by R. D. Rosen
Flora blazed her own middle trail. She went to synagogue, but only for Yom Kippur. She celebrated Passover, but in her own way, emphasizing the courage and survival of the Jews. She visited her relatives in Israel but didn’t like Judaism’s “rules” or its “right wing.” She liked Judaism’s focus on life here on earth. “Somewhere in the Talmud, it says that men look in envy at heaven, but the angels look in envy at men,” she said. “My philosophy is ‘I’m lucky I’m alive, I have a responsibility to do my best, to be good to other people.’” But it’s a philosophy that’s often frustrated by the unimaginable inhumanity that blackened her life. “I manage to do what I can in a small way. My value is to enjoy life and not to be overwhelmed by everything.”
Flora summed up her religious experience with a shrug, saying “I’ve got a whole problem with God—or the idea of God.”
“Why didn’t I rebel against Judaism?” asked Sophie. After all, she was raised as an anti-Semitic Polish Catholic and kept her Jewishness from coworkers into her thirties. A compliant temperament provides part of the answer. “I always did what people said!” When she was five, her mother told her to be a Catholic and she obeyed. Six years later, when her mother informed her that she was really a Jew, the information was shocking, absurd, and initially useless to her, but at a deeper level, she experienced this too as an inescapable verdict. “I never asked myself, I never had the luxury of ‘Do I want it?’ So now I’m a Jew!” she recalled, laughing. In time she accepted it and even vowed to marry a Jew and raise Jewish children. “I always gave a hundred percent!” she said with a smile.
Still, when she attended High Holiday services at a conservative synagogue, she was extremely uncomfortable. Although she joined a reform temple in Great Neck, it was the aesthetics of it, the beautiful synagogue itself, that appealed to her as much as wanting to belong and connect with her ancestors.
Was Sophie the same adult that she would have been had she remained a Catholic? Since religion plays little religious role in Sophie’s life, it’s easy to believe that, whatever her faith, Sophie would be the same person—and precisely because her experience ultimately freed her from the man-made constructs and exclusivity of religious beliefs and committed her, like Flora, to a nondenominational gospel of kindness and responsibility. But we’ll never know, and who’s to say that Sophie, who kept her childhood rosary and her catechism until a museum finally claimed it, wouldn’t have become a devout Catholic had her mother not survived the war or had she decided to spare her daughter the trauma of religious confusion so soon after all the other losses?
For Carla, who is six years older than Flora and eight years older than Sophie, Judaism had had more time to take root in her consciousness. Moreover, she had only to keep her Judaism secret, not renounce it for Catholicism. But since Judaism for Carla, as for Flora and Sophie, was a cultural tradition rather than a formal religious commitment, she had that much less of it to conceal. “I remember once, in hiding,” Carla recalled seventy years after the fact, “thinking that there is no God. If there was one, he wouldn’t have put me in this position because I hadn’t done anything. The whole idea of a God who is good and everything was gone at the age of thirteen.”
Regardless, her ethnic and cultural connection to Judaism never weakened. In her eighties, Carla is “very Jewish, a very proud Jew. Ed and I don’t have a problem with our Jewish identity. Not only from the Holocaust, but from the Zionist organization after the war. When we lived in Israel on a nonreligious kibbutz for five years, we weren’t religious. We didn’t have to be!” Although she celebrates Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Hanukkah at home, she is otherwise nonobservant and doesn’t attend synagogue, not even on High Holidays.
The five years in Israel made her husband Ed “a very patriotic Jew. I’m not religious, but there’s something mystical that this people have survived. There are more people living now in Israel than were killed in the Holocaust. To me,” Ed said, “being Jewish is the most magical thing. It’s a privilege to belong to this amazing people, who’ve given more to mankind than any other people in the world.”
What does it mean to be a Jew?
