“Bread of Freedom in Times of Despair”

Aaron Keyak — April 7, 2009 – 11:38 am | Civil Rights Comments (0) Add a comment

In difficult times it’s important to count our blessings. As we scurry to prepare for Pesach and we stock our kitchens with kosher l’Pesach goods, we should remember that, as a whole, the American Jewish community is blessed - even in these difficult times.

A year old article from The New York Times, “Bread of Freedom in Times of Despair,” is worth keeping in mind.

The beginning:

At a restaurant in the theater district, I sat down to dinner with George Perecman and his sister Frances Greenberg, both concentration camp survivors. When I told them that I was interested in food during the Holocaust, they reacted with disgust.

“Food? What food?” asked Mr. Perecman, 83. Then he took the paper napkin off his lap and drew a piece of bread, dividing it into quadrants.

“This was our lunch — a quarter the size of a piece of bread for a German soldier.”

Mrs. Greenberg, who had ordered French onion soup, added, “Dinner was soup, mostly water. Sometimes there was a little meat. For all we knew it was dog or horse meat,” she said.

Then Mr. Perecman, a watchmaker who owes his survival at Dachau to the bread he received from the German officers for fixing their watches, looked around at the plenty in the restaurant, and said with a heavy Yiddish accent, “I feel like I have become a Holocaust denier myself. It’s so hard to believe that it really happened. But it did. The Passover Haggadah should be rewritten to include the Holocaust.”

In the past, talk of survival at concentration and internment camps, including food or the lack thereof, has been considered largely off limits. When Cara De Silva edited and published “In Memory’s Kitchen” in 1996, a manuscript of remembered recipes written by women interred in Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, some readers feared that that recipes trivialized the dire conditions in the camps.

“Until recently in Israel people were ashamed to talk about food, like they were about games in the Holocaust,” said Yehudit Inbar, curator of the museum division of Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial.

Then people started sharing stories. Yad Vashem recently opened an exhibition, “Spots of Light: To Be a Woman in the Holocaust,” which is on view at the Royal Palace in Dresden, Germany, through May 4.

“We now see that when people had no food, talking about food or even writing recipes became tools of the mind to survive,” said Mrs. Inbar, who curated the exhibition. “They were signs of hope.”

A few weeks ago, Hadassa Carlebach discussed the work of her activist father, Rabbi Zalman Schneerson, during the war, when his last name was spelled Chneerson. The rabbi, who was born in Russia and moved to France in 1935, was responsible for hiding many Jews, mostly children whose parents had been sent to the death camps. In 1944, with help from the French Resistance, he found hiding places for about 60 people in farmhouses in the countryside near Grenoble. For Passover, they wanted to find a way to make matzo.

“We had a little wheat, which we milled into flour for Passover,” said Mrs. Carlebach, 80, who now lives in Brooklyn. The local farmers baked in a communal oven.

“It was too dangerous for us to go there during the day, so in the middle of the night we went in, burned the oven to kosher it, and baked the matzo in a hurry, while the dogs were barking,” she said.

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