liberation."

Gitta Sereny, near the end of her book on Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Treblinka, asks him if he thinks God was in Treblinka. Yes, he replies, "Otherwise, how could it have happened?" A bit startled, Sereny asks him if God isn't good. "No, I wouldn't say that. . . . He is good and bad." And at the conclusion of his little known The Trial of God, Elie Wiesel reveals that God's eloquent, devout and much admired defender is Satan.

OF PARCHMENT AND INK

From the Shavuous Service

A Survivor

"Do you still believe in God?" The question arises regularly when Holocaust survivors speak--especially when they address American students. Many students who have read survivor texts, from Elie Wiesel's Night to Alicia Appelman-Jurman's Alicia: My Story, seem intrigued by a survivor's faith or lack of it. And considering the apparent religious magnitude of the Shoah, there has been relatively little theological reaction from Jews about the place of God in the Holocaust. Included in those responses to theological questions, survivor testimonies rest on a different plain than rabbinical, academic or professional ones. Less unequivocal, emphatic or certain, some of them reflect the experience of the Holocaust in their syncretic confusion of opinions. Unlike more imperious answers, they echo the conundrum-like nature of the epoch, even from profound religious commitment. Conundrum implies a question without an answer, a problem without a solution, or a problematic situation that is unresolvable. Immersed in this religious conundrum, perhaps a variation on the question of God, is a question about the meaning of the Holocaust.

Richard Rubenstein, among those theological voices who have addressed this subject most controversially, wrote:

Rubenstein joined a venerable group of Jewish doubters, some even Talmudic, and a line of western thinkers that reaches far back into ancient history all proclaiming the death or disappearance of God. Even Elie Wiesel, in what is perhaps the most quoted passage in his signature work, Night, seemed to echo Rubenstein's sentiments: "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp . . . . Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever." After the Holocaust, such questioning voices assume chilling new depths. And here is Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, the opposite pole from the doubters and questioners:

It is Job again: do not presume to ask of God the reasons for his wrath. Who is Job--who are we--to judge the need or rationale for punishment, the meaning of God’s actions? More to the point, this seems to assume what Job's "friend" did, that Job must have committed some crime, some indiscretion or sacrilegious or sinful act. The meaning of Job’s suffering—and then the meaning of the Holocaust—is clear: suffering is always God’s punishment. Suffused with purpose and intention, human suffering carries a lesson, a moral, a divine and justifiable retribution for transgression or iniquity. Considered from this perspective, God has instilled the Holocaust with meaningfulness.

At the root of this discourse, whether biblical or contemporary, rests the fundamental assumption, represented by Job’s friends, that some meaning must be ascribed to suffering. Perhaps the most chilling prospect from a particular reading of Job is the terrifying suggestion that either God acts on whim, or the world, godless, is stochastic or random, with no reasonable meaning whatsoever. Many Orthodox Jews, including some survivors, in the prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Amos, or Hosea, have argued intractably, that the Holocaust must be viewed as God's just punishment on a people gone astray. Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, quoting a survivor interview in Reeve R. Brenner's The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors (1980), cite a stark, extreme statement of this position:

Marcus and Rosenberg offer seven theodicies which survivors have presented to explain God's place in relation to the Holocaust. This one suggests retribution, closely bound to another, "the suffering servant" theodicy of Isaiah.

Rejecting such traditional explications, Rubenstein raised the question that plagues some Jewish theologians: after Auschwitz, can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God? An affirmative answer places Auschwitz, Hitler, the SS--as Rabbi Weinberg and Brenner's survivor seem to readily admit--in the position of God's instruments--a prospect if not blasphemous, then almost obscene to many. In this vein, the Holocaust presents little or no crisis of faith or theology. The typology of Jewish history and suffering remains constant: the Nazis, cast in the mold of the Amalekites, (Exod.17:8-16), continued the behavior of prototypical antisemites. This position has gained strength in recent years, grown with the forceful insistence of leading Orthodox rabbis in Israel who ultimately accuse secular Zionists for the Holocaust. Some argue that Jews then and now have failed to obey the "Mitzvot genocide batorah," the commandment of genocide in the Torah, the order from God in Genesis to destroy all the Amalekites. It is a holy war, a Jewish jihad.

But for many survivors who have pondered the question, such systems of symbolism abstract the experience, pose little if any resolution and unsatisfactorily meager answers to colossal theological questions. Some Jews became apostates after the war; some became even more religious than before; others abandoned Judaism only to return to it later, perhaps after the birth of children. There are those who, like Elie Wiesel, questioned God, indeed, are or were angry and openly express that. Anger at least presupposes existence. Others reject that existence.

Curiously, those who draw upon the Holocaust to justify either position, who argue most vehemently for or against the presence or absence of God, tend to be of the post-Holocaust generations. Survivors rarely enter the discussion with such certainty. Rubenstein, for example, at a conference nominally on the Church struggle and the Holocaust, revealed the origin of his denial, a powerfully dramatic experience, yet once removed from the Holocaust. In 1961, days after the erection of the Berlin Wall, Rubenstein visited Probst. Dr. Heinrich Grueber in that city. The only German to testify against Eichmann and himself a concentration camp victim, Grueber explained the Wall to Rubenstein in theological terms. He believed God was punishing a sinful Germany; homeless Germans would now pay for those whom other Germans had made homeless. As Rubenstein listened raptly, the good Probst. finally asserted that Hitler had been a tool of God, sent to exterminate Europe's Jews. Rubenstein then realized that Grueber represented the logic of Covenant Theology applied to the events of the twentieth century. "He [Grueber] recognized that, if one takes the biblical theology of history seriously, Adolf Hitler is no more nor less an instrument of God's wrath than Nebuchadnessar."

Ultimately, such beliefs probe for the meaning of the Holocaust and find it, mysteriously, in God’s unfathomable mind. And, just as for Job, a lesson emerges, a presumed revelation. And a revelation of sorts seems to have come to Rubenstein as he discerned that "If one takes Covenant Theology seriously, as did Dean Grueber, Auschwitz must be God's way of punishing the Jewish people in order that they might better see the light, the light of Christ if one is a Christian, the light of Torah if one is a traditional Jew."

