Wherever I see him, either davening at the Gra shul in Shaarei Chesed or walking home, he has a smile permanently affixed to his face. He is of medium height and slightly hunched over, with a tripod walking cane for support, and I had never even bothered to learn his name until someone pointed out to me that Mordechai Ansbacher, 86 years old, was one of the key witnesses in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. A search on the internet shows a handsome, dynamic looking man with a black kippa taking the stand at that famous trial, which kept thousands of people in Israel glued to their radios for weeks. He survived the Theresienstadt ghetto, the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, and the War of Independence, where he fought to protect Jerusalem within three years of being liberated from the camps. He was also one of the founders of Yad Vashem and the author of 100 articles on Jewish art and Ashkenazic Jewry in the Encyclopedia Judaica. Quite a resume for such an unassuming man.
Mordechai Ansbacher is a rare breed of Jew, as far as the religious spectrum in Israel goes. He was affiliated in his youth with the Agudath Israel movement in Germany – hence his black yarmulke and his attachment to the Gra Shul. (He would fit in great at Baltimore’s Shearith Israel.) But unlike today’s typical Israeli Agudist, he fought in the Israel Defense forces and has an advanced secular education. Listening to him, you can see that he is very Zionistic. After hearing his story of becoming a stateless pariah, of losing the most elementary human rights under Nazism, and of having no security other than his faith in G-d, you can understand why it is so important to him to have a Jewish state, and to be able to take up arms and stand up to your enemies.
I have known quite a few Holocaust survivors who always smiled. They were, and are, a gift to the world, every one of them a precious soul whose countenance belies a gruesome past. Would he open up to me?
* * *
Mr. Ansbacher invited me to visit him in his modest apartment on Ibn Shaprut Street in Rechavia, only a block from the Shaarei Chesed neighborhood. Right away, he reminisced about his hometown, Wurzburg, whose significance, he stressed, was that it was home to an Orthodox Jewish Teachers’ Seminary. “Jewish day school principals from Detroit to South Africa come from there,” he said with pride. He was also proud of the fact that his hometown was where Yitzchak ben Moshe of Vienna, author of OrZarua, headed a yeshiva and taught Meir of Rothenburg, back in the 1200s. This disciple, later known as the Maharam mei Rothenburg, became the rabbi of that town.
Hundreds of years later, on November 9 to 10, 1938, the Nazis staged vicious pogroms – state sanctioned, anti-Jewish riots – against the Jewish community of Germany. These came to be known as Kristallnacht (now commonly translated as “Night of Broken Glass”), a reference to the untold numbers of broken windows of synagogues, Jewish-owned stores, community centers, and homes, which were plundered and destroyed during the pogroms.
Shortly after the pogrom (Mordechai dislikes the word Kristallnacht because it is a “Nazi word”), he was sent to Belgium, along with his cousin, with a Kindertransport of Jewish children. He was 11 years old. Children chosen for a Kindertransport convoy traveled by train to ports in Belgium and the Netherlands, from where they sailed to Harwich, England. Mordechai stayed with relatives for a time, until the Germans invaded Belgium. He eventually fled to Calais, a major ferry port in northern France – the closest point on the French mainland to England, where Dover lies, just 32 km away, across the English Channel. Mordechai wasCalais is a city in the Nord-Pas de Calais region of France. It is the closest point on the French mainland to England; Dover lies across the English Channel just 32 km away. unfortunately caught by the Nazis during their blitzkrieg of Dunkirk, and the Germans shipped him back to his family in Wurzburg.
From there, he and his mother were sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, while his brother was shipped to Auschwitz. In Theresienstadt, “the Jews died like flies,” Ansbacher testified. The population of the camp was in a constant state of flux; there were always new arrivals while others were being shipped “to the east,” to the death camps of Poland.
* * *
Here are some excerpts of Ansbacher’s testimony at the Eichmann trial, about what he experienced in Theresienstadt:
State Attorney Bar-Or:Please describe to the Court your daily life in Theresienstadt.
Witness Ansbacher:Originally I lived together with my mother in house No. L206. The Theresienstadt ghetto was divided into large buildings, barracks, and blocks of houses.... There was an office called “Evidenz” (Registration). There we were given a slip of paper after we arrived with the transport from Wurzburg....This was the place where they took away from everyone those things that were considered forbidden, such as thermos flasks, beverages, cigarettes, and toilet paper.
