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A million shoes saved, a million lives destroyed

Published 17 September 1995

Reflections from Rabbi Sacks’ following his first visit to Auschwitz in 1995

Until now, I’ve never been to Auschwitz. For me, it’s been the black hole of Jewish history, an echoing abyss which I never sought to enter. But, listening to the nightmare stories of the survivors, I realised that there was something they wanted from us, the generation born after the Holocaust.

They wanted us not to forget. But what is it to remember life in the midst of death? I don’t know, and that’s why I’ve come here, to see and listen and reflect. Old men and women, children in their hundreds of thousands, Jews from across Europe, Rabbis, musicians, professors, husbands, wives, ordinary people whose sole crime was that they had a Jewish grandparent. They came packed in cattle trucks. Many of them died on the journey. They brought their luggage with them because they’d been told they were just going to be resettled, and then they came to the gate with its words: “Arbeit macht frei” – “work makes you free”. By then, some must have realised that Auschwitz was built on lies and these were the gates of the kingdom of death.


Walking through Auschwitz, what strikes you today is how careful the Nazis were to waste nothing. They took everything, kept everything, and not only items of value. Here you see mountains of suitcases, piles of toothbrushes, and shoes, hundreds of thousands of shoes, worn, battered, but still collected. Nothing was too valueless to throw away, except life. A million shoes saved, a million lives destroyed.

For three thousand years, Jews lived by a set of values first proclaimed in the Hebrew Bible: the sanctity of life, the moral covenant between man and God, the idea that authority is conferred by right not might, the love we owe the stranger, the dignity of every human being as the image of God. It was those values that Hitler despised; he once called conscience a Jewish invention. But when they are lost, this is the world created in their place. Here might ruled over right, the stranger was hated, the covenant defaced, and the image of God burned and turned to ash. It was the nightmare kingdom where man sent God into exile and condemned his witnesses to the gas chambers.

The Nazis weren’t content to kill Jews; they wanted to murder Jewish faith itself. They cut the beards from  Rabbis’ faces, they shot Jews who prayed, and they deliberately chose the Jewish holy days for their worst acts of brutality. Here at Auschwitz, the worst selections for the crematoria took place on Yom Kippur. Dr. Joseph Mengele used to tell Jewish prisoners: “Here I rule in place of God. I decide who will live and who will die.” On Yom Kippur, we believe God writes us in the Book of Life. Auschwitz was the book written by man, and it was a book of death.

People sometimes ask me: Where was God at Auschwitz? I don’t know, but Jewishly it’s the wrong question. The real question is: Where was humanity at Auschwitz? God never said He’d stop us harming one another, but He did give us a moral code, commandments engraved in stone which taught us how to stop ourselves. Where was humanity when old men and women were being murdered, millions being gassed, children thrown on the flames still alive? The real question, so painful we can hardly ask it, is not where was God when we called to Him, but where were we when He called to us?

I don’t understand what it was to live here, I don’t understand what it was to die here, I don’t understand what it was to issue the orders, carry them out, decide who would live and who would die. But I think I understand one thing, that this is what the Bible warned against in its very first chapter when God said, “Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness.” When human life is no longer sacred, Auschwitz becomes possible. And standing here, I hear those other words from the book of Genesis, God’s words to Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.”

What prayer do you say here on this desecrated ground? Shalom Katz was one of those who stood here. He and fifty other prisoners were ordered to dig their own grave and then stand in front of it to be shot. Before the guns were raised, he asked the guards’ permission to say the Jewish prayer for the dead. It was granted. He sang it, and the guards were so moved by the beauty of his voice that they took him out of the line, kept him alive to sing for them, and he was still here when Auschwitz was liberated. Then he sang the prayer a second time for all those who had died. “Oh God full of compassion, grant rest to those who have gone from this world and shelter their souls under the wings of Your presence.”

I came to Auschwitz to honour the memory of those who died, among them members of my own family, great aunts and uncles from Poland and Lithuania. But now that I’ve come, I feel overwhelmed by a sense of evil so vast it leaves you numb. Here, where a million and a half died, where those who lived were robbed of all humanity, where you’re surrounded by factories whose product was death, you feel a chill like ice. I’ve come, and I don’t know that I’ll ever want to be here again. The sense of desolation is still too great. There’s nothing here but a massive echoing silence that swallows words and robs them of their meaning. And yet, I now know that we must never forget the Holocaust. Never again may we walk down the road that begins with hate and ends in attempted genocide.

Towards the end of his life, Moses summoned the Israelites and said, “I’ve set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore, choose life.” That choice still stands before us with its two monumental symbols: Auschwitz and Yom Kippur – the book of death or the Book of Life. And this too, I now know, that some extraordinary reserve of spirit has renewed itself. Jews didn’t despair; the survivors built new lives, new communities grew up elsewhere, and in the State of Israel, we’ve come together as a people again, building one of the world’s oldest and newest countries, and singing, “Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people lives!”

For me, faith after Auschwitz is the courage to live and bring new life into the world, never forgetting those who died but never yielding to despair. It means fighting for a world in which we recognise that those who aren’t in our image are still in God’s image. It means remembering for the sake of life and humanity and hope.