The question is a matter of endless debate among unambivalent Jews everywhere, but for the hidden children the question is more immediate and even more unanswerable. Almost every Jew at the Gathering had been torn from their Jewish families and traditions by the Holocaust. For those hidden in convents, monasteries, and Christian families, the Catholic church and religion provided them with structure and beauty, positive and omniscient authority figures, a surrogate sense of family and belonging, a feeling of active control over their own and their family members’ fates through prayer, and a doctrine that made some sense of their suffering. At a time when Judaism was not simply reviled but punishable by death, Catholicism could be irresistible and its God benevolent, while the Jewish one appeared to be on some sort of sabbatical. If exposed to Catholicism at a very young age, they were faced with a later decision of whether to embrace a religion—Judaism—that they never knew had embraced them. If older, they were later confronted with the challenge of reconciling two historically antagonistic faiths they now experienced as competing for their loyalty and faith.
The religious choices child survivors made were influenced by numerous factors: their age, their temperament, the mysteries of personality, circumstance—and often whether they ever saw one or both of their parents again. For Shlomo Breznitz, this last factor may well have utterly changed the course of his life.
In Vrbove, Czechslovakia, in 1944, no Christian child seemed as Christian as an eight-year-old Jewish chess prodigy named Shlomo Breznitz. When his grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins kept disappearing from Bratislava, his parents attempted to escape the Nazis by moving him and his sister Judith to a shtetl named Vrbove, which Shlomo later described in his memoir, Memory Fields, as “something out of a Chagall painting or a story by Sholem Aleichem . . . but by the time we arrived, any fiddlers that might have been on the roofs of Vrbove had been taken to Auschwitz.”
As a further precaution, the family converted to Christianity and the two children began taking private lessons in Catholicism. When the parents were tipped off about an impending deportation in September 1944, they tried to hide their children in a local orphanage run by the Benedictine Sisters, but they said they’d already taken as many Jewish children as they wished to. Another local orphanage run by the Sisters of Saint Vincent took in Shlomo and Judith, who said tearful good-byes to their parents, assuming they would be deported to Auschwitz.
Eight-year-old Shlomo was abused, taunted, beaten up, and humiliated by the older Christian orphans while all the while taking great pains to conceal his circumcision, even if it meant wetting his pants. Using his remarkable memory, Shlomo, who had already memorized prayers and passages from the Old Testament, now focused his formidable powers on the long Latin litanies that the nuns themselves couldn’t commit to memory, but had to read aloud as they walked the corridors and courtyard. That Shlomo had no knowledge of Latin didn’t prevent him from being able to recite the litanies at length. The Mother Superior, alerted to his talent by a Sister C., beckoned both of them to her office.
“I have heard that you have a very good memory,” she asked the small, bespectacled boy. “Is it so?” And when he had proved it, she asked him how he did it.
“I don’t know, Sister,” he replied. “The words just come to me on their own.”
She made him promise not to mention his gift to anyone. Inspired by this special attention, Shlomo began volunteering for little jobs, making himself useful. One afternoon, Sister C. asked him to wash, change his shirt, and prepare to visit the house of the prelate, the town’s highest religious authority, who lived near the church orphanage. Ironically, the prelate lived across the street from the house Shlomo’s family had lived in, and which was now occupied by strangers.
The imposing prelate first asked if he was the son of Joseph Breznitz, the Jew who had lived across t
he street and who had been taken, along with Shlomo’s mother, by the Germans. The prelate then asked him to demonstrate his mastery of the Catholic prayers, which he effortlessly did, after which the prelate retired to an adjacent room with the Mother Superior and Sister C., leaving Shlomo to wonder about the significance of his performance and what destiny awaited him.
He wouldn’t learn what the prelate had in mind until months after the war, when he was miraculously reunited with his mother, who had, unlike his father, survived Auschwitz. Shlomo’s mother found her son’s survival equally miraculous. At Auschwitz she had seen the children from the first orphanage where she had tried to deposit her son, and could only speculate that the Jewish children from Saint Vincent had met with a similar fate. That very morning, Shlomo’s mother informed him that she had met with the Mother Superior, who told her what had happened behind those closed doors.
The prelate had seen Shlomo’s gift for memorizing prayers as a sign that Shlomo might be the Jewish orphan who would one day become pope, foretold in a fable he knew, and familiar to the Saint Vincent sisters as well. The prelate had urged the sisters to protect Shlomo from the Germans at all costs in the hope that Shlomo indeed might rise to become the leader of the planet’s Roman Catholics! After the prelate’s brutal murder near the end of the war, the Mother Superior remained so convinced that Shlomo was papal material that it was only his mother’s reappearance that convinced her to let him go.