Disturbed by Rubenstein's story, Elie Wiesel, speaking at the same conference, offered a surprising, impromptu response instead of the talk on Holocaust literature for which he was scheduled. He began with the story of mad Moishe the beadle who came every day to the bimah, altar, in the synagogue in Sighet, Wiesel's city in Rumania. He pounded on the pulpit and said, "Ribbono shel Olam, Master of the Universe, I want you to know that we are still here." Daily, even as the transports started: "we are still here." Finally, only Moishe remained in the ghetto, and still he came to the bimah and banged his fist: "I am still here." Then, he stopped and murmured, "but you--where are you?" An anecdote? An allegory or metaphor? Wiesel elaborates: "What the Germans wanted to do to the Jewish people was to substitute themselves for the Jewish God. All the terminology, all the vocabulary testifies to that."

Typically profound, almost cabalistic, Wiesel's story implies a more mundane moral. If the "Germans wanted . . . to substitute themselves for the Jewish God," Jews were obliged to cling faithfully to that god, perhaps as a demonstration of the defeat of the Nazis, a symbol of victory, an audacious display of spite. How this midrash, or interpretation, connects to Moishe the Beadle, remains tantalizingly obscure. Similarly enigmatic is Wiesel's concluding allegory about Rabbi Ishmael, one of the ten martyrs in Roman times to whom God gave an option in the midst of his travail: if Rabbi Ishmael shed one tear, He would return the universe to chaos. But the rabbi did not cry. "Why didn't he cry? The hell with it!" Wiesel challenges. "If this is the price to pay, who needs it? Who wants this kind of world. Who wants to live in it. . . . But to be a Jew is to have all the reasons in the world to destroy and not to destroy." Presumably the moral to be taken from this story, as it might relate to the issue at hand, needs some transposition. The meaning of the story, and perhaps the lesson of the Holocaust, may lie in this parable, but it must present itself to many as simply inadequate to the task. To be a Jew, intimated Wiesel, is to have all the reasons in the world not to believe in God, and to believe in God. For after the Holocaust, almost as an echo to Emil Fackenheim’s admonition to Jews to remain Jews of the faith in order to withhold final victory from Hitler, it is incumbent on Jews to believe, in spite of the Shoah.

On balance, Rubenstein's point seems stronger, more concrete, more consistent, if devastating and depressing. Wiesel's eloquence and Talmudic style appear strangely inappropriate in his abstruse parables. In Night or his other novels, or in his essays that directly address Holocaust related questions, the literal assumes primary precedence; specific, human examples sharpen and reinforce Wiesel's purpose. Unlike that writing, however, this essay--admittedly an impromptu talk--lacks the intensity and assurance of those others. At least here, God's role in the Holocaust remains problematic for this primary emissary from the world of survivors.

When they emerge, questions about that role have been among the most torturous for victims of the Holocaust who survived. Few subjects receive such intense reaction--dismissal or engagement. From the midst of incredulity about her own survival in hiding, Erna G. voices her paradoxically ambivalent yet adamant refusal to attribute that survival to God:

Throughout the remainder of the interviews with Erna, there would be almost no discussion about religion. Even her childhood recollections of her Orthodox grandfather reveal fear and hostility--a severe man, dressed in black, with a violent temper who never held her or offered a kind word. And typically, she tries to mitigate the memory: "Maybe it was just too long ago and I don't remember." Erna seems to have bound Judaism's God to this image and to her experience of fear and disease, starvation and silence that meant survival for her. Pain and loss merge with religion and she finds no solace in it. Bereft of that comfort, visited by the physical losses of family, she mourns over the multiple deprivation of a religious heritage. Yet beneath an antipathy toward religion lurks a cautious, penitent attempt to palliate what she perceives as Judaism's failure. Much of that religious heritage had been absent from her life before the war. From religious grandparents came less observant parents, and the child had little awareness of ritual, having been born in France after her parents had emigrated from Poland.

Others, however, attest to the centrality of religious observance in their lives before the Holocaust: "Religion was part of your life . . . You kept your Sabbath, you were Jewish and you were kosher. That was a natural thing. And there were no questions." In Munkacz, in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Czechoslovakia, Agi R. recalls that there were no questions. She, like Wiesel, questioned and questions God, defying the idea of justice in His actions, yet acknowledging His existence--frustratingly unfulfilled in that concession. In the village of Betlan, in Transylvania, smaller than Munkacz but perhaps equally devout, there were no questions, either. There, Abe P. grew up in a family that lived and breathed religious devotion. His initial reflections announce his religious sensibilities and their links to his family life. His father, he begins, had "bord and peyas," (long) beard and side locks; his mother wore a sheitl, head covering; the region knew his grandfather as a "moira tzadek," one with an awesome or authoritative knowledge of interpreting the Law (Torah). Abe's childhood life revolved around religious education. He recalled in minute detail the table in his cheder, religious school, around which the students sat learning the alphabet; the weekly exams, the questioning, the "potches" (slaps) at incorrect answers, the Thursday night examinations and the Sabbath ones at home beginning with the weekly "wos hoben gelernt?" (what have you learned) query from his father. Any sign of failure and "God help you!"

His routine had already been established at a tender age, fixed like the natural course of events, like the God-ordained routines of the stars: 6 a.m., ready for cheder and davening (praying); breakfast at home then he and his siblings "put down the siddurim [Hebrew books] and picked up our goyishe [non-Jewish]--our secular--books and we rushed to school. . . [We] came home around 11 o’clock, ate lunch, rushed to school until 4 o’clock and we picked up our books and went back to shul [synagogue]. . . until 7 o`clock." Evenings were for study.

Abe boasts that his father endeared himself to Betlan's rebbe, religious leader, because of his piety, a sign of the profound respect the community and the son bore him. Partly a consequence of that respect, the idea of questioning either of those two religious figures simply was beyond imagining: "God forbid!" There were no questions or conversations probing the nature of God--an unthinkable topic. Lessons learned by rote filled his mind and "the worst thing you could say about [a peer] was `he doesn't know, he doesn't know Chumash [the Bible]’."

