A Death in the Family
RIEMER, JACK
ADEATH IN THE FAMILY JACK RIEMER It was an Evangelical Lutheran service, and the interment was at the Calvary Cemetery, and more than half the people there were Jews. Mr. Harry Epstein, the...
...And then one priest said: No, it isn't fair...
...Michael Steinlauf stayed with her, the others went elsewhere...
...if we do that we give Amalek a belated victory...
...For they are indispensable in holding on to our faith in God, in man, in the sanity of humanity itself...
...The Holocaust was dark and evil, but there were sparks of light and holiness within it...
...And from that day on, the Jews of St...
...Carter and Sadat and Kissinger have been there...
...They were afraid to stay together for fear that one of the children would cry out during a search...
...She needed more food now that she had six people living with her, but she was afraid to go to the grocery store and suddenly start purchasing more food than she had before...
...Louis took care of her...
...Louis, and notified the local Jewish Federation...
...The Israeli government does not give this award easily...
...It seems that Michael Steinlauf had survived the war and had found his way to Australia afterwards...
...The boy was raised by the Jesuits and for years he knew nothing at all about his Jewish origins...
...Then she delayed the Nazis for as long as she could, rummaging in drawers for the key to the attic so that he might have time to run away...
...He alone survived...
...Hallie was driven to study this community because he wanted to find out: What makes them tick...
...We wilPnot let . them make us like them...
...Because if you did, if you hated all people, then Amalek would have won a victory, would have succeeded...
...He became Paul-Henri Friedlander, and he was on the way to becoming a Jesuit priest...
...That is why the Jews of St...
...There is a recent book by Saul Friedlander, an important Jewish scholar in Israel, in which he tells his own story...
...When the Nazis came, his parents fled, but unfortunately they fled in the wrong direction and ended up in France...
...And at the annual meeting of the Federation in 1971 at the Chase Hotel, Michael Steinlauf came from Australia, and a representative of the Israeli government came, and Natalia Abramowicz received the honor that she so truly deserved...
...Louis...
...You might be tempted to generalize and to hate all non-Jews because of what Amalek did...
...Because otherwise, if we remember only the evil and the darkness, if we become warped and angry and vengeful and hate-ridden, because otherwise, if we generalize and say "alt non-Jews are...
...That is why we want to pay our tribute to this good woman who lived among us...
...We in America are the indirect beneficiaries of such acts of kindness and courage...
...Louis went to Natalia Abramowicz's funeral...
...There have been lots of scientific studies of the pathological and of the cruel...
...Each plaque bears the names of a non-Jew who risked his or her life to save Jews during the Holocaust...
...She was sent to one prison and then to another, and finally she ended up in the Ravensbruch concentration camp, where she stayed until the end of the war...
...after a long and thorough study, they determined that Natalia Abramowicz was indeed worthy of being included in the Avenue of the Just...
...Now you might be Cqjnpted to think that all non-Jews are like Amalek...
...What made them special...
...She took them all in and hid them in her attic...
...A few weeks after the others left, there was the inevitable knock on the door...
...She was the first person in America ever to receive this award...
...Louis...
...First they investigated, they searched the records, they found witnesses who could corroborate Michael Steinlauf s testimony...
...We need to share that, if we are to keep our faith in the sanity of humanity...
...Alex Grobman, the director of the Holocaust Center, and Rabbi Grollman, and Rabbi Diamond and I were there, and so were a number of other Jewish leaders as well...
...May God remember her...
...And we will not do that...
...Louis, was there...
...One of those plaques bears the name of Natalia Abramowicz, she whom we had gathered at the Calvary Cemetery to mourn...
...In all those 12 months that she kept the family hidden upstairs in her attic, she never let anyone enter the house for fear that they would be discovered...
...And this priest told him who he was, and where he came from, and what he stood for, and brought him back to his people after the war...
...He wanted to do a study of the kind...
...Louis area, which is where many Polish people live, until 1971...
...And may we remember her too—for her sake as well as for ours...
...Michael Steinlauf escaped, but she was arrested and put on trial, accused of the crime of harboring Jews...
...The Nazis had come...
...The names are Belgian, French, Dutch, Polish...
...We need to hear these stories and to remember them...
...May God rest the soul of Natalia Abramowicz and grant her a full reward for all the good that she did...
...There, they were desperate, and so, since they could think of no other alternative, they turned their child over to the Catholics for safe keeping...
...the Holocaust was a time when human beings sank to an upre-cedented depth of degradation and bestiality, but there were some noble spirits who rose to heights of goodness even then, even there...
...She was found guilty and sentenced to be shot, and then, for some reason—perhaps because she was of German ancestry—the sentence was modified to life imprisonment...
...The question is valid, especially when you realize that the story seems to be out of place...
...They provided her with an apartment and some furniture, and then, when that became necessary, with nursing care, and then, when she was no longer able to live alone, they took her into the Jewish Center for the Aged...
