For Decades I Was Silent: A Holocaust Survivor's Journey Back to Faith

By Baruch G. Goldstein

A fascinating memoir about a Holocaust survivor's loss of and journey back to faith. In 1939, Baruch Goldstein was a religiously observant adolescent resident of the Jewish community in Mlawa, a town that was then in East Prussia. After war broke out, the Jewish community there was relatively sheltered, as that region was incorporated into the German Reich rather than into the General Government (the German run-fragment of pre-war Poland, where conditions were harsh for everyone). However in 1942, Goldstein was sent to Auschwitz, where he stayed two-and-a-half years. His family was scattered all to their deaths, but he survived the war--barely. For Decades I Was Silent is an account of life in a small Polish-German town and provides information on the religious life of the Jewish citizens. This book creates a direct sense of the random, mystifying personal violence individuals felt at the hands of Germans--not the anonymous industrial death machine, but immediate, face-to-face violence.

After the war, Goldstein drifted as a refugee to UNRR camps in Italy. Over time, young Goldstein had to face the fact that all of his extended family was lost and he had only the possibilities of Palestine or help from distant relatives in the United States as a future. His American relatives urged him to enter the United States as a yeshiva student, and eventually he became a rabbi and started a family. As a young rabbinical student, and then as a rabbi, Goldstein was forced to confront the events of the Holocaust and the damage done to his faith. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780817386627

Book preview

Memory

Introduction

The letter began Taierer Fraind (Dear Friend), and as a man who had lost all his friends and loved ones, this was a phrase I had never expected to hear or read again. The year was 1947, two and a half years after my liberation from the Nazi concentration camps, and I, a twenty-four-year-old survivor, found myself still in transit, longing to immigrate to Palestine. I had just arrived in Rome, where I knew almost no one, to continue waiting for the opportunity.

The writer, a Miss Rivka Golinkin, introduced herself as a friend of my aunt Sonia Ulick, whom she had befriended on her vacation trip to Los Angeles. My aunt had shown Rivka some of my letters, and Rivka was moved to help bring me to America, she wrote, if that was what I wanted. I was living then in a fog of despondence. Although the war had ended more than two years earlier, I was still very much a refugee. After the liberation, I had traveled from Czechoslovakia to Hungary, then to Austria, and finally to Italy, where I had spent two and a half years in displaced persons camps, with no real home, no family, no sense of stability, without plans for a normal life in the future. My life was permeated with frustration and loneliness, and the expression of friendship from a stranger touched me very deeply.

My intentions after the war had been to immigrate to Palestine as soon as possible, but after spending years of waiting for the opportunity to reach Palestine, I did not know what I wanted. I responded to Rivka's note and expressed gratitude for her kindness and caring. Maybe I would consider going to America, I wrote back. And from there began our correspondence.

Rivka's letter had arrived after a long and dark period in my life. That letter became the beginning of a healing process that ultimately helped me to live a full life again. Please allow me to share my story with you.

1

Origins

The city of Mlawa is located in the northern part of Poland, between Warsaw and Danzig, in the district of Mazowsze. Both my parents, Israel Meyer Goldstein and Tirtza Beilah Goldstein, were born there, and on April 23, 1923, I became one of the first of the next generation of Goldsteins to be born in the city. I was named Baruch Gershon after my mother's uncle, who had been known as Boruch Gershon der Sofer (the scribe), and they nicknamed me Butche. A year and a half later, my sister, Rachel (Rachela, in Polish) was born. We called her Ruchcza. And then, about a year and a half after that came my brother, Shmuel Alter, whom we called Shmulik. I do not know when, from where, or who of my ancestors came first to Mlawa.