To say that Jewish life in Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Karpatorus) or in this small Transylvanian town revolved around religion would be a gross understatement. Judaism, ritual, piety were inhaled like air. "It was a way of life." Subcarpathian Ruthenia, a part of Hungary before World War I and of Czechoslovakia between the wars, had been a stronghold of Orthodoxy since the seventeenth century as well as of Hasidism since the late eighteenth century. Jewish Subcarpathian Ruthenia (ca. 45% of the population was Jewish) retained that tone until its destruction in the Holocaust.¹⁵ Numbers of Jews had arrived in Subcarpathian Ruthenia in the seventeenth century, fleeing from Galician pogroms begun in 1648 by Chmelnietski and his Cossacks. Poor and frequently downtrodden, they settled in the agricultural backwater towns and villages where the overwhelming majority remained at or below the poverty level in "primitive" conditions. From Galicia, too, emigrated key Hasidic rabbis in the late eighteenth century, establishing major schools or yeshivot in Munkacs, Sighet, Ungvar and Chust among other cities and creating consequent internal strife with traditional, non-Hasidic Jews. Despite, or because of that strife, the Jews of Subcarpathian Ruthenia maintained devoutly religious households and communities.

Hasidic sects, each with its own spiritual leader, rebbe, filled the region. Jewish communities there exuded religious orthodoxy, piety, and education steeped in Talmudic literalism. Occupied by the Hungarians in 1939 as a result of a treaty with Germany, life remained essentially the same, although the new authorities established quota systems and antisemitic laws. The gendarmerie along with the Arrow Cross Party became a frightening presence for Jews. Jewish men were conscripted into labor gangs and camps when the war started, but only with the German occupation in March, 1944, did the Holocaust reach its lethal peak there. By Fall, 1944, virtually all Jews in these occupied areas had been shipped to Auschwitz.

Abe and the two survivors who follow him here shared a type of religious education which included rote memorization, constant reverence, a rigorous educational schedule which, despite the different cities, remained essentially the same. There were "modern" Jews in these towns--Betlan, Volove--but "a so-called ‘modern’ Jew there, would be an Orthodox rabbi here [in the U.S.]."

Violence, pandemonium and confusion exploded into that life. Three interviewees had voiced a poetic, blackly ironic inversion of part of the ritual service of Shavuos which reads: "If the sky were parchment and the oceans ink, there would not be enough parchment and ink to magnify the name of God." In their twists, or variations on this reading, each of the three substituted either Auschwitz or the Holocaust for "the name of God." Unlike Emil Fackenheim's apparent call for the substitution of the "Commanding Voice of Auschwitz" for the commanding voice of Sinai, these variations resonate with resignation or even cynical despair. When presented with this rather stunning modification, Abe reacts by reciting the original text, describing the letters ("a double aleph-bet") and avoiding the implications of the change. And then he abruptly launches into his own description of a day in Auschwitz. "[It was] an insane world. Insanity was the order of the day. Sanity did not exist . . . Counted you . . .This counting; this Appell [role call] and constantly watching you. I don't know. I'm, I'm putting it now together. Over there, there is smoke and all kinds of things going on and here they're counting you over and over and over. Why are we so important? While other thousands of people are being killed."

A persistent motif, the preoccupation with the Appel, a reflection, perhaps, of what seemed a German preoccupation, seems to conceal another theme: those "other thousands" seem to be more important, to him, than himself and those with him. Why was he so "chosen"? Why did he survive, when those other thousands did not, were not counted, do not count now? Insanity seems to be an explanation, a rationale, which ultimately fails to assuage his sense of guilt and his puzzlement over that infernal counting. Given the insane world of Auschwitz, his survival seems senseless too. He bears a part of the nature of that place and his reflections on God have prompted this veiled confession.

But how does he feel about replacing the name of God with the name of Auschwitz? Without skipping a beat, rhythmically responding to that question, Abe somehow averts it: "When you davened [prayed] in Auschwitz, you davened with such gehunim, such intensity . . . . Oh--I davened every day alone . . . others watched us. A man at Buchenwald had a half burned siddur and it was his shield . . . ." Does he reply to the question of Auschwitz supplanting God? Is this his answer? A refusal, perhaps, to face the question directly, like the taboo against speaking God's name or looking into the holy of holies. "I was afraid. I was fresh out of a yeshivah; I had peyas to the last moment . . . . used to say tfilin [daily prayers] constantly . . . used to daven constantly with such concentration: `Please God, help us!’" He remembers, repeats the fact of davening perhaps in order to emphasize that such religious observance continued, indeed, heightened, in Auschwitz. "While I was in the camp I never stopped believing."

Sidestepping a direct confrontation with the question of divine responsibility for the Holocaust, Abe has sounded another primary motif: davening, constant, lonely, intense "full of tom [guts or energy]." He contrasts this with the prayer of American Jews, including his own, after the war. As he speaks, growing more agitated, angry, Abe reveals more of his inner torment, seeming to unearth secrets to himself, revelations that almost surprise him as they are spoken. After the war "I became a shaygetz [non-Jew] . . . I dropped out for a long time . . . I'm ashamed to say it. I even ate trafe [non-kosher]. That's when I questioned. No! Let's not put it that way because [growing agitated again] when I went to shul I still davened with kahunis [enthusiasm]. Let's put it this way: I rebelled . . . Who did I rebel against? I don't know. This is the truth. I don't know whether it was God. I was always--even though I rebelled--I was a superstitious person . . . I don't believe I rebelled--no-I would not put God in it . . . I rebelled against authority. I rebelled because I didn't have parents--anybody to account to. I said: `I'm gonna do whatever I want.’ . . . But it didn't last long."

Those questions about God's responsibility, God's role in the Holocaust, the substitution of Auschwitz for God in the prayer, and ultimately the meaning of the Holocaust hover around the discussion. Fixed on his post-war experience, Abe continues reflecting. "It was . . .[long pause] empty. An empty feeling. [In Yiddish] I didn't know anything. . . I didn't know exactly what [I was doing]." His silent rebellion, "a rebellion . . . without cause," internal, agonizing, which led him to distraction after the war, bound him to the Holocaust, amplified the loss, deepened the emptiness. Was it a rebellion against the experience, against the Holocaust itself? Or was it against the memory?

