It was Simchat Torah, one of the most celebratory festival days of the Jewish year. But the murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau went on that day as usual. There was, after all, a quota to fill. Hundreds of young Hungarian Jewish boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen had been marched to the crematorium. They were stripped, the doors shut, the vents turned on. The gas chamber guards checked the teenagers off the list as dead.
And then, roaring up to the crematorium came three officers on motorbikes. Fifty boys were plucked out of the gas chamber. Dazed, they were carted off, together with a stowaway, to make fifty-one. Why? To do what? To plant a field of potatoes.
This powerful book by Michael Calvin and Naftali Schiff tells a true story that is filled with contradictions. It makes us look at these boys and the second chance they were given. What would we do with such an opportunity?
The authors delve deeply into the questions, both theological and sociological, that spring up among those forced to face the ultimate evil. Schiff is a rabbi and one of the world’s great collectors of Holocaust testimonies; Calvin is an award-winning journalist and book author. Both characterize Holocaust survivors as their greatest teachers because they have traveled into the soul of what it means to be human.
In the book, the authors study the lives of the fifty-one boys, all products of an ultra-Orthodox upbringing, analyzing their childhoods and the inherited and learned discipline of their faith. The story travels along with them through adolescence, imprisonment, near tragedy, then veers off into their rebirth and the adulthood they found for themselves. Their legacy speaks eloquently to the lessons they learned, the promise of the future they carried with them, and the wisdom they can impart to us. As Schiff states, “anyone who has a number [an Auschwitz tattoo] and got out of that place with his faith has the power to bestow blessing.”
Eyewitness accounts of other survivors deepen the story, such as the testimony from 110 witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. The narrative throughout the book provides a complex, multidimensional set of characters whose stories will resonate with scholars and survivors, the 2G and 3G communities, historians, clergy and lay people alike.
Linda F. Burghardt is a New York-based journalist and author who has contributed commentary, breaking news, and features to major newspapers across the U.S., in addition to having three non-fiction books published. She writes frequently on Jewish topics and is now serving as Scholar-in-Residence at the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County.