Instead of becoming pope, Shlomo and his mother made aliyah to Israel in 1949, where he grew up to be a renowned psychologist and expert on stress, member briefly of the Knesset, and a leader in the use of technology to improve and maintain brain function.
In the case of Jean-Marie Lustiger, perhaps the most famous of all Jewish-born priests, the crucial factor seems to have been a temperamental affinity for Catholicism so strong that, unlike Breznitz, he likely would not have renounced his adopted Christian faith even if his mother had survived the war. Lustiger was born in 1926 in Paris to two Polish Jews, but when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 Lustiger and his sister were sent to live with a Catholic woman in Orleans. Immediately taken with Catholicism, the teenage Jean-Marie decided to convert that same year, against his parents’ wishes. Not even his mother’s murder in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 deterred him from entering a Carmelite seminary in 1946 and being ordained in 1954, while his Jewish father, a survivor, watched from a seat in the back of the church. He went on to become the pastor of Paris’s Sixteenth Arrondissement.
After a spiritual crisis in the late 1970s, when he considered moving to Israel, the stylish but conservative Lustiger was appointed archbishop of Paris by the pope in 1981, a nomination about which his enigmatic comment was, “For me, this nomination was as if, all of a sudden, the crucifix began to wear a yellow star. . . . I was born Jewish, and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope, and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.” Two years later he was named a cardinal and gained a broad reputation for his authoritarian manner. A strong supporter of Israel, he was instrumental in pressing Pope John Paul II to order the removal of the controversial Carmelite convent that had been constructed next to Auschwitz in 1984.
When the Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel accused Cardinal Lustiger of betraying his people and his faith during the Jews’ darkest period, the Holocaust, he replied, “I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”
“I believe he saw himself as a Jewish Christian, like the first disciples,” one of his close friends said.
After he stepped down as archbishop in 2005, the year that pope John Paul II died, he was mentioned as a possible successor, but he refused to discuss the possibility publicly. To a friend who asked him if he might become pope, he reportedly said in French-accented Yiddish, “From your mouth to God’s ear.” However, to another who asked him the same thing, he reportedly replied, “Oy vey—you think I’m meshugge?”
Jakob Hirsch Greiner was also able to juggle, or reconcile, his double religious identity. In 1942 Jakob, already eleven years old, ran away moments before the Germans shot the rest of his family. He spent most of the rest of the war wandering alone from Polish village to Polish village under the name Jakob Popofsky. After the war, he found a home at a Catholic orphanage, where he didn’t reveal his Jewish name for fear of standing out, but he missed having a faith. The children’s agency didn’t know what to do with him until a nun from the orphanage said, “Well, if he’s so religious, I’ll take him with me.” Popofsky entered the seminary in 1952 and became a priest in 1958. “But all the time one thought kept bothering me,” he said. “I was a Jew and I was still hiding. Why was that? It began to torture me.” In 1966 he announced in a magazine article about his life that he was a Jew, after which he was better able to reconcile the religious tension in his life.
Things were not so simple for Father Popofsky’s brother, who had survived the war and was now living in Israel as an Orthodox Jew. He discovered his long-lost brother through the magazine article and tracked Jakob down. When the priest decided to visit Israel in 1970, his brother warned him that if he insisted on coming as a priest, “You better stay in Poland.”
Disregarding this advice, Father Popofsky arrived in Israel wearing a cassock. His brother, who met him at the airport, was upset. “This is how you greet us?” he said. “I can’t take you home like this.” So Popofsky changed out of his cassock in the airport men’s room and went home with his brother to meet his long-lost relatives, who took him to their synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, where the Lubavitcher rabbi said, “Let God bless him.” Back home, his brother exclaimed, “Do you realize what an honor that was!?”
“Big deal,” Popofsky replied. “I could’ve blessed him!”
Somehow Popofsky survived his “dual personality” with a sense of humor. “I’d go to synagogue with a yarmulke on my head, and the next day I’d go to church with the yarmulke in my pocket,” he said. “I had to be careful not to cross myself in the synagogue or put my yarmulke on in church.”