No further discussion of the child ensues. Perhaps he decided to censor his story; perhaps the boy intruded as a distraction; perhaps Abe knows that to finish by telling of the child's death would be gratuitous and painfully exhausting; his silent question of why almost audible. Silence ensues, uneasy and long, more than a full minute, before he continues, shifting, or so it seems, to another subject. But the topic remains focused on his post-war religious sensibilities. As an assistant chaplain in the U.S. Army, Abe often conducted services for a small number of troops. "When I was a chaplain . . . [pause] it was nothing. It was another job. I used to daven. I used to daven by myself . . . No! I didn't daven, I just davened Friday nights." At this point, the pauses seem to indicate moments of decision. Should he divulge these feelings? Will his persona as particular interviewee, particular survivor, be altered? What will the interviewer think of him--questions raised silently, perhaps, but irrepressibly there. These moments appear to gain stress, create dilemmas for him, new and compounded struggles of how and what to tell.

Trying to explain his post-war ambivalence, he contrasts American Kol Nidre, Yom Kippur Eve services, with those in Betlan, his home town. He expresses contempt for the American version:

Order, meaning, feeling, understanding--Abe yearns for pre-war life which was exactly predictable, orderly, obedient, meaningful, unquestioned, full and feeling. As he discusses that, simultaneously aware that it has all disappeared, he reflects the dilemma of having nothing left but rebellion with no one to rebel against; no order, no sense, "an insane world", riddled with questions that frighten him, drained of feeling, rendering him afraid to feel again. Ghosts of the past and the way the world ended converge on his religious memories, finishing with thoughts of his parents and brother in the gas chamber. Where in these confusing and conflicted ruminations can a person with such a past address the question of religion and the Holocaust with any sort of certitude?

Ambivalence, an utter lack of unequivocal certitude, permeates much of Abe's subsequent narrative. Unprompted by a question, he reacts to the logic of his own rumination:

He appears to digress, speaking about the train from Theresienstadt to the labor camp at Schlieben, his consistent belief while in the camps, his post-war abandonment of Sabbath observation and his guilt over that. Again he grows agitated and then returns to the question about God, citing a Talmudic passage:

Like the survivor quoted by Marcus and Rosenberg, Abe demands there be an answer--an answer in the Torah or Talmud. Such an answer must be there yet he admits, almost in passing, that he "was never able to find an answer"; that while "my belief did not leave me" he nevertheless asked a fellow prisoner "how God could do this to us." The conflicts appear in thick clumps, rapidly thrown together, contradictions which are not contradictions. Searching desperately to resolve some of them, he has sounded a new, vexing theme: punishment. It lurks beneath this long portion of the interview about judgement, answers, hell breaking loose, disobeying the laws and, finally, the quote from a fellow prisoner, another former yeshivah student. When queried further about this question of God's punishment of the Jews, Abe almost loses control of his temper:

As the question of sacred punishment prompts strong reaction from him, he has nevertheless circled to an oblique argument that may support the idea. Hell breaks loose, a vehicle for the reproof of previous generations, a hidden agenda of God's which victimizes unsuspecting, even innocent Jews. "We may be paying for generations way, way back." To demonstrate his idea, Abe briefly describes the short life of Samuel, who, according to the Talmud, thus paid for the sins of previous generations. And the paradoxically inconsistent conclusion follows: "No survivor will accept this concept that God punished us because we were not religious enough." Shifting to a discourse on the crusaders, Abe draws yet another conclusion, in Hebrew: "The ones that God loves, He punishes them." He seems to have switched again, recognizing the possibility that to reconcile God and the Holocaust, one must acknowledge an element of holy retribution, and again continues with apparent contradictions:

Angry at the concept that God would punish Jews for a lack of piety, he nevertheless seems to lace his discussion with affirmation of the idea. He implies that the Jews disobeyed the eye for an eye commandment, the instruction to kill first when someone comes to kill you. Thus, they discovered the cost of transgression. As if in flight, Abe turns again to descriptions of davening, before, during and after the war. He describes his feelings at the birth of his son, his return to the fold with subdued gusto and when he describes his post-war rebellious attitude toward the lamentations of t'ish abuv he seems to become melancholy. Were the deaths in the Holocaust like those deaths, holy, sanctified, consecrated?

With that statement, Abe has, probably unconsciously, substituted God for the Germans and the Hungarians. He seems to mean that the Germans and Hungarians, to whom he was a "dirty Jew" or "a damned Jew," may have picked the Jews for destruction because they were disorganized, easy prey. Yet he identifies the perpetrator as "He" in a discussion of the Kinot (Lamentations) in which God's martyrdom of pious Jews in history is commemorated. Typically, Abe moves to peripheral topics, the resistance movement, isolated, individual acts of resistance in the camps, only to return abruptly to the question of whether he considers the Holocaust a secular or a religious issue. "I cannot answer that. I only know I was disliked" [referring again to the Germans and Hungarians who persecuted him.] After more seemingly discursive rambling--about Israel, the lesson of not turning the other cheek, the Exodus, the British quotas, Auschwitz, the ghetto--he returns to the question about the religious or secular nature of the Holocaust. His talking, perhaps, has covered his thinking, bought some time to address the subject.

Has Abe dialectically advanced to the opinion that the Holocaust came as a punishment from God? After adamantly, even angrily rejecting the idea, he seems to have reasoned his way to that point. He repeatedly refers to the superstitious aspect of his religious conviction, vacillating between deeply felt religious passion and occasional fear and superstition. Finally: "You don't know how to answer these complicated things. I don't know how to answer . .. [pause] I know this much: in the camp I was afraid to irritate the Ribbono shel Olam [God] [pause]" But how much worse could it have gotten? Why the fear of irritating God in Auschwitz?

With characteristic honesty, Abe has revealed the profundity of his ambivalence. Yes, he davened, a possible ticket to survival, but he couples that activity with cleaning himself of lice, a precise, physical and definite necessity for survival--like davening, a necessary but not sufficient element for living. Steeped in religious fidelity, his intensity of belief unquestionable, Abe nevertheless expresses another fundamental, equally basic source of his piety: he just did not want to die and feared irritating God for that reason. These emphatic avowals provide a tapestry of contrasts, contradictions, confusion and equivocal feelings. Perhaps such paradoxical views might exclude each other in different contexts. They do not in this one. Holding such simultaneous, conflicting attitudes emerges as a commonplace in many survivor testimonies. And in few other subjects does this pattern manifest itself so strongly as in the subject of religion or God in the Holocaust. The concluding remark about the insanity of speaking to college students echoes Abe's characterization of Auschwitz as an insane world, a world which seems to pursue him in his heart of hearts, afflicting his relationship with God. This world, too, is insane.

