Introduction. xxi Hebrew Union College Press. All rights reserved.

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1 I Each year, for the past several years, Professor Werner Weinberg has thoughtfully climbed the steps to the bimah of the synagogue of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati to speak to our college community. He has done this on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Day, and on November 9 or 10, the anniversaries of the Night of Broken Crystal, an orgy of killing and destruction in the year 1938 visited upon every Jewish community in Germany. I have anticipated Professor Weinberg s lectures on these occasions with eagerness and with trepidation. I have been eager because I know that his is one of the most eloquent and most profound voices among those who seek to understand that which we call the Holocaust and those whom we have labelled its survivors. I have felt trepidation because I, too, am a survivor of the Holocaust, and Professor Weinberg evokes in me as well memories long suppressed. I, too, know firsthand the incredible events of the night and day of November 9 and 10, As an eight-year-old child in Germany, I saw my synagogue defiled and its sacred objects despoiled. I watched my grandfather wade into a freezing brook to recover the carved up pieces of a Torah parchment. My entire world was carved up as well, and I do not know if it will ever be whole again. xxi

2 Yet I am deeply honored to introduce this extraordinary book. I know of no other memoir of the Holocaust which has searched so deeply for meaning, which has subjected the author to so much self-scrutiny, and which has contained so complete a chronicle of the chapters that make up the earth-shattering events we have named the Holocaust. II There are wounds that defy healing, and the reason is that they must not be allowed to heal. The imagery and the truth of these words of Werner Weinberg define the very essence of this volume. The imagery suggests a wound of some kind that continues to bleed or remain infected. The imagery also suggests doctors and nurses making an effort to treat the wound and being hampered, on purpose, in their efforts. In the Holocaust world, Werner Weinberg s world, Jewish prisoners were often used as experimental guinea pigs. In many cases, open wounds of the most horrible nature were deliberately left untreated by Nazi doctors in order to record the scientific consequences. That is one truth of this image. A second truth is that the Holocaust was a revaluation of all moral values, a clear sign that, as Weinberg finds, mankind overestimated the progress it had made since its dawn and that now you could do the absolutely unthinkable with absolute impunity. The Holocaust was a clear sign that Western civilization had failed and that the illusion of order, of scientific progress, of religious tolerance was merely that an illusion. When and if we understand that, we will understand that we can no longer fully trust the intentions of those scientists and bureaucrats who present xxii

3 us with the latest technological advances in modern warfare. When and if we understand that the two great wounds of our time, the Holocaust and nuclear destruction one real and the other the push of a button away are but two sides of the same phenomenon, we will understand that one marked the end of Western civilization s innocence and the other will mark the end of our world. In Werner Weinberg s imagery, the open wound of the Holocaust will serve to educate us and to deter the even greater wound of our self-destruction. Werner Weinberg did not understand any of this in 1936 when he graduated from the Hebrew Teachers Seminary in the German city of Würzburg with the exalted title of jüdischer Lehrer or Jewish teacher. Three years after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and a year after the Nuremberg Laws had effectively removed German Jewry from the social, political, and economic life of Germany, Werner Weinberg entered what was for him a normal world of teaching Jewish students, delivering sermons, and generally trying to walk a balanced tightrope of relations between a spiritual leader and his or her congregation. He did not realize that the insanity of such a situation was becoming the norm, that what Robert Jay Lifton has termed an ultimate moral inversion, where living and dying were divested of moral structures, had already made its appearance. It would find its crystallization in the counterfeit universe of the concentration camp. III Emerging from this counterfeit universe where wrong was right and life was death, what could Werner Weinberg know of life? What can he teach us today? xxiii

4 For Werner Weinberg, his wife Lisl, and for the few survivors of the camps, liberation in 1945 was a physical liberation. From the harrowing experience of being an individual in the concentration camp, the survivor found himself the victim of the concentration camp in the individual, a situation where stress and suffering over a sustained period very often left survivors emotionally damaged. The isolation of captivity in the camps also manifested itself in some survivors as an inner isolation, leaving them unable to respond normally to a normal, postcamp experience. Werner Weinberg is not free from these consequences of life in the counterfeit universe. But like some survivors he considered it his duty to let the world know about Nazi inhumanity and the suffering of the Jewish people. This is what Professor Weinberg can teach us about the world, about what he calls his sacred mission. But as one views this self-portrait, one can see certain feelings emerge about Werner Weinberg s relationship to the world, that vast body of humanity, Jew and non-jew, which knew of the relentless Nazi drive to annihilate European Jewry. That sense, that the world knew, writes Dorothy Rabinowitz, who has interviewed many survivors, coexisted side by side with the survivors perception that people [in America and elsewhere] rejected the facts about the Holocaust which had been published after Weinberg expresses this realization when he observes that for him the Holocaust has become the process of taking a back seat in people s consciousness, of getting sanitized, of being adapted to fit schoolbooks. The fact that the world did not wish to know about or refuses to believe the Holocaust has been, I suspect, even more of a blow in Werner Weinberg s life then the eerily prophetic vision in Bergen-Belsen which he describes in his book. At that time he had xxiv

5 foreseen a period thirty years from now [when] people will say, if you cannot forgive, at least forget, and life must go on. But Professor Weinberg has not forgotten and he will not allow us to forget. He has not forgiven, but he has entered into a dialogue with a new generation of Germans, trying to help them overcome the burden of their past, even if he cannot, by the virtue of its enormity, overcome his own. The enormity of that burden is made clear in this book. Weinberg wonders whether he should have written it. He envies those survivors who do not speak out. Their silence demonstrates that the unspeakable has remained unspeakable, while my discourses might make it appear as though the unfathomable enormity [of the Holocaust] could be reduced to finite proportions. I do not presume to know the answer to such a dilemma. But I do believe that in speaking out to mortals of finite dimensions, he is helping us to live with the meaning of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen for our social and our religious beings. Finally, we must ask if there is a message of hope in Werner Weinberg s book. I would answer yes. For what else can one see but hope in the beautiful story of Wim and Jennie, the heroic Dutch Christian couple who hid the Weinberg s daughter, Susie, for over two years. There is hope, too, in the amazing story of the Weinberg family Torah, dedicated in 1845, which was destined to become a display piece in the planned Nazi museum of the extinct Jewish people. That Torah survived the thousand year Reich, as did the Jewish people, was found by Werner Weinberg and today is used anew to teach in the Hebrew Union College- Jewish Institute of Religion. In Wim and Jennie s courage, in the odyssey of the Torah scroll, there is what Professor Weinberg refers to as the still small voice. I believe that voice exists in all of us who profess to believe in a God of love and mercy and in the idea of the innate dignity of xxv

6 human beings. We must never stop searching for that voice or lose sight of its meaning. It is for us, as a human community, our hope and our future. Alfred Gottschalk, President Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Cincinnati April 1985 xxvi