Yom Hasho’ah veHagvurah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) marks the 79th anniversary of a public Shabbat service held in liberated Dachau. While it’s not a particularly well-known story, it deserves to be commemorated and widely retold, not least because it illuminates the powerful ways that prayer has historically served as a form of resistance.
The service was led by Rabbi David Max Eichhorn, a Jewish chaplain in the U.S. Army’s XV Corps. Rabbi Eichhorn wrote extensively about this — and many other of his remarkable wartime experiences — in letters that were compiled in (the highly recommended) book, The GI’s Rabbi. While Eichhorn experienced a number of well-known historical events during the war, for me, the most indelible moments in the book come from his witness to the liberation of Dachau: from his description of the army’s numbing discovery of masses of naked, emaciated bodies, to the acts of revenge committed by ex-prisoners against their former captors, to his moving description of courageous non-Jews who “had saved Jewish lives at the risk of their own.”
Eichhorn’s most memorable recollections of the liberation of Dachau involve his role in the Shabbat service he led on May 5, 1945. One day before, on Friday afternoon, after Eichhorn had led a service in the women’s barracks, a lieutenant colonel approached him with tears in his eyes. It was the famed Hollywood film director George Stevens, who was in charge of the Signal Corps unit that had been taking official army footage of Dachau. (Stevens’ movie “D-Day to Berlin” is among the films made by five Hollywood directors who were embedded in Europe to document the war effort — a project powerfully recollected in the book and documentary “Five Came Back,” also highly recommended.)
Eichhorn and Stevens made arrangements for Stevens to film the camp-wide service that was scheduled to take place the next day in the main square of the Dachau compound. When Eichhorn arrived the next morning, however, he discovered that no preparations had been made. He was subsequently informed that Polish non-Jewish inmates had threatened to break up the service by force if was held in the main square. As a result, the service was moved to the camp laundry, which only accommodated a fraction of Jews who desired to attend. As Eichhorn recalls it:
While the service was in progress, in a jam-packed room with hundreds of others crowded around the open doors and windows, Colonel Stevens came in, elbowed his way to my side and demanded to know why the service was not being held in the square. His cameras and crews were ready for action, and he wanted the event to go on as scheduled… . After hearing the “inside story,” he exploded in anger. “I did not give up my good job in the movie business in Hollywood,” he bellowed, “to risk my life in combat for months and months, in order to free the world from the threat of Fascism and then stand idly by while the very victims of Fascism seek to perpetuate its evils. ” … He took me to the Camp Commandant, and with a loudness of voice and much banging on the table, George Stevens repeated his anti-Fascistic sentiments.
… And so, thanks to the decent instincts of an American movie director, the camp-wide service was held in the main square. It was attended by every Jewish male and female whose health permitted. As promised, every nationality was represented by flag and delegation. There were an estimated two thousand Jews and non-Jews at the service. And ringing the outer rim of the service with faces turned away from the platform was the American military “guard of honor.” They were prepared to deal with a situation which did not develop. No untoward incident of any kind marred the service.
(from The GI’s Rabbi: World War II Letters of David Max Eichhorn, pp. 185-186.)
When I first watched it on YouTube, I found that the very familiar words of these prayers had a powerful new resonance. It was essentially an abbreviated Torah service, with other added prayers relevant to the occasion. It began with a prayer known as the Shehekheyanu — a blessing of gratitude for having been kept alive long enough to celebrate a sacred moment or season. He followed with Birkat Hagomel — a blessing traditionally recited by someone who has recovered from a serious illness or has otherwise survived a traumatic, potentially life-threatening episode. While I have been part of countless services that have included these blessings, it is indescribably moving to witness them recited by thousands of Jews recently liberated from a death camp. I had a similar response to the recitation of El Malei Rakhamim — the prayer for the dead — a prayer that has become a staple at Holocaust remembrance services.
In the end, however, it seems to me that the very act of holding the service was itself an act of resistance. I was most moved by the sight of the Torah scroll — the most indelible symbol of Jewish spiritual survival — being held aloft before the liberated of Dachau. It is, in its way, an iconic and redemptive image — one that speaks not only to this historical moment but to our collective responsibility to a liberative future.
The very act of holding the service was itself an act of resistance.
As Rabbi Eichhorn so aptly put it to his “congregation” that day:
What message of comfort and strength can I bring you from your fellow Jews? What can I say that will compare in depth or intensity to that which you have suffered and overcome? Full well do I know and humbly do I confess the emptiness of mere words in this hour of mingled sadness and joy. Words will not being the dead back to life nor right the wrongs of the past ten years. This is not a time for words, you will say, and rightfully so. This is a time for deeds, deeds of justice, deeds of love … Justice will be done.
Taken from Shalom Rav, a blog by Rabbi Brant Rosen.
