A powerful story of Resistance

[Richard D]

For those who do not know, today is Israel Yom Hashoah. The international Yom Hashoah is on the day that Auschwitz was liberated by Allied forces. Israel Yom Hashoah is on the day that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising started. One remembers being rescued, the other, the power of resistance and heroism.

My father was born in Gunzenhausen, a small town in Bavaria, in 1921. . . . In 1924, when my father was three years old, the “good citizens of Gunzenhausen,” as he always sarcastically labeled them, elected members of the Nazi party to the Gunzenhausen town council. A decade later the town’s gradual transition from normal, unofficial anti-Semitism to vicious, official Nazism seems to have been seamless. In fact, these townspeople became so enthusiastic about their “mini-pogroms” that when Berlin officers became aware of what was going on, they sent a message to “slow down”—so that the Nazi party could take credit.

Materials in one of the cartons showed me poignantly that Gunzenhausen’s Jews avoided reality by focusing on their internal communal and synagogue life. While boycotts, pogroms, and even murder erupted around them, the synagogue’s executive committee calmly debated what color carpet they should install.

But one day, the synagogue hosted a guest speaker who wanted to “shake us out of our lethargy,” as my father later wrote. Giora Josephthal was a twenty-one-year-old man from Nuremberg, a member of Habonim, the Labor Zionist movement, and a rising star among Zionists in Germany. My father, then twelve, was persuaded by Josephthal’s certainty that Zionism was the solution to the Jews’ problems, a solution that could come about only if Jews banded together in collective action. The next day, Dad gathered all of the Jewish boys his age to build a “‘sports facility’ with our own hands, and study Hebrew and Zionism.”

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/holocaust/18539/my-fathers-resistance-a-memoir/