the boy in the sack and other heroes

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, 
we cannot go there now…

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, 
they weren’t the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, 
not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
-from Refugee Blues, W. H. Auden

I was at the Singer’s for Shabbat lunch last week. I am not sure how it started, but we went around the table sharing aliyah stories. It went like this: Mr. Kaplan is a Holocaust orphan who left Germany on the Kindertransport in 1940. After a brief internment in Britian, he was sent to Australia on the H.M.T. Dunera with a large group of other boys. As a young teenager, he was then given the option of staying in Australia or making an illegal voyage to Palestine. 

Palestine sounded exciting and he felt an ideological connection to the Land of Israel, so he decided to sign up for the adventure and join the voyage to Palestine. I asked him why he would choose to do something so risky having just escaped grave danger in Nazi Germany and made it to somewhere safe. He said he was so young and so alone, he had nothing to lose and that being so young he felt invincible. 

After a risky and indirect journey in which his ship was attacked several times, he made it to Palestine where he became a war reporter, a job that would develop into his full-time career as an adult.

Orna’s father hid his brother in a sack in Auschwitz to prevent his selection (the little brother was too young to be helpful for labor). Both made it to Palestine, and Orna’s uncle, the boy in the sack, would go on to become a very famous rabbi here in Israel. 

I made aliyah on a Boeing 747 with a personal television screen and an iPod. The journey took ten hours. When I arrived, the Israeli government gave me money. When the young Mr. Kaplan arrived several decades earlier, he was given a garden hoe to fight in a war in which one-percent of the population was killed, many of whom were Holocaust survivors who had just escaped the gas chambers and furnaces of Eastern Europe.

I am able to be here today, a new immigrant in Israel, because of people like Mr. Kaplan and Orna’s father. Sometimes, it is important to just stop and remember.

From out of the depths did I call upon G-d; 
G-d answered me with expansiveness. 
Hashem is with me, I have no fear; 
how can man affect me?
You pushed me hard that I might fall, 
but Hashem assisted me…
I shall not die! 
But I shall live and relate the deeds of G-d.
(Hallel)