Can Holocaust experiences like Abe's be illumined by some theodicy? In a sense, that question stalks Abe and will stalk the others discussed here. Lawrence Langer has maintained that the biblical figures of Jesus and Job, "archetypal examples of the value of suffering for the growth of the spirit," demonstrate how "virtually useless" such traditional ideas are in confronting the Holocaust. The very language of the texts appears vapid when applied to Auschwitz and "betrays the limitations of all pre-Holocaust spiritual vocabulary." Yet, ironically, Langer used a portion of Abe's testimony in earlier interviews to make this point and suggests that Abe would not ask God questions about forgiveness or justice. In the interview that dealt primarily with his religious viewpoint, however, Abe approaches those two subjects, circumspectly and obliquely, but steadily. He draws no certain conclusions; takes no firm stand. Religion provides him with little consolation and less explanation: as a theodicy, an interpretation of events which might offer a consoling model, or "the justification of God's goodness and justice in view of all the evil in the world," his religious belief verges on irreconcilable differences with his experience.

Abe returns to his memory about the young man in Buchenwald who miraculously retained a half-burned prayer book:

The final emptiness: what is the meaning of clinging to God ("Siddur and God go together")? For life, for help, for survival--God saved him. But He did not save David, or the book, for that matter. Haunted by such memories and associations, Abe seems to confront a host of prospects about a world with God and Auschwitz: no sense, no reason in number identities, in Auschwitz the planet, the insane world created not by God but on his behalf--is that possible? Is it plausible? Is it reasonable? No answers, only questions and a missing family--no parents with whom to talk--missing children, missing books and, perhaps, the unspeakable, a missing God.

Alex E.'s family were not Hasids, did not follow a rebbe. He wore short peyas, his father wore a beard. Of the approximately two hundred Jewish families lived in his Hungarian town of , Alex remembers one lawyer considered a "modern" Jew who observed the Sabbath but did not attend daily services. Alex's grandfather sat and studied the Talmud all day while his children ran the store, the family business. Some of his uncles were rabbis in other cities and his family could trace its origins to King David. Like Abe, he followed a rigid daily routine of cheder, public school, eventually yeshivah, and when his grandfather would visit, with his caftan, black hat and silver cane, an event of consequence, there would be informal exams. The yeshivah he attended for a short time was thirty kilometers away, "the same place the ghetto was." No one even dreamed of raising questions about the universe or God, all enshrouded in mystery. About the rote memorization of the Torah and the Talmud he recalls: "[we] did not question what we were taught; I did not question what my parents told me . . . I accepted explanations given to us by our teachers and parents."

These seem to be troubled comments. Asked about the variation on the Shavuout prayer, the substitution of Auschwitz for God, Alex responds quietly and firmly: "That never occurred to me. . . . I can never describe what went on, but I can't describe God either. They are each indescribable in different ways. [Pause] I have trouble seeing it that way [Auschwitz and God] . . . There was not a replacement [of God by Auschwitz] . . . anger, frustration . . . anger towards God [which is] connected to the glory of God." But he has not remained angry. "I believed God is with me . . . reads my thoughts. . . is a matter of examining and talking to my conscience. I was praying in my thoughts." Praying, like Abe, every day in camp--morning prayers marching to work, thanking God for surviving each day; praying to find his family, to return home. He returned, found no family and no home.

Growing more thoughtful, Alex seems to contradict earlier statements, as if integrating his memories more deeply. "[Pause] Others were angry against God, against religion. But I didn't question [pause] not during the experience. I questioned after . . . about a year after liberation. [Pause] Is there a God? Was this preordained? . . . I was looking for answers . . . . What happened to me, the loss of my parents and my sister is something I cannot really question . . . I can question, but there is no way I can get an answer. And since I have to answer myself, I came to the conclusion--chose the conclusion--that I'm not to question. It was the will of God and I accept it."

In the Warsaw labor camp, where Alex cleared away the debris and rubble from the uprising and the war, he attended daily, secret services conducted in the barrack by the esteemed Klossenberger Rebbe. The Rebbe received special privileges, permission to remain in the barracks, for example, from the Blockeltester. As objectively as he can, Alex relates the resentment of the other prisoners to the Rebbe. He comes no closer to expressing anger, estrangement, disapproval or doubt about God or religion--just the brief comment about the resentment toward the old man, God's representative, His leader in prayer. Like the conclusion he chose, perhaps, he has chosen this figure as symbol, delegate or emissary of God against whom he may, however gently, vent his frustrations.

What follows concerns a small portion of a series of interviews with Meilech. Those interviews, running to some twenty-five hours, represent a minuscule portion of his memory, which in turn recalls a minute portion of his experiences. The focus of these selections is theological. Upon reviewing the remaining parts of Meilech's narratives, one might discover that much of them are also theological--less explicitly, perhaps, but poignantly, often bitterly, sometimes reverently grappling with universal questions through specific, concrete events.

Meilech was born in Volove, a small town in Carpatho-Ruthenia, in 1929. He was 14 when the Hungarian Police sent him to Auschwitz with his father, mother, younger sister and younger brothers in May, 1944. He was 14: a refrain he repeats at each interview. If survivors feel that there cannot be enough time, "not enough tape, not enough paper and not enough ink" to adequately convey their experiences, Meilech has devoted himself to simultaneously affirming that and attempting to overcome it by a series of interviews. He broke a forty year silence with a torrent of spoken memories.

As he speaks, one hears echoes of Hasidic homilies, theological similes, improvised metaphors as poetic as some of those in Meilech's tradition. His speech is laced with Hebrew quotations from the Midrashim, or from the Talmud or the Kinot laments. He quotes, then translates. Yiddish folk sayings and songs blend together with tales of beatings and a 14 year-old's incomprehension.

A scholar: "I am a magnet," he says, "any time I see a book about the Holocaust, I am drawn to it."

A comedian: "I have a good mind--and I'm modest." From deep, meditative wanderings that produce tears, he moves to jokes. They are usually Jewish jokes, long, expertly delivered.

A philosopher: "If I tell you jokes, I won't cry; or maybe I should cry and not tell you jokes." He smiles, laughs, and returns to the subject before his strategic digression. He glides with apparent ease from Auschwitz to humor and back to Auschwitz. Through it all, his persona as disguised theologian surfaces regularly.