Wherever I travel throughout the Jewish world, in Israel as it strives to create peace, and throughout the Diaspora as Jews marry and build Jewish homes and light the candle of faith in a new generation, I witness something I can only call the Shechinah – the name we give to God as He enters the human heart and gives it a strength we didn’t know we had. And on the faces of Jewish children, I see a people who walk through the valley of the shadow of death coming to life again, cherishing life, sanctifying it, and knowing that in it is the breath of God

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour
@HusseinAboubak
Mar 27

Faith vs. Ethics

In the introduction of Eichah Rabbah (a Jewish biblical commentary), I came across an interesting midrash that puzzled me for some time. The introduction of Eichah Rabbah is mainly a grand narrative exegesis of heavenly mourning over the destruction of the temple and the exile of Israel to Babylon. At one point, the midrash builds itself for Jer 31:15: " "A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children because they were not." It says that in heaven, God was mourning and weeping for what was happening to Israel. The temple was destroyed, and Israel was subjugated, murdered, tortured, and exiled to Babylon in the most humiliating conditions. God could not find comfort, not from his angels, whom he forbade from singing as he did during the flood and the drowning of the Egyptians, and not from Jeremiah, who grew up in an already decadent and corrupt Israel and didn't feel the loss God felt.

God then ordered Jeremiah to go raise the Patriarchs and Moses from the dead. The Patriarchs and Moses knew Israel in greatness, which Jeremiah didn't know, and thus they could share with God the weeping, mourning, and true sense of tragedy. And indeed, they did. When they saw the desolation of Jerusalem, the ruin of the temple, and the agony of the children of Israel, how God's spirit departed Israel, they were devastated. One by one, the Patriarchs go and beseech God to spare Israel and return them to their home. Each has a personal and brilliant plea which I can't quote at length but encourage the interested reader to go read them. Abraham reminds of Israel's voluntary acceptance the Torah. He reminds God of his sacrifice. Isaac reminds God of his obedience and selflessness. Jacob reminds God of his hard work. Moses reminds God of his dedication to divine demands despite their difficulty. Each counts their own merit and asks God to reciprocate and spare Israel. And each time, God declined and said it was the undoable decree of his justice.

And then came Rachel. Not a Patriarch, not Abraham, Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith. Not Moses, Freud's founding father of civilization. Just a poor woman weeping over her children. She then tells God a story. Jacob wanted her. And she wanted Jacob, and they both agreed to get married. They agreed on many details. And then Jacob went to her father, only for her father to deceive Jacob and plan to give him her sister, Leah, instead. She felt angry, and the flames of jealousy burned her chest. She planned to go and ruin their plans and take Jacob for herself. But then, she felt sorry for her sister and her father and did not want to bring them shame and disgrace. Despite that it הוקשה עלי הדבר עד מאוד "it was exceedingly difficult for me," she still forgave them and even helped her sister and gave her the details she agreed on with Jacob. Can you imagine how difficult that was for her? Helping her sister to marry the man she wants? She then says, "I consoled myself... I suffered... I had mercy... I gave kindness... and I did not envy...I forgave..." נחמתי. סבלתי, רחמתי, , גמלתי חסד, לא קנאתי, סלחתי. And then she asked God to forgive Israel. And God listened and decided to forgive Israel and return them home for Rachel's sake.

This story has been giving me goosebumps since I read it, and I'm still marveling over the ability of the Jewish sages to wrap inexhaustible wisdom in such simple and profound stories. Why did the rabbis imagine God to honor simple Rachel when he turned down the holiest and founding figures, not just of Judaism, but the entire Abrahamic world? Abraham, the man through whom humanity knew God. And Moses, through whom humanity received Torah. Why? The rabbis had different ideas that revolved around revoking God's justice vs. his mercy and the question of merit vs. the question of forgiveness. Unlike the others, Rachel didn't claim that Israel deserved forgiveness but that God is the one who should be abundant in mercy and forgiveness so much as to surpass the letter of the law.

I have a take on this. In Genesis, while the disobedience of Adam and Eve symbolized man's choice of sin and rebellion to be the nature of his relationship with God, the story of Cain and Able symbolized man's choice of crime and tyranny to be the nature of his relationship with society. This first fratricide was the foundation of 
all crime of the city of Cain, repeated in the story of Romulus and Remus, and philosophied in Freud's patricide, which Freud considered to be the default composition of human psychology. The story told in the midrash about Rachel is the exact contrast to that of Cain. Both stories are about siblings, the symbols of natural human egalitarianism and equality, and both of them have the same desire for the same object of desire. And in both stories, the father, God in Cain's and Lavan in Rachel's, chooses the other sibling almost arbitrarily. For no apparent reason, one desire is honored, and one desire is suppressed. And both, Cain and Rachel felt outraged, felt angry, and felt they were treated with injustice. Both, in a sense, became critical intellectuals, critical philosophers, who refused injustice and demanded their lots. Yet, Rachel decided to "console, suffer, have mercy, give kindness, not envy, forgive." In this simple ethical act of compassion instead of hatred, an act of conscious ceding HER RIGHT, Rachel unfounded the city of Cain. She became the humanity that does not 
murder out of resentment, envy, and rage but the humanity that just forgives. One story ended with murder, and other ended with the birth of God's people. And for that, God forgave and spared Israel. This is an incredible rabbinical exposition on the importance of everyday ethics, especially in your dealings with your brother and sister, over grand statements of faith and heroic achievement efforts. All that is needed is to forgive your brother/sister....