”We just tried to keep alive from day to day and not … be beaten too much. People just lived from one day to another and mostly lost hope.”
These are the words that Joachim Joseph, a Holocaust survivor and professor emeritus of planetary physics at the Tel Aviv University, told to the Mail & Guardian Online to describe his early introduction to a world of death, fear and survival at a Dutch concentration camp during World War II.
On Tuesday, Joseph spoke at the annual Day of Remembrance, hosted by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the South African National Yad Vashem Memorial Foundation at the West Park cemetery in Johannesburg.
In 1943, during World War II, Joseph (12) and his family were sent to Westerbork, a concentration camp in Holland. ”We [the family] were together then. Later I was sent on to Bergen-Belsen. It was in the north-west of Germany and it was an extermination camp. Then we were separated.”
Joseph, dressed in a light green suit, greets me in the lounge of the Rosebank Hotel in Johannesburg. He appears calm and looks nothing close to his age of 75 when he walks towards me. I shake his hand and remark on his youthful looks. He laughs.
With a glint of humour in his eyes, he says: ”Where would you like me to start?” after I ask him about his life in concentration camps.
He folds his hands slowly and in a deep voice begins to tell me his story, in the process transporting himself back to the camp of Bergen-Belsen. His brown eyes turn sombre.
”I had several jobs [in the barracks], which I have difficulty explaining to people. I had to check on people in bed, whether they were alive or dead. If they were dead, [then] with another boy I had to drag them out and throw them in a cart. That’s what I did in the mornings in Bergen-Belsen when I was 12. It was cold, dreary and frightening. It was a camp out to kill you. People died like flies,” he says.
Joseph’s mother and father were assigned to different camps and his brother Peter remained with him. Even though many people around him lost hope in the camp, Joseph says: ”My father gave me a sentence that kept me alive”.
”My father took me aside and said: ‘You are not just you, but you’re also now father and mother to your little brother. Try to look after him as best as you can.’
”And that single sentence is what kept me going. It was such a powerful obligation to me. So I kept alive. I kept alert because I was always looking out that nothing bad would happen to him,” says Joseph
A devoted rabbi had heard of Joseph in the camp and knew he was nearing the age of 13. Joseph was alone at the time (his brother had been taken to the hospital barracks) when Rabbi Simon Dasberg, the chief rabbi of The Netherlands, proposed a daring idea. They would hold a full-scale bar mitzvah in the camp.
”He asked me whether I’d be willing to be a bar mitzvah boy. I immediately agreed because I remembered many my friends having had their bar mitzvah, and I wanted one too. I felt that it was very daring to have a bar mitzvah,” says Joseph.
Joseph woke up at 4am every morning for the next two months in preparation for the ceremony.
”And then when the day came … all the windows were blanketed so no light would get out. Dasberg had arranged a table with a blanket on it with four candles. And in the middle was the little Torah scroll which we’d be using to study.
”I had the ceremony and read my piece and the rabbi made a speech. I didn’t bother to remember anything about the speech because I was too excited.
”I even got presents. I got one cube of chocolate somebody had been saving. I got a one half-slice of bread with a slice of sausage on it. And I got a miniature pack of playing cards [the size of his pinky finger].
”After the ceremony, the rabbi called me aside and said: ‘I want you to take this Torah scroll’. Of course I refused. What’s a 13 year old boy going to do with a Torah scroll? I mean, it is a holy artifact.
”He convinced me: ‘You take it because I want to have it. And why do I want you to have it? I will not come out of here alive. I will die here. But you being young, you might come out. If you do come out, my condition is that you tell the story’.
”Several months later, he died. In fact, I think he was beaten to death. He did all kinds of things and got beaten all the time because he wouldn’t stop being a rabbi,” says Joseph.
During World War II, millions of Jews were killed and more than 50 000 people died at the Bergen-Belsen camp between 1943 and 1945 alone. Although the camp was burned to the ground, the site is open to the public today and features a visitors’ centre, a monument to the dead, and a ”House of Silence” for reflection. Anne Frank and her sister Margot were also victims of the camp and died there in March 1945.
The torah stayed with Joseph for many years and he didn’t do much with it because he wanted to bury his experiences in the camps during the war, he says.
”I tried as hard as I could to bury my memories as deeply as possible. I had horrible dreams every night. I was able to put a lid on it mentally and screw it down, deep down and forgot,” he says.
Eventually, on January 21 2003, the story of the little Torah given to Joseph was told to the world by a close friend and the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon.
Ramon obtained permission to take the torah into space and broadcast to the world the story of a brave rabbi and a willing 13-year-old boy eager to have a bar mitzvah in the concentration camp during the war.
He said from the space shuttle: ”This was given by a rabbi to a scared, thin young boy in Bergen-Belsen. It represents, more than anything, the ability of the Jewish people to survive from horrible periods, black days, to reach periods of hope and belief in the future.”
The shuttle crashed on the March 1 2003 when it was returning to earth. Three books have been written about the story of the Torah and it is also being produced into a full-scale documentary movie, says Joseph.
”The very fact that one hero rabbi would die because of his faith and was courageous enough to practise it in a concentration camp, and a young boy who was willing to take the chance and becoming a bar mitzvah in the camp, just caught on. If we’d been caught I wouldn’t be sitting here,” says Joseph.
The generation that has gone through the Dutch concentration camps is almost gone says Joseph. He says he doesn’t tell his story out of obligation to the rabbi, but that people in the world should know ”what happened, how it happened and what was done to people by other civilised people”, during World War II.
Hitler declared Jews as sub-human during the war and being ”sub-human we could be used as necessary and thrown away as necessary” says Joseph.
He says the message he would like to remain with the youth is that they should learn to live in the world and know that ”people can be very good, but can also be very bad and it may be the same people.
”So you should always keep in mind that if you see something happening, or going to happen, you should do all that you can to make it not happen. Once people think they’re Superman and somebody else is sub-human anything may go and that should never happen again.”
When asked what he thought about the situation in Israel, Joseph says he only wants to see one thing — peace — but admits that it’s going to be ”very difficult” to achieve.
”We are a thorn in the side of the Muslim world. Jews in the Qur’an are defined as sub-human. And the very fact that a Jew is living among Arabs and is powerful is an anathema to them. We’re not just the representative of the imperialist West. We are Jews living as people in an Islam world.
”They still cannot stand the idea that a tiny little piece of what they regard as the Muslim world is occupied by Jews. It’ll take a long time till they understand that because they have to grow into this idea that we don’t mean any harm.
”They could even profit from us living in their midst. But at this time with the condition Islam is in, Islam is turning more and more radical. To convince them to accept us is going to take a lot of time. I don’t think that there are many people [in Israel] that will say otherwise. People all want to be part of the surrounding areas. But they won’t let us.” says Joseph.
He adds that once there is peace in the Israel ”everything will follow. We still have a problem of integration. We still have a big job of bringing all these different pieces of Jewish people and melting them down into one nation. We are still not there. That’s another great challenge.”
When asked about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel being wiped off the map, Joseph retorts that he thinks it’s a political thing.
According to AFP, the firebrand leader on Monday said the ”fake” Jewish state ”cannot survive” and called on migrants to the country to go back to where they came from.
Joseph says: ”They now see a chance to become leaders of the Arab world. To become leaders you must push in a certain directions. It’s a very easy thing to unite people in a mission of hate. Now they see their chance. Now Iraq is gone. I think they’re the most powerful Arab nation now. And they are trying to use that to the hilt.
”I think even if we had not been there at all, they would’ve invented something to enable them to lead the way and carry a banner. There would be something else if we were not there. This is partly a radical Muslim thing and partly politics.”