It is an interview like a roller coaster, with the same rhythms, ups and downs of emotion with which Meilech lives from hour to hour. Everything in his life connects to his survival-- his business, his previous business, the robberies he endured, the financial disasters, the ulcers, the constant battle to climb out from beneath debts. Few survivors continue to grapple so explicitly and profoundly with the personal consequences of the Holocaust. "I still do not believe it, I don't understand it. I was only 14 and in many ways I'm still only 14, or 12, sitting around the table with my parents. But at the same time, I'm 56, or 120. What happened to my childhood? Why?"

Meilech thus voices the question that haunts all victims of the Holocaust, regardless of tentative answers. And having voiced the question, Meilech dwells on the answer for hours, circling, offering hypotheses, thinking aloud--"I'm talking to myself, you're listening in"--and concluding nothing. No answer suffices and the experience, the events, the epoch, the loss all remain somehow insane, shrouded in mystery. "It was a world of insanity. The positive became negative and the negative became positive. If you acted with kindness, you did the wrong thing. It was lunacy. Everything upside down." Like Abe, Meilech recollects an insane world.

He recalls, too, the intense Orthodoxy of his home, Volove, the district, the entire region of Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Karpatorus) whose history he has learned in some detail since the war. Geography shaped his life; where he was, the location of his village, determined the lives and deaths of his family. Volove lay near the major strongholds of Jewish learning in Subcarpathian Ruthenia: Munkacz (Mucachevo), Beregszasz (Beregovo), Chust (Khust), Ungvar (Uzhgorod) and Sighet (Marmasso Sighet). One commentator has written that "the region was very primitive, about one hundred years behind the times." Meilech's commentary on this interpretation typifies his spirit: "I think that man was wrong--it was at least two hundred years behind the times."

It was in that environment which frequently spurned secular affairs that Meilech's spiritual consciousness was formed. To the question: "Why haven't you continued the religious observance of your father, recreated some of that in your own home?" he responds with over two hours of rumination. It is not a question he has considered directly before and it continues to nag at him into the next session.

Meilech's voice assumes a tone of disbelief and sarcasm. So complex are these feelings that he returns to them again and again, clarifying, repeating but always expanding, as if trying to work through a satisfactory answer for himself. Enveloping themselves in religious traditionalism, rejecting the secular world, made his community--the learned rebbes, the elders, the teachers, his father and mother--vulnerable to violent invasion by that world. Yet, interwoven with his sarcasm, and bitterness are warm descriptions of a way of life now lost. To a man who knows each day that the world is too much with him--with everyone--such a past recalls both naivete and wisdom and he has struggled to retain its values and ethics, apart from religious practice.

With this introduction, Meilech sounds much of what will continue throughout his long testimony. An almost clinically objective tone pervades the description of life before the war. Later, Meilech includes the prospects of other schools in the town of Volove, not only Ruthenian and Czech, but Hungarian, German, Russian, and Jewish. The significance of this multiple choice, emerges from a personal perspective: he could have attended any of those schools--he spoke all those languages. His breadth of learning remains evident, and he will pride himself on how well he did in school and how devoted he was to his lessons and learning. That characteristic of his childhood connects to his life today. He was, as he noted, "two years ahead of my peers." In a sense, that has remained the case, somehow, regarding those of his own age, in particular survivors. Few have read so widely on the Holocaust. And despite a marked ambivalence regarding religion, a confession of agnosticism, he repeatedly quotes segments from Scripture or various midrashim or prayers, first in Hebrew and then in English.

The association of past and present appears immediately, tragically. The introductory remarks move from school, to cheder, to the Jewish population, to "when they took us away in 1944 I was 14." The memories are bound up with each other, intersected forever, inseparable and thereby tainting, "polluting" (Langer) any reminiscences of life in Volove before 1939. This phenomenon occurs again with his discussion of languages which leaps from Yiddish at home, Ruthenian in school, to "in the camps there was no talk . . . ."

The topic of religion equally entwines with the violence. Like Abe's community in Betlan, Meilech's revolved around religion, the same rituals and piety. His attitude regarding that piety became etched during the Holocaust. Ambivalence, like so many other "normal" words, hardly seems adequate, but his feelings remain divided and much of his narrative deals with his sentiments about the legacy of Judaism.

To fully appreciate the multiple layers of meaning behind these "reminiscences," one must hear Meilech's voice. These obviously gentle and warm memories--falling asleep in his father's lap, hearing his mother sing lullabies (a theme he elaborates on later), walking with his grandfather who bought him cherries--are not related with equivalent warmth; nor do they seem to evoke fond memories. Perhaps this is in part explained by the ending, the realization that there is no one to share the recollections, to participate and deeply empathize; there is no one, in short, who shared the experience of his home, who remembers his mother's voice, his father's beard, the stories they told, the worries and joys of his life. Who will share emblematic words from his home; who will recall the "secret" language of that household and family, a language steeped in meanings derived from their particular, private history?

In the face of these obstacles to speaking, acrimony, anger, remorse, disbelief, uncertainty and disappointment blend together as he tries to explain his abandonment of a communal religious heritage. Forsaking that heritage, or contemplating its disavowal, produces stress and a need to explain. For Meilech, such a discussion must encompass a definition or redefinition of his heritage of Jewishness, a defense of his rejection or semi-rejection, a circumlocution that skirts parts of the issue, and an honesty that confronts it head on. He speaks of it, bluntly, with passion and tears in the end. His response to the question of why he has not recreated part of Volove's religious ambiance delves deeply into his most hidden, often cynical-sounding thoughts. The answer winds around the subject, digresses, incorporates a battery of avoidance techniques, and finally, although not for the last time, engages the question.

There are intimations of themes that will continue later in this lengthy discussion of religion and the associations surrounding it. At age nine Meilech was exposed to horrors that adults could not easily assimilate. At age ten he had heard about, if not witnessed, still more. The metaphor of the diabetic who loses his legs seems connected to the loss of his father in 1941 when he was taken to the labor camp; connected, too, to his growing questioning of religious practices upon which he and his family had stood. If this metaphor carries forward, it will perhaps explain much of Meilech's attitudes after his father's death--like the loss of legs. His words should not be dismissed lightly at this juncture. Questions about his father and mother and religion percolate beneath virtually everything that he will say. From age nine and ten, to age eleven, when he was "the man of the house," he had no father, no childhood, no ground upon which to stand and from which to grow. This concern with age broods beneath the surface of his testimony. It is a concern with lost childhood, with the years that disappeared and make him, in his own mind, four years younger than his chronological age.