No one knows exactly when and from where the first Jews arrived in Mlawa, either. According to an article by Yehuda Rosenthal, who has done extensive research on the history of Mlawa, Jews lived in Mlawa for at least four hundred years. The earliest available information dates back to 1515 and refers to a Dr. Brasius, a Christian who was accused of preaching Judaism to Christians. A claim was made that the doctor observed Jewish holidays and customs and had leanings toward Judaism. We can assume that he was under the influence of Jews who lived there at that time.¹

A more specific document, dated 1543, was found in the archives of the city of Plock, then the capital city of the Mazowsze region. It mentions the names of Berachja or Baruch (Polish: Bugoslaw), the Parnes (the chief or leader of the Jewish community) of the Jewish community in Mlawa, along with Dr. Lewek, the Parnes of the Jewish community in Plock, as having reported a decree of the Polish king Zigmunt August the First, on August 1, 1541, which made ritual accusations against Jews. This proves that there were Jews in Mlawa in 1541 and that they had a Parnes who took care of the Jewish affairs in the community in connection with a case of blood libel.²

By 1569 twenty-three Jewish families were living in Mlawa, and by 1578 there were thirty-four families. Their main sources of livelihood were the livestock trade and various crafts. The fires that devastated Mlawa in 1659 and in 1692 and the accusations of disloyalty in 1670 caused the number of Jews in Mlawa to decrease. Growth in the region's economic activity during the last third of the eighteenth century brought more Jews to the area. The 1765 census showed seventy Jewish families and 487 Jewish poll-tax payers (head tax paid by Jews) in Mlawa and the neighboring villages. Jews owned fifteen houses in the town itself. The 1781 census showed a Jewish population of 718 individuals.³

After the Prussian conquest in 1793, the city of Mlawa was granted a privilegia de non-tolerandis Judaeis status, which forbade Jews from living in the city. The Jews then moved to Zabrody, an area just outside Mlawa. In fact, there were 3,164 Jews living in the surrounding towns and villages. They made up 10 percent of the total population.⁴

Stories used to circulate in Mlawa that the renowned Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, the tzaddik of Berdichev, Ukraine, had once spent a few days in the city when the Jews lived in Zabrody. This could have been between the years 1772 and 1785. From that we may assume that Hasidim (pious Jews) were already in Mlawa. A century and a half later, that visit was still a source of pride to the Jews of Mlawa. Jews would walk to the synagogue in Zabrody on the high holidays to pray where the tzaddik of Berdichev had prayed. The Zabrody synagogue existed until World War I.⁵

With the establishment of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1806, Jews were allowed to return to Mlawa. By 1808, records show, 137 Jews living in Mlawa, constituting 15 percent of the total population, but they were not completely welcome in the city. About twenty years later, restrictions were again placed on Jewish settlement, and in 1824 a special Jewish quarter was established. With some rare exceptions, Jews were permitted to live only in the Jewish quarter. Yet, in 1827, 792 Jews made up 36 percent of the total population of Mlawa. The restrictions on residence and land ownership by Jews remained in place for almost forty years; they were abolished in 1862.

The Jewish population increased considerably once the railway from Mlawa to Warsaw and Gdansk was opened toward the end of the nineteenth century. Many Jews earned their livelihood then from the trade in grain, livestock, wood, and army supplies. Between 1857 and 1897, the Jewish population of Mlawa grew from 1,650 to 4,845, representing 41 percent of the total population.⁶

The influence of Hasidism manifested itself among the Jews of Mlawa from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the influence of the Mitnagdim, opponents of Hasidism, gained strength. (Although both groups are considered Orthodox in comparison to other branches of Judaism, they differ in some respects. The Hasidim emphasize meticulous observance of God's commandments but worship with ecstasy and joy; the Mitnagdim use a more scholarly approach to religious behavior and attitudes.) By then the Jewish population had grown to more than five thousand people. Rabbi Wolf Lipszic became rabbi of Mlawa in 1870. The last rabbi of Mlawa, Rabbi Yechiel Moshe Segalowitz, a Mitnaged, was appointed in 1901.⁷

By that time Mlawa had become home to a large and active community of Jewish intelligentsia. In the late 1890s a Zionist group called Hovevei Zion—Lovers of Zion—was organized there. During the same period, while pogroms were rampant in Russia, the Bund (Jewish Socialist Party) and the Po'alei Tzion (a Zionist workers' organization) wielded considerable influence among Jewish workers, youth, and intelligentsia. The renowned author Joseph Opatoshu (his brother, Feivel Opatowsky, was my Yiddish teacher), the Yiddish and Hebrew writer Yakir Warshawsky, the publicist and influential leader of the Bund, Victor Alter, and the accomplished engineer-mathematician Moshe Merker were born and began their careers in Mlawa.⁸

While I was growing up in Mlawa, about six thousand Jews resided in the city out of a total population of approximately twenty thousand. Although it was not a particularly large city, it had a very active cultural life and was one of the more progressive cities of Poland at the turn of the twentieth century. Religious Jews made up a significant portion of the city's Jewish population in the early part of the twentieth century.