In the mirror, Popofsky doesn’t see a 2,000-year-old rift between two major religions predicated in some large measure on the allegation that the Jews killed Christ. Instead he sees the essential decency and kindness that followers of all religions profess to aspire to. “When I’m alone,” he says, “I can talk to myself in the mirror: ‘Oh, there you are—a decent guy I can talk to.’”
It’s easy to see the priest’s renunciation of his Jewish faith, as Popofsky’s own brother does, as a betrayal of Judaism and a kind of posthumous victory for Hitler. Yet the relatively peaceful coexistence of both religions within Popofsky might also be seen as a profound spiritual rebuke to the very anti-Semitism that motivated the Final Solution. If the Jew is no longer the Other, no longer the viciously maligned foil for Christianity, but rather Christianity’s long-lost brother, a vital member of the spiritual family, then how can you murder him? He too is in you. As Popofsky says, “If Christ’s a Jew and I serve him, that means I’m also a Jew.”
For Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, however, the question of whether he was Catholic or Jewish became a source of great suffering. Unlike Breznitz, Lustiger, and Popofsky, Weksler-Waszkinel never had a chance in childhood to choose his faith. Born in 1943, he was given up as a newborn to a Catholic couple, the Waszkinels, the only parents he would ever know—or know of, until middle age. Still, he harbored faint doubts about his origins; it was as if others knew something about him that he didn’t. When he was a boy, two drunks once yelled “Jewish orphan!” at him. He was the target of other taunts about his appearance, so unlike his parents’. At the age of ten or eleven, the dark-haired Weksler-Waszkinel looked in the mirror and asked his mother if he looked like his fair-haired father. On a trip with his father when he was thirteen, an elderly Polish man pointed to him and said to the father, “Where did you conjure up thi
s little Jew?” At fifteen, he was reading to his illiterate mother about some Jews when he saw tears in her eyes. “Why are you crying?” he asked. “Am I a Jew?” To which she replied, “Don’t I love you enough?”
At seventeen he decided to enter a seminary, which angered his father. “Am I doing something wrong?” Weksler-Waszkinel asked him. “No,” his father replied, “but your life will be very difficult.” Shortly after, his father died of a heart attack. In 1966, Weksler-Waszkinel was ordained a priest at the age of twenty-three.
In 1975, now a Polish Catholic priest and professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, Weksler-Waszkinel moved his mother in with him in an apartment in Lublin, where he was again encountering rumors of his possible Jewishness. “The question ‘perhaps I really am Jewish’ nudged its way into my consciousness more and more intensely,” he wrote of that period. “I nurtured this question in my heart and the possibility of it having a positive reply no longer terrified me.” In 1978, when he was thirty-five, his beloved, now elderly mother, Emilia, finally brought herself to tell him the truth—that in 1943 his Jewish mother, trapped in the Lublin ghetto, contacted Emilia and begged her to take her week-old baby, saying, “You are a devout Catholic. You believe in Jesus, who was a Jew. So try to save this Jewish baby for the Jew in whom you believe. And one day he will grow up to be a priest.” And so it had actually come to pass.
Weksler-Waszkinel now considered himself an emissary between Jews and Christians, who themselves had lost three million to the Holocaust. But the belated proof of his earlier suspicions that he had been born Jewish unsettled him, even as, for the next thirty years, Weksler-Waszkinel attended to his university students at an Ursuline convent in Lublin. When he was in his sixties, the knowledge that he was born Jewish gave birth to a determination to settle in Israel and become a Jew. For one thing, he had learned that his biological parents had been Zionists who wanted to immigrate there. For another, with the help of a nun who herself had saved many Jews during the war, he had been put in touch with an uncle and survivors from his Jewish parents’ small town who now lived in Israel. He at last learned his father’s family name and appended it to his Polish Catholic surname. Maybe most of all, he could no longer abide the anti-Semitism in Poland. The country, he said, reminded him of people smoking under a sign that says NO SMOKING. Anti-Semitism was prohibited, but no one complied. “The sermons are filled with it,” he complained. A Christian radio station with millions of listeners peddled anti-Semitism to the masses. “I can’t bear it,” he said. “It’s too intense for me.”