At age 13, with his father back, he was sent away because his mother, the more traditional and pious of his parents, insisted that he go and learn, study Talmud at the famous yeshiva in Ungvar. And upon his return he was "cheated" of the warmth of a family homecoming. The reasons are unclear: perhaps the shock of his pregnant mother ("and it's black, black"). Having been away, alone, he returned home triumphant, a survivor of sorts already, only to be rejected, even accosted by his parents. "I'm still only thirteen," interjected out of sequence in the narrative of his journey home. A journey which must have been difficult at best for a lonely and bewildered 13 year old child; "and they weren't happy to see me." But there is no time to dwell on the boyhood emotions attendant of that stunning reception because "within three weeks they took us." And this childhood misery, obdurately bound to it, clearly emerges from religion.

Each word, as Elie Wiesel has noted, "contains a hundred words." The yeshivah at Ungvar, for example, with its long history of scholarly achievement and honor, carries associations so full they cannot be spoken to anyone not familiar with the region. When Meilech speaks of that school, he understands what it meant to his mother and cannot, does not try to communicate that to the listener. It meant fear and loneliness to him. When he speaks of returning home, the smells of the house, the greeting in dim light, the conditions under which they lived and to which they would be subjected within the next three weeks are not communicated. Those, too, meant different things to him than to his parents. Perhaps the secret theme running through this segment is his memory and fear of being alone--an orphan even before the D.P. camp--what Primo Levi termed a "memory wound."

Forced to confront the issue of his Jewishness, Meilech finally and clearly states the possible rationale behind his abandonment of ritual observance: "All this happened to me because I was Jewish." He will speak later of his mother's quite different definition of what it meant to be Jewish: social conscience, concern for others, and study. All these he has continued. His narrative continually affirms this as he quotes Hebrew texts, Holocaust literature, book after book to demonstrate his broad learning and scholarship. Has he not, then, maintained his Jewishness in practice?

The issue remains unsettled, probably can never be settled, for him. In a burst of memory that moves from resentment to rancor, from disdain to pathos, Meilech pours forth one of the several climactic statements that crescendos to a passionate silence. His narrative has gone quickly from ghetto to arrival at Auschwitz and back to 1941 when his father was sent to forced labor. In rapid spurts he has spoken of the arrival, then come to a halt, a long pause, another silence full of inexpressible meanings. Meilech attempts to communicate this welter of feelings.

By the time this torrent of words flowed forth, Meilech had discussed most of the events described here. He had commented in calmer, more reflective ways about the drive to work, the naivete and confusion of a 12 year old, his father's age and educational background, and the haunting statement made on the Appelplatz about the chimneys. This last he had mentioned several times before and would mention again. "Your" mother--not "Mama" or "my wife" or "our family" or "my children", but "your mother and brothers and sister." Meilech notes with an astute critical ear the strange statement. Later he will recall it with the same harsh edge to his voice and wistful, almost accusatory tone and look, but then try to mitigate the comments with references to the circumstances and his father's mental state at that moment. Yet it is "something I will never forget." Who were the mythical "they"? In historical context, the words, which fell like blows but were dimly felt, followed a deadening sequence of events which Meilech now knows were calculated to debilitate, disorient, and, ultimately, exterminate.

In the barracks at Auschwitz, an SS officer offered to remove those under 16 to easier tasks. Meilech's father urged him to go, perhaps they would put him in school. But he refused, and here he reveals why: "not that I'm worried about him [my father]. I don't want to be alone." Now, at age 56, there is a complex mixture of anger, regret, guilt, and confusion; the 14 year old's mind melds with the 56 year old's. How could his father have sent him away, albeit unsuccessfully? Had Meilech followed his advice, he would have died in the gas chamber with his mother and his brothers and sister. Had his father been more aware, more alert, more wise, he would have perhaps understood the need to conceal his son's true age as he had been secretly advised by the prisoner on the platform. Yet how could he not have felt concern for his father at that moment? His brutally honest admission of his own fear of isolation forces him to ponder the lack of feeling then.

How describe those moments, those hours when he lost everything, including his 14 year old identity? After "constantly" he pauses, not for a breath, but to search for a word, the word to describe accurately the conditions he recalls. "Rushed, harassed, being beaten" all spoken in rapid succession because none of them are adequate to the task. As if to compensate for the thinness of the words, the associations tumble out in thick bunches. After hours of painstaking description, of sharing stories, single words now serve as emblems, like poetic emblems, to evoke the fuller meaning--but still incompletely.

Among the repeated stories that become such reference points, one emerges with particular relevance to these themes revolving around religion, father, and family. Once again, the anecdote begins with a book, The Kinot, the lamentations recited on the Jewish holiday of Tisha Bi-Av, memorializing the destruction of the temple. Included are excruciatingly detailed descriptions of Jewish tribulations from the time of the Babylonian captivity; and passages have been added since the Holocaust.

Reconciling suffering with piety and righteousness seems impossible here. His narrative does not progress chronologically from the Babylonian Captivity, the destruction of the Temple, to 1943; they are grouped together in single sentences. Are they comparable? If the hand of God was at work in the one, was it also at work in the other? "For no reason" his father was shot. How could a people so steeped in righteousness suffer such a persistent fate? How could his father, his devout mother, his brothers and sister, the infant, suffer such horrible fates? If he wept at the reading of the Lamentations, the holiness of Jewish travail, did Meilech weep similarly over the destruction of his family and Volove? Was that, too, holy? 1943: blunt, harsh, and secular. All his descriptions, his recounting, bristle with the knowledge of brutality that ignored religious hostility, a hostility that might, at least, be intelligible. Was there talk of Jesus at Auschwitz? When they were herded to Sikirnitsa ghetto or onto the trains, or lined up at the platform, were they cursed as demons or anti-Christian? No, the structure of this portion of Meilech's story indicates another, more puzzling answer.

