The Believing Survivor

"The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors By Reeve Robert Brenne reveals the victims' frank and thought-provoking answers to searching questions about their experiences: Was the Holocaust God's will? Was there any meaning or purpose in the Holocaust? Was Israel worth the price six million had to pay? Did the experience in the death camps bring about an avowal of faith? A denial of God? A reaffirmation of religious belief? Did the Holocaust change beliefs about the coming of the Messiah, the Torah, the Jews as the chosen people, and the nature of God? Drawing on the responses of seven hundred survivors, Reeve Robert Brenner reveals the changes, rejections, reaffirmations, doubts, and despairs that have so profoundly affected the faith, practices, ideas, and attitudes of survivors, and, by extension, the entire Jewish people. Many survivors carried their deepest secrets and innermost beliefs silently, from internment to interment. But Brenner's quest provided the impetus for many survivors to end their silence about the past and come forth with their feelings."

This is an extract from the chapter entitled "The Believing Survivor"


More complex indeed is the analysis of believing survivors whose faith in God did not waver during their ordeal.

This population requires far more attention than the atheist survivors, not only because there are nearly twice as many, but irrespective of numbers, for the theological implications raised by their steadfast belief: Where was God? Why do good men suffer? How can good men who suffer remain good men? Why do good men who suffer not follow the advice offered to Job to "curse God and die"?

This population interests us also for the number of survivors who evidently are emotionally unable to come to grips with the challenge to their faith raised by the Holocaust. We shall examine this group first.

Three decades have elapsed since the Holocaust was consumed, but to this day the passive and inaudible presence of God, sought vainly in the whirlwind, continues to bewilder survivors as much as ever. For believing Jews a persistent and frequent response to the problem of God's whereabouts during those dark days is, "I do not permit myself to think about it." however, one candy survivor, himself a devout Jew, is persuaded that this declaration, when it is not merely the conventional abdication of the responsibility for serious thinking, is a convenient if platitudinous ruse for avoiding frank and open reflection on the subject. For these survivors God's whereabouts amounts to nothing less than the single most recurring enigma even as the problem, which reaches far beyond the strict symmetries of theological speculation, is being wholly and vehemently denied.  Nevertheless,  it is indisputable that numerous believing survivors would simply not choose to be brought consciously to the scrutinzation of God's withdrawn presence.

"I never think about God anymore" insists an attorney an university professor who experienced the ultimate agony of being forced by the Germans to choose between wife and mother, which should live and which should die.  "I don't let myself. I work, work, work, work, from the moment I get up in the morning till late in the evening, although I am above the age and beyond the need. I intentionally carry a full teaching load at the university and at the same time maintain an intensive legal practice. I never slow down lest I start thinking. All this that I would not ask myself about God. I am an observant Jew. How can anyone be anything but, after what has happened? And yet in all honesty it is true I 'davan' but I no longer pray. I can no longer speak to God as formerly; I speak at Him. Yet I find that the synagogue and the matzot are as important in my life today as before - and as consoling. How could I go on without them? But as for God Himself - can you believe this? - I just continue to recite prayers. I never let myself think about him."

Moreover, for pious Jews, there exists a real religious attitude or prescription, which is psychologically supportive against the threat represented by the outsider and his questions, and behind which they may pause to regroup and find escape when subsurface rumbling doubts assail: the prohibition against thinking alien thoughts that may conduce it irreligious behaviour or provoke "appikurish" (philosophically anti-Jewish) ideas. Virtually anything at all may, at various times, be so classified; and from the inquiring stranger just about everything is alien until such time as he is less strange - and more trustworthy. 

The believing Jew is generally "not allowed" to ask himself or reflect upon questions that may, because he has not acquired the wisdom of a sage, give way to scepticism. 

A significant number of believing survivors would rather not be compelled to consider God's role in the Holocaust. But in fairness, there are others who also claim their faith was not affected, that is, neither strengthened not weakened. They deliberately follow the antithetical route of theological speculation and religious inquiry. And they welcome the inescapable challenge and the travail it engenders:

It is all I think about... My life is a running, nagging dialog with God... he is always on my mind. Why? Why? I sometimes find I have been walking the lonely, crowded streets of Tel-Aviv, wandering aimlessly, conducting a question and answer session with Him - with no satisfactory answers forthcoming. I believe in Him with the same certainly as ever. The Holocaust couldn't change that. But I find I want very much to keep after Him and try to do the best of my ability to overcome the obscurity of His ways and I can't escape Him, however much He may have wished to escape us. I will do this to my last breath. I know it. More than this, I believe this is precisely what a Jew must do, to keep after Him for answers. And it brings me a measure of repose and comfort to conduct these conferences, to be God's interlocutor, to keep after Him by creating and inventing, like the traditional Jew of the past in history, new arguments against Him, and new justifications for Him. For me it is the entire Torah, the Etz Chayyim [Tree of Life]. Although I have no choice to the contrary, I am happy to hold fast to it.

The greatest number of these believing Holocaust survivors who to this day besiege God in head-on religious encounter do so involuntarily and unwillingly. For them it is not a cathartic, untrammelled exercise in the search for religious truth, but rather submission to an irresistible psychological imperative. 

I'd rather be free of it all; but it possesses me. I'd rather just live... not think of my daughter, my wife, my mother, all of room perished... rather not think of my aged father who has been living a kind of death for thirty years and only noe had, thank God, been freed by his senility from his unbearable burden. I often wish I could join him in his blessed senility; but I'd sooner, if I had my way, not even live as long as he. That way I'd be free of my burdens towards God and He'd be free of all He owes me. We'd be quits. Man was not intended to think about things beyond him. God's silence during the camps is one of those things. If I could I'd stop asking God "The Questions" altogether. But I can't.