COMMENTARY: Of pots and pans, shoe polish, and death.

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.) UNDATED _ Imagine that your country is suffering under harsh military occupation. The authorities have just ordered you and your family, including children, to report to the local train station tomorrow morning. If you resist in any […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ Imagine that your country is suffering under harsh military occupation. The authorities have just ordered you and your family, including children, to report to the local train station tomorrow morning. If you resist in any way, you will be forcibly removed from your home at gunpoint. There is no choice.


However, you have been officially assured that you are only being moved to a new home several hundred miles away, where a job is waiting for you. But, because of space limitations on the trains, families are limited to one suitcase. Everything else must be left behind.

What items would you put in the single suitcase? What would you take on the train? How would you decide?

Tragically, these were not hypothetical questions for the millions of European Jews during World War II who were deported by the Nazis not to new homes and jobs, but rather to death camps, gas chambers, and ultimately, crematoria.

My wife Marcia and I recently visited the most infamous of the Nazi mass murder factories, Auschwitz-Birkenau, located in southern Poland. A tour of the death camp’s museum poignantly reveals precisely which articles the doomed train passengers brought with them in their overstuffed suitcases. What one sees at Auschwitz-Birkenau reveals more about human nature than countless psychology textbooks or sociological studies.

We first came upon an enormous display of the actual baggage the Holocaust victims carried with them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Germans required all suitcase owners to list their names and dates of birth on the outside of each valise. The luggage makes frightening reading, especially when one sees names of children born in 1940, who were probably gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau just four years later.

Some Jews listed home addresses on their luggage, hopefully thinking they would return after the war. Sadly, many of the victims believed, or perhaps wanted to believe, the Nazi lies that the train ride led not to death, but merely to a new life in a different location.

Dazed by the suitcases, we moved on to another huge glass case; this one containing hundreds, perhaps thousands of colorful pots and pans. Because the victims believed the false German promises of a new home, a family’s favorite metal bowl or cooking dish was often included in the suitcases. And, perhaps, many Jews wanted to maintain the traditional kosher dietary laws in their new residences, something that can only be achieved by using ritually pure and familiar kitchen utensils.

I stared and stared at the pots and pans. Which ones, I wondered, had been a wedding present to a new Jewish bride in Budapest? Which one was a cherished gift from a beloved grandmother in Amsterdam? Which pots had been used to cook Sabbath meals in Lodz? Who owned these pots and pans?


But it was the large exhibit of shoe brushes, shaving brushes, and shoe polish that completely shattered my wife and me. Somehow the statistic of 6 million Holocaust victims is too overwhelming. In time it can become only a chilling, but abstract number. But O, those brushes and shoe polish … they make it all so personal.

After all, the male victims must have reasoned, it is necessary to be clean shaven and to have well-polished shoes when starting a new job. So, put the brushes and polish in the suitcase.

Staggered, we moved on to another hideous display. This one contains an item that many Jews carried in their luggage: tallisim, the Jewish prayer shawls worn at religious services. In a typical act of contempt, the Nazis converted the silk and wool of the shawls into military blankets that were used to protect German soldiers from the bitter Russian winter cold.

I could only think how our daughter and new son-in-law had joyously used their own tallisim to form the roof of their wedding canopy.

With over 50 years distance from the smoking crematoria and with enormous hindsight, I wanted to shout out to the murdered victims:”My Jewish sisters and brothers! Do not believe the clever propaganda about being `resettled in the East’ nor the diabolical slogan at Auschwitz’ entrance, `Arbeit macht frei’ (Work makes for freedom). It’s all part of the mass deception used by the Nazis.” But, of course, it is all too late. The Holocaust dead can not hear me, and the traumatic display of shoe polish tins from many European countries is agonizing proof that hope is the last human emotion to die.

MJP END RUDIN

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