From his most telling remarks about the region, revealed by the lullabies of his mother, to be Jewish in Subcarpathian Ruthenia meant to be "righteous, just, and gaining knowledge." And for that, Jews were murdered. Within that general lesson, the personal one seems to nag incessantly. For the oldest, the task is to fulfil those wishes, continue the heritage of Jewishness. As "the oldest" he confronts his past, his tradition, his parents, the Holocaust, with a directness that tears him in different directions. "The oldest" remains 14, the "man of the house," the heir to the obligations of Judaism, but simultaneously a child.

Historically, from 1938, Jews became increasingly isolated, separated from the rest of the population of the region. So, too, was Meilech separated and isolated from his previous life. To be the oldest took on new meanings in 1941 and 1943. To be a Jew carried drastic repercussions. Separation and loss included separation from what being Jewish had meant. That has continued to stalk Meilech as he searches for words to translate the language of after into the language of before so that his experiences and his feelings might be adequately expressed.

There are two worlds in this description of "a beautiful spring day." One is the world of Meilech's parents, of pious Volove, of prayers and serenity. The other is the world of guns and bayonets, cattle cars and SS men. A world without words, whose language is violence and pain. A world without thinking where no one thought to offer consolation any more. A world without tears. It is the second world, however, that Meilech recalls as the world of God.

Do these three men share attitudes about God and religion during and after Auschwitz? Each came from pious homes, with minor differences in degree, perhaps blindly religious, saturated in rote learning and unquestioning obedience to authority. Yet that pre-war life provided purpose, order, meaning--meaning in every gesture, every ritual; every act had significance: from the growing of peyas, to the wearing of a skullcap; from the routinized Shabbos exams to the packed educational schedules. Every deed resonated with religious implications, unquestioned but significant, steeped in tradition and archetypal precedent. More than any other concept, perhaps order embodies the essence of these lives.

The Holocaust, as Abe indicates and as Meilech and Alex reveal in private, sometimes bitter and sometimes cryptic reflections, was--not "represented," not "symbolized," or "signified" or "embodied"--chaos, as literal as it could be, the antithesis of order and meaning. Auschwitz, its chaos, disrupted everything--shattered their pre-war lives and continued to plague their lives with that chaos, invading their minds, their prayers, their memories. No memory of life before remained untainted, "unpolluted" by the memory of what ended it. Like many survivors, Abe and Alex seem to have attempted to combat that lingering chaos with religion again--a difficult task in a country without religious fervor, among people (Jews) with no tom in their praying. They have tried, it appears, to combat the insanity that invaded and permeated their lives, made them seem purposeless. Meilech, in 1941, at age eleven consumed by fear and confusion, like Abe and Alex watched as chaos replaced or murdered order. Unlike the other two, he continued to question explicitly the function and efficacy of religion. Yet his questions remained couched in religious terms, in the words of the Scriptures or the Perkey Avot, in Hebrew, from Psalms and Rashi. Those texts and he have abandoned each other, yet he cites them in pained recollection, with the connections strained to breaking, the questions before his eyes, sad. Meilech is a seeker of explanation, a hunter of reason and meaning. He has found no satisfactory explanations, the harshest forms of reason within the German system of values and logic, and a desolate emptiness instead of a lesson.

Paradoxically, Meilech considers those texts both relevant and irrelevant after the Holocaust. "Was gewen is gewen und mer nichtum" what was, was, and is no more, a Yiddish proverb, seems to suffuse his narrative. That motif forms the discomfiting basis for Leon Wells’ Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy. Like Abe, Wells tormentedly contrasts American religious services, in particular Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur services, with those he recalls from Europe. He describes a life in the shtetl near Lvov as totally immersed in loving, warm, devotion and piety. It is a life informed by awe and education; revolving around fear, love and awe of God. Everything in Wells’ youth was wrapped in devotion—every move, gesture, word. The memoir unfolds through the Holocaust and after, focusing on Yom Kippur of each year: 1942, when thee first Aktion struck his village; 1943, when Wells was part of the opprobrious "Death Brigade"; 1944, after liberation, when the future disappeared along with any hope and when Wells realized he had no purpose or aim. At that Yom Kippur service in the old synagogue in Lvov, where the few survivors gathered not for religious reasons "but rather like animals who herd together. Not thinking, not feeling . . . [as] a potent survival instinct," Wells knew that he could no longer cling to his faith. In the starkest possible contrast to previous Yom Kippur services, there was "no joy or thankfulness to God. . . nor was there any discussion about God or religion in general."

As he traces the history of subsequent Yom Kippurs, Wells continually draws upon passages from Job which question the justice of God’s plan, the value of righteousness and the prospect of blind faith in the face of a potentially malevolent world. Disillusionment melds into anger and despair as Wells realizes that he, the survivor, remains in mourning, alone in it. Awe disappeared from his life; betrayal haunts him night and day—dreaming and waking. In the awful shadow of his awareness of all this, with the day of awe upon him, he concludes that "the Nazis . . . were God’s messengers . . . ." Corresponding with a friend and fellow survivor of the Death Brigade, Wells feels his doubt transform into contempt—for the chasidm, the Belzer Rebbe who had emphatically told Wells’ father not to leave Poland (in 1937). Questions rise up, only to culminate with Wells ruminating on the absurdity of the artificially added conclusion of The Book of Job (Job, 42:17). It is a happy ending about which Wells writes with sarcastic bitterness: "Weren’t some survivors after the war much richer than they ever could have dreamed of being before the Nazis . . .? Most remarried and had children. As the saying goes, ‘God gives and God takes.’" Just as readers of this ending find mindless solace in it, so Wells views those who urge him to find happiness in his survival.

And finally, on Yom Kippur, 1994, the service in America has virtually no resemblance to Kol Nidre before the war, "no sense of awe." Wells may be Abe speaking when he writes "Dead is dead. It is all gone . . . as it was on the first Yom Kippur after my liberation."

Gitta Sereny, near the end of her book on Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Treblinka, asks him if he thinks God was in Treblinka. Yes, he replies, "Otherwise, how could it have happened?" A bit startled, Sereny asks him if God isn't good. "No, I wouldn't say that. . . . He is good and bad." And at the conclusion of his little known The Trial of God, Elie Wiesel reveals that God's eloquent, devout and much admired defender is Satan.