After we had waited a long time in the blazing sun, they transferred us on foot to house L206. We were allocated the attics, for all the rooms were already full.
Q:Why do you say that a large number of them died right away?
A: There was terrible hunger, and the hygienic conditions were most awful.
Q:Did they attend to the people?
A: Not at all. People were unable to wash themselves – there was no water. With difficulty, a little water was brought from another building, and that was supposed to suffice both for drinking and washing.
Q:How long did you remain there in the attic?
A:I remained in the attic for about four weeks. Afterwards I received a place on the floor in the room below, also together with aged and sick people; no one knew who was lying next to him.
Q:I want you to describe to the Court what happened to you. How old were you when you reached Theresienstadt?
A: Fifteen years old.
Q:Please describe your life in Theresienstadt.
A:In Theresienstadt, there were Jews from Germany, mainly old people, feeble people who had been left by themselves, without children, without family assistance; as a rule, all their relatives had left Germany, and they were left behind without help. They adjusted to the conditions at Theresienstadt with great difficulty….They performed their bodily functions in the room itself, for they no longer had the strength to stand on their feet. Particularly the Jews from Germany, it can be said, fell like flies.
It was strange, for example, that people who were very hungry and were mostly dying from starvation, from dysentery, when they fell upon the remnants of food, upon potato peels, you heard occasionally: “Please excuse me, Herr Sanitaetsrat (medical councilor), please allow me to get to the potato peels for a little while.” It was really shocking.
Generally speaking, with all these niceties of behavior, people cared for themselves, and owing to the starvation, they did not observe the sanitary regulations according to which it was forbidden to go near the remnants, but one would push the other and help himself. What would he find? Perhaps a few peels in the dirt, and he would swallow them unwashed.
* * *
Sinai Adler, who later became the Chief Rabbi of Ashdod, was about Mordechai’s age when he was sent from Prague to the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt. In his autobiography, Your Rod and Your Staff (Feldheim, 1996), he writes:
The food in the ghetto kitchens was not kosher....However, there were youths who came from strictly religious homes, and they succeeded in obtaining a special kitchen that was kept kosher. All the food had to be vegetarian, because kosher meat was unavailable in the ghetto. This group also succeeded in obtaining a corner of one of the barracks for their living quarters, which was separated from the rest of the barracks by makeshift dividers. A small aron kodeshwas placed there along with a small sefer Torah. In addition to the daily prayers which were held in this special living quarter, regular Torah classes and social activities were also provided. There were about fifteen young men in this group, including myself. (page 20)
Ansbacher told me that he was one of these 15 boys who learned together. They hailed from Germany, Holland, and Belgium. This clandestine cheder was organized by members of Agudath Israel.
Mordechai spent two years struggling for survival in Theresienstadt. He never knew if and when it would be his turn to be sent “to work in the east.” That dreaded moment finally occurred just before Rosh Hashanah of 1944, when he was selected to be shipped to Auschwitz. He spent 10 days in Auschwitz, before being transferred to Dachau. On arrival, thousands were lined up for roll call – and they had to stand there throughout the cold November night, half naked in the sleet and snow. Many just dropped dead.*
Those who survived that night were put into work details, continually beaten by SS guards who kept barking at them to work faster. Everyone had typhus. The little food they received began to run out. In the weeks before the end of the war, the Nazis didn’t even bother to bury the dead. Corpses were piled high and stacked like cordwood at the gates. That’s the scene the American soldiers experienced when they liberated the camp.*
* * *
After listening to just the most sketchy outline of his Holocaust experience, I was dumbstruck. “Mordechai,” I asked, “how is it that you are always wearing a smile? You seem happier than people who never had a bad day in their life!”
Mordechai answered me with his trademark smile: “Yehuda Avner (former Israeli ambassador to England, author of The Prime Ministers, and a neighbor who also davens at the Gra Shul) asked me the same thing. I will tell you. The Nazis wanted to exterminate us. But I witnessed miracle upon miracle [and survived]. My life unfolded from degradation to pride and achievement. I attained the rank of rav seren (major) in the Israeli army, in the artillery corp.