...There is another new book, this by Philip Hallie, who is a professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University in Connecticut: Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed...
...Amalek was that cruel and savage tribe of desert marauders that struck at the Israelites ftom behind for no reason when they were weary and exhausted5bs they were traveling through the wilderness...
...They found out that she was living in St...
...And she kept them there for over a year...
...In 1971, the local Jewish Federation received a cable from Israel, .askingfor help in locating Natalia Abramowicz...
...And so the family decided to split up and find other hiding places...
...There came to her a Jew named Michael Steinlauf: he asked for shelter for himself and his wife and their two small children, and for his sister and brother-in-law...
...That is why our Federation responded to this woman in the way that it did...
...they separated, and each went his own way...
...At the entrance to Yad Vashem there is a garden, sometimes overlooked by the visitor...
...In Le Chambon, a whole community resolved to rescue Jews by taking them in and giving them shelter, and then smuggling them across the mountains to safety...
...After the war, she lived in a displaced persons camp in Hamburg, and then somehow she found her way to St...
...And in this way she saved their lives...
...That is why we want the story of this woman to be a part of our memory of the Holocaust...
...And therefore the Torah puts the story of a good non-Jew, of a non-Jew who came and helped and taught the Jews, right after the story of Amalek, so that you wouldn't generalize, so that you shouldn't think that all non-Jews are like Amalek...
...It is a fascinating book...
...If we hold man to be savage and brutal, if we approach man with cynicism and despair, what does that say about God...
...Michael Steinlauf remembered the woman who had saved his life, and he nominated her for the award...
...And so she started a garden in her back yard and raised most of her food at home...
...And Ibn Ezra of Spain, one who knew what hatred and persecution meant well enough, asks: why should one of the most important sedras of the whole year be named after a non-Jew...
...That is why we need to keep1 track of, and record, and remember, all the acts of goodness by human beings...
...We see Yitro helping Moses judge the people before the Torah has been given, before judgment could have started...
...And she lived here in utter obscurity and poverty in the North St...
...After the Holocaust, it is hard to believe in God—but it is even harder to believe in man...
...Quickly she locked the door to the . attic and whispered for him to slip out the window and run for his life...
...How come they were willing to do what so few others were...
...In 1942, Natalia Abramowicz lived in the village of Radonsk in Southwestern Poland...
...As those plaques at Yad Vashem show, Natalia Abramowicz was not the only one...
...Ziva Ezenberg of the Jewish Family and Children's Service was there...
...It is the story of a small village in France called Le Chambon, a village of pious Protestants...
...And she lived out her life there in dignity and respect, with care and with love...
...She had no other relatives here in this land, just one niece in East Germany, and so we became her family...
...All those who were there that night, all those who saw Michael Steinlauf and Natalia Abramowicz*—who hadn't seen each other in so many years—hug and embrace and kiss that night, will always remember the scene...
...Louis...
...Each one of those who left was found by the Nazis and killed...
...His work appeared in the first issue of MOMENT...
...He was born Pavel Friedlander in Prague...
...which is just as false as when the anti-Semites say "all Jews are...
...And in that garden, there are a number of lovely trees, and at the foot of each tree there is a plaque...
...And there he had heard about the creation of Yad Vashem in Israel and about the Avenue of the Righteous, established to honor those non-Jews who had risked their lives to rescue Jews...
...Ibn Ezra explains it this way...
...We took her in and made her a part of our mishpoche until the day she died...
...And yet, as we understand it, you can't really have faith in the One without the other...
...We will • not let the Nazis warp or poison our souls any more than we will let them break our bodies...
...There were others...
...Rabbi Jack Riemer is Scholar-in-Residence at Congregation B'nai Amoona in St...
...We can't let Hitler destroy Jewish bodies and then do his work by robbing Jews of their children...
...And now the Jewish Federation has announced that it is setting up a Natalia Abramowicz Memorial Fund in her memory...
...A brief word of Torah: The sedra that describes the moment at Sinai, the sedra that contains the Ten Commandments, is named after Yitro, who was a non-Jew...
...If you have been to Israel, you have almost surely been to Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Six Million who died in the Holocaust...
...And today he is a major Jewish scholar, he is Saul Friedlander, in Jerusalem...
...If you look one paragraph in the Bible before the story of Yitro you will see the story of Amalek...
...Harry Epstein, the president of the Jewish Federation of St...
...The next winter the Germans began searching homes to find Jews...
...no tour of Israel is complete without a stop at that place...
...not only in destroying oar bodies, but also in warping and spoiling and poisoning our souls...
...We were there to pay our last respects to a woman who could hardly speak a word of English, to a Polish woman who had a very special place of honor and respect in the hearts of the Jews of St...
...There may be some religions that exalt God by putting man down, but as we understand it, man is God's creature, made in the image of God...
...It is called the Avenue of the Righteous—Gan L'Chassidei Umot Ha'olam...
Vol. 4 • September 1979 • No. 8
