The Lord be with you.
Brother Daniel.
I prefer that form of address, is that okay?
May 1964, Jerusalem
F
ROM
H
ILDA
E
NGEL TO
D
ANIEL
S
TEIN
Dear Brother Daniel,
My mother always said that my stubbornness would break down walls. I wrote to our board in Munich, then rang them up two or three times, and now they have promised to try to transfer my post of pastoral assistant from Jerusalem to Haifa. I mentioned that I have learnt Hebrew, but I don’t know Arabic and that makes it difficult for me to communicate with the local Catholics who are all Arabs. They promised to reply promptly, but need a letter from you to say that you really do need me at your church. The address to write to is below, and then in a month’s time I will be in Haifa. Hurray!
Hilda
Oh, by the way, I rang my mother and told her that now I would be working as an assistant to the priest in a Jewish church and she said I was mad. She thinks I have decided to work in a synagogue! I did not try to explain. Let her go on thinking that.
June 1964, Haifa
F
ROM
B
ROTHER
D
ANIEL TO
H
ILDA
E
NGEL
My dear child,
You forgot half your belongings: a sweater, one shoe (were you wearing the other or did you bring a spare pair?), your Hebrew textbook, and a very badly written detective novel in English. Having piled them all together, I decided that being a pastoral assistant is your true vocation.
With love,
Brother D.
20. November 1990, Freiburg
F
ROM A TALK BY
B
ROTHER
D
ANIEL
S
TEIN TO SCHOOLCHILDREN
We know that today many Christians do not conduct services together because they split in the past over theological disagreements. The Church, which at one time was united, divided into three main churches: Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. There are, however, many other smaller churches, some with only a few hundred members, which nevertheless have no liturgical relations with other Christians. They do not pray together or conduct services jointly. Among Christians such splits, or schisms, have sometimes been very violent, even leading to religious wars.
The Jews also experienced a schism of this kind in the late eighteenth century. Two tendencies arose at that time, the Hassidim and the traditionalists, or Mitnagdim. They did not recognize each other, although they never got round to waging war on each other either. The Jews living in Poland belonged in the main to the Hassidic tendency, while Wilno, as Vilnius was called at that time, remained a traditionalist city. The Hassidim were mystics who would lapse into prayerful ecstasy. They set great store by study of the Kabbalah and expected the Messiah to come soon. This latter belief makes the Hassidim resemble a number of Christian sects.
For the past two centuries Vilnius was the capital of Jews of the traditionalist tendency. To this day the differences between these trends are of interest only to practicing Jews. The Nazis took no interest whatsoever in such subtleties, and set themselves the task of exterminating all Jews, Hassidim, Mitnagdim, and nonbelievers alike. It was ethnic genocide.
When we young Jews from the Polish periphery reached Vilnius in December 1939, we found not only a great city in a European state but also the capital city of western Jewry. It was often referred to then as the “Lithuanian Jerusalem,” and Jews made up almost half the population.
At the time of our arrival, Vilnius had been ceded under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to Lithuania, and the Lithuanians promptly started expelling Poles. There was a brief period of Lithuanian independence. We believed our dream of reaching Palestine was about to come true. Little did we realize we had fallen into a trap which would shortly snap shut. In June 1940, Lithuania was occupied by the Red Army and within a month and a half had become part of the Soviet Union. In June 1941, Vilnius was taken over by Wehrmacht troops. There was no way we could have foreseen such a turn of events.
We really liked Vilnius. We climbed Mount Gediminas, strolled through the Jewish quarters, and walked along the embankments. The city had a smell of its own, with a suggestion of smoke from wood-burning stoves. There was almost no coal and it was thanks to that we were able to find work. The first winter we earned our living by chopping firewood and taking it around the apartments and to the upper stories of the houses in Vilnius.
A number of Jewish organizations were still functioning in the town, including Zionist ones, and we immediately got in touch with them. You needed a special certificate to be allowed to emigrate to Palestine. They were issued free of charge if you were under the age of eighteen, so for my brother, who was sixteen, the chances of emigrating were quite reasonable. As I was already eighteen, mine were very low.
We had to keep body and soul together somehow while we waited for a certificate, and organized a kibbutz, a commune where everybody works together and nobody has a personal income, like a monastery. We moved to a fairly spacious house where each group had its own room. The only girl among us did the housework and all the rest of us went out to work. The work was sometimes very hard. At first I worked together with all the others as a woodcutter, and then I was invited to become an apprentice cobbler. The cobbler was very poor, with lots of children, and I spent almost the whole day with him. After work I stayed behind with the children and helped them with their homework. I learned how to be a shoemaker and to this day mend my own sandals.
We managed to get in touch with our parents through the Red Cross and wrote to them. After we parted they had gone back home but immediately been resettled to another part of Poland. The Red Cross forwarded the letters. Our parents were last seen alive by our cousins. For a time they all lived together in a small Jewish shtetl, but after that there was no more news. We do not know exactly in which of the death camps they were killed.
In the last letter from our mother to reach us, she begged us under no circumstances to separate, but separate we did. My brother obtained the certificate to emigrate to Palestine and made his way there by a very dangerous route, via Moscow and Istanbul. That was in January 1941 and it was a very sad parting. We did not know if we would ever meet again.
After my brother’s departure there were dramatic developments. On twenty-second of June 1941 the Russo-German war began. An hour after war was declared the bombing began, and three days later the Russians surrendered the city.
By then we had left and gone some sixty kilometers before finding we were in German-occupied territory.
We returned to Vilnius and heard distressing facts. On the day the Red Army abandoned Vilnius, Lithuanian gangs spontaneously organized themselves and began murdering Jews, even before the city was taken by the Germans. Later, large numbers of Lithuanians joined German execution units.
Anti-Jewish laws came into force: confiscation of property, prohibition of appearing in public places, prohibition of walking on the pavement. Finally, it was made compulsory to wear the Star of David as a distinguishing mark. Arrests began.
At that time I was so naive that I could not believe the Germans had a policy of systematically exterminating Jews. I had been brought up to respect German culture and argued with my friends, trying to persuade them that individual acts of violence and abuse were just a result of the general disorder. I simply could not believe it. Everything that was going on seemed an absurd mistake. I kept saying, “That’s impossible! Don’t believe the slanders! The Germans will soon restore order!” We had yet to see the reality of German order!