“By the way, before I enrolled in the officers training course, I consulted with Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, zt”l. I was close to him and was in his weekly shiur for balabatim for over 30 years. I had, after all, risen in the ranks of the Haganah. Now that the IDF ( Israel Defense Forces) was created, I asked him, ‘What should I do? Should I enlist in the army in the first place and aim to be a simple soldier? Should I invest time and effort in the army to become an officer? Or should I join the police force?’ I consulted with him before I made any important decision. He took a great interest in my life. And you know what he told me? He told me that it was better for me to become an officer in the army. ‘Oif toon ah zach. (There is so much you can accomplish.) You can be a mashpia there,’ Rav Auerbach told me. Shabbos, kashrus in the army kitchens! And that’s what happened! This was before I got married. And then I got married.”
He stops talking, points to a framed picture on the wall, and says, “This was our firstborn son, a father of 13 children. He was a rabbi in The Hague, in Holland. And he passed away five years ago [from late-onset diabetes].”
We sat there in silence. A minute that felt like an hour passed by. I composed myself and looked at him. “After all you went through, and now this with your beloved son, you still are always smiling?”
“People ask me, ‘How can you laugh after all you’ve gone through?’ I tell them, there is no answer to this question. No answer. The day will come when I will ask the Ribono Shel Olam. Until then, we really have no answers how these things could happen.”
Suddenly, for a moment, the smile is gone. He is choking back tears.
“I received a deep and lasting chinuch (education) in emunah (faith) from my parents. No chochmas. The real thing. I also get a lot of fulfillment from the fact that all my children are true yarei Shamayim – and their children as well. My smile? I guess it’s just for appearance sake at times. In any case, I know there will be continuity.”
I suddenly remember something I learned just that morning before the interview that connected with Ansbacher’s story.
“Mordechai, this morning while studying the parsha we came across the following verses: ‘And you shall remember the entire way on which the Lord, your G-d, led you these 40 years in the desert, in order to afflict you to test you, to know what is in your heart... And He afflicted you and let you go hungry... so that He would make you know that man does not live by bread alone but rather by whatever comes forth from the mouth of the Lord does man live.’” (Devarim 8:2, 3)
I continued, “The commentaries say that the reason for the long, difficult desert sojourn was so that it would be ingrained in the minds of the people that any good that comes to them is a gift from G-d – especially when they will settle in the land of Israel and prosper there by their own initiative. This reminds me of your story!”
“You have a good point,” Mordechai responded. “It reminds me of the verse, ‘The Lord will fight for you, but you shall remain silent.’ (Shemot, 14:14) Iran going nuclear. Chemical weapons. What can we do by our own power alone? Nothing! I am not afraid!”
“You are not afraid? After what happened to all the children in the Holocaust, and you are not afraid?” I asked.
“Of course I am afraid,” he said, seeming to backtrack a bit. “But what I am afraid of is the false confidence that we have the power to take on Iran and our other enemies by ourselves and not rely on G-d.That’s what frightens me.”
“Is there any message that you want to leave for the next generation?”
“It is not enough for us to pray to G-d when our enemies rise up against us. We have to stand up against them. We have to fight them. The Lord will fight for you – but we have to do our part. Either join the army or do some other kind of national service. We cannot just sit with hands folded while anti-Semitism rages. We must speak out. Something.
“Since 1987, I have been part of an organization that goes to Germany and lectures to Protestant ministers on the Jewish views of the Bible. Once a year, for a week at a time, I would travel to a town near Stuttgart and engage them. I believe that it was ignorance of Jews and Judaism amongst the gentiles in Germany and Russia that allowed anti-Semitism and Nazism to take root and spread. I fought in the IDF, and for years I fought in a war of ideas to combat anti-Semitism. We cannot remain passive,”
“I don’t think Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach would agree with you about the army thing,” I countered.
“He certainly wouldn’t. I have grandchildren who are learning in kollel who also disagree with me. What can I do? That’s how I feel, and that’s my message. And one more thing – let’s not be weak and make land concessions to the Arabs. Hashem gave this land to us, not to them.”
* * *
A few days after finishing the article I thought again about Ansbacher’s smile. I don’t think it’s a façade at all. The pain and wounds of the past are still there. But just as the present cannot completely bury and erase the past, the past should not bury the present. His personal salvation and the miracles he witnessed – from survival in a world of utter helplessness and brutality to proudly fighting to defend his land and his people, from his children’s children carrying on the Ansbacher family’s heritage – those are good enough reasons to wear a big smile every day.
*(Based on an article in the newspaper The Norwalk Hour, May 12, 1961.)