Among the religious Jews were different groups of Hasidim in Mlawa, each with its own specific religious philosophy of serving God. Each group of Hasidim had its own rebbe or tzaddik and considered him to be the greatest spiritual leader. The Hasidim would follow his leadership with great devotion and would seek his advice on all important matters of life. Each Hasidic group had its own place of worship, known as shtibl, usually consisting of not more than one or two rooms. Thus Mlawa had many different Hasidic groups along with the Mitnagdim, who remained philosophically opposed to the Hasidic movement altogether. Despite their disagreements, however, these groups shared common basic beliefs and a strong commitment to religious observance.

The number of Zionists of all convictions continued to grow in the twentieth century. Among the groups were the General Zionist Party, the socialist Zionists, and the right wing and left wing of the socialist Po'alei Tzion movement. There were also the religious Mizrahi Zionists, and when Ze'ev Jabotinsky separated from the general Zionist movement and founded the Revisionist Zionist movement, there were Revisionists in Mlawa, too.⁹ All these organizations actively supported the idea of the Jewish people returning to Palestine, the Land of Israel, to rebuild the land, which had been neglected for thousands of years, to build new settlements and farms, and to reestablish there an independent Jewish state. The persecution of Jews and the spread of nationalism in the nineteenth century contributed greatly to the creation and growth of the political movement of Zionism.

Anti-Zionists made their voices heard in Mlawa as well. The religious organization Agudath Israel held onto the traditional idea that Jews should wait for the coming of the Messiah to take them back to the Land of Israel en masse. The Bund in Mlawa also opposed the Zionist movement. This secular group believed it best for the Jewish people to remain in the countries of their birth and work for social justice and equal rights for all citizens. They believed that Jews should maintain their love and commitment to Jewish culture, the Yiddish language, and Yiddish literature instead of attempting to renew the ancient Hebrew language.

Thus, virtually every Jewish religious and political movement was represented in Mlawa. Moreover, each movement had its own youth organization. For example, there were the Hashomer Hatza'ir (socialist Zionists), Hashomer Hadati (religious Zionists), Hashomer Haleumi (national-general Zionists), and Betar (revisionist Zionists). Many of Mlawa's youth joined the Hakhshara (preparation), a movement of young people who learned agricultural and industrial skills to prepare to immigrate to Palestine and assist in the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland there. A sizable number of people from Mlawa succeeded in their efforts to immigrate to Palestine before the beginning of World War II, despite the hardships they then had to endure there from the hot climate, the lack of water, and the malaria epidemics.

Non-Zionist youth groups were also active, such as Tze'irei Agudath Israel (Young Adults of Agudath Israel) and Pirchei Agudath Israel (religious non-Zionist youth). My parents were not politically involved, but I guess they leaned toward Agudath Israel. I used to attend Pirchei Agudath Israel meetings, even though I personally had more Zionist leanings and would attend the occasional meeting of the Betar club of the Revisionist youth. Some young Mlawa Jews even held membership in the underground Communist Party, which completely rejected Jewish tradition and Zionism. I knew young Jewish Communists who served jail sentences for their political activities because the Communist Party was illegal in Poland.

Many social service organizations functioned successfully in the city, too. Managed and staffed by volunteers, these groups assisted families in need. Among them were the Beis Lechem (food for the poor), Bikur Cholim (help for the needy sick), Hakhnosas Orchim (food and shelter for strangers), Hakhnosas Kallah (help for poor brides), Gemilus Chesed Kasse (interest-free loans for the needy), and Hevra Kadisha (the burial