Menachem Rosensaft is an attorney, law professor, poet, and one of the most influential voices of the second generation. Born in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp to parents who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, he has spent his life engaging questions of memory, justice, and moral responsibility.

In this episode of To Be Continued… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, Rabbi Jeff Salkin speaks with Rosensaft about what survives survival itself: exploring inherited trauma, the “ghosts” carried by children of survivors, and the obligation to remember in ways that demand action.

TRANSCRIPT:

This episode is sponsored by Barbara Kaufman Simon, in loving memory of her parents, Blanche, (also known as Blima), and Max, (who was also known as Moniek) Kaufman, who were both born in Poland. Blanche survived numerous labor and concentration camps, and Max survived Auschwitz, the death march, and Mauthausen/Ebensee. May their memories be for a blessing.

Today's episode is about what survives survival.

Many children and grandchildren, Holocaust survivors, grew up with what our guest calls ghosts, not as metaphors, but as real presences, or as the author Thane Rosenbaum puts it, they grew up with secondhand smoke. The ghosts live in questions that were never answered. They live in names that are spoken carefully or not at all, in absences that somehow take up space. 

Welcome to our podcast, To Be Continued, Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask, how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you, the person you are today, and what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? 

I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Our guest today is a man who has been described by the New York Times as one of the most influential sons and daughters of survivors. Today we're speaking with Menachem Rosensaft, an attorney, a professor of law, a poet, and one of the most prominent voices of the second generation. He was a founder and first chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. He is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, and he has one of the most coveted positions in the Jewish world. He's the past president of a synagogue, the past president of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City, but the titles, the rest of them, they really don't matter because they don't capture the work he's done or the ground that he stands on. 

Menachem was born in the displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany. His parents survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Delsen. His grandparents and his five-and-a-half-year-old brother Benjamin were killed in the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I am a fan of his writing. He is a wonderful poet.

There are several books of poetry. There is the most recent book, Burning Psalms, Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz, and in his poetry, Menachem confronts not only memory and inheritance, but the tender topics of God, faith, anger, and moral responsibility after Auschwitz. He asks what it means to pray when consolation feels impossible and what it means to remember if remembrance does not lead us to act. 

And so, this conversation is about trauma, resilience, rage, moral clarity, and the refusal to look away.

Menachem, welcome. It's great to have you. 

Jeff, rabbi, thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me and thank you for this most gracious introduction.

Well, we've already said and we know that you were born in the DP camp at Bergen-Belsen a few years after the war ended. But I'd like our listeners to know a little bit more about you, so let's just rewind. Let's go back a few steps. And can you give us some more background on your father's remarkable story of survival and what he did in Germany after the war and who your mother was as a doctor worked for in Auschwitz, and finally how they met exactly 80 years ago in 1946.

Well, they actually met 80 and a half years ago in 1945, a couple of weeks after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

Going back a bit…my mother was a dental surgeon. She had studied medicine in France and at Nancy, before the war, and she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on the night of August 3rd to 4th, 1943 with her parents, her first husband, and her five-and-a-half-year-old child. They were immediately sent to the gas chambers.

My mother was sent into the camp itself, and there she was assigned by the chief doctor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, to work in the camp infirmary. And there she was able to save the lives of countless women by performing rudimentary surgeries, by sending them out of the infirmary, even with high temperature ahead of selections by the SS and the like. I know that not from my mother who rarely spoke about it, but from women who came up to my mother at survivor reunions over the years saying, "Dr. Bimko," my mother's maiden name, "Dr. Bimko, you don't remember me, but you saved my life."

In the fall of 1944, my mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen to set up, with a group of other women, to set up an infirmary there.

And at Bergen-Belsen, she and a group of other women were able to keep 149 children, many of them orphans, alive through the bitter winter of 1944 to 1945 through the liberation, including through a raging typhus epidemic.

At the time of liberation, the British chief doctor of the chief medical officer of the Second Army of the Rhine, Brigadier H.L. Glenn Hughes, appointed my mother to head a team of doctors. There were 20 or 28 doctors and several hundred nurses, nurses meaning individuals who didn't have any medical training, but were strong enough, given the horrific health condition, to work alongside the skeleton British military medical team, to try to keep as many of the desperately ill survivors at Bergen-Belsen alive. And that was what she did for the first two months following liberation. And subsequently, she was the chief witness for the prosecution at the first post-war trial of Nazi war criminals, which was the Belsen trial, for reasons we can go into at greater length if you want. It was just not only the command and the administration of Bergen-Belsen, but many of them had previously been in Auschwitz-Birkenau, so it was really the first Auschwitz trial, as well.

And that was, that's in a nutshell, my mother's background. My father meanwhile had escaped several times from Nazi captivity, including once from a train carrying him, his first wife, and her daughter to Auschwitz. He was able to dive out the window of the train, it was a passenger train, rather than a cattle train that time, into the Vistula River. He was hit by three bullets, was able to get back to the ghetto of his hometown of Benjen, where he was reunited with his father, and he found out that the entire transport, just about, including his wife and his stepdaughter, had been murdered upon arrival in one of the gas chambers.

He then, was at Birkenau, attempted to escape, was caught, was sent to a transfer to a labor camp, escaped again, was caught again, spent about six months in the notorious Block 11, where he was tortured at great length because the Germans wanted him to give up the name of the Polish friend who had hidden him for several weeks, something he refused to do, in which I believe saved his life. Upon liberation at Bergen-Belsen, he emerged as the leader of the Jewish survivors of Bergen-Belsen, and he held that position and was repeatedly elected and re-elected for that position, as well as head of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British zone of Germany, where Bergen-Belsen was liberated.

And he was in that position from the time of liberation, April of 1945, until the Displaced Persons Camp of Bergen-Belsen was closed in 1950. And during that period, he had numerous, not particularly amicable confrontations, with the British military government over such things as recognition of the Jewish DPs, as Jewish DPs, rather than nationals of their country of origin, insistence on having the human right respected, being one of the witnesses before the Anglo-American Commission and then the UN Committee on Palestine, demanding the right of the DPs to go to Palestine, which the British had kept closed until the establishment of the State of Israel. And so that in a nutshell is the background into which I was born. So, for me, my parents were not just parents, they were role models. They were examples of what one can do and one should aspire to do with one's life if one is given the opportunity.

A remarkable story. You've written, Menachem, that children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors live with ghosts. What or who are those ghosts for you? And when did you first become aware of them?

Well, the first thing many of us, myself included, became aware of, were the absences.

My parents, I had no grandparents. I grew up without grandparents. Other children, classmates in Switzerland, which were where we lived after Germany, and then in the United States when we came when I was 10-years-old, others had grandparents. I didn't.

Parents had siblings. There were uncles and aunts. I had none. Our family was a family of three.

And a child is aware of the absences, is aware of the fact that we are not necessarily the same as other families. And for a child that is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a reality. And as one grows up, as I grew up, I started putting some kind of names and faces and imagined faces to the absent ghosts, as you call them.

I knew that my mother had had a child before the war. I don't remember. I don't remember when and how I knew it. What I found out much later was that my mother actually had a photograph of her son. I'm not quite sure how it survived. It may have been sent to a friend in Palestine who gave it to her after the war, but she had that photograph. And I am quite certain that she looked at it every single day of her life. But I never saw that photograph until I was probably in my teens, because my mother did not want me to feel that I was a replacement, that I was somehow filling a void. And so that little boy whom I knew about but had no image of, and subsequently did have the image, became the preeminent ghost in my life because he never got to be more than five and a half years old. He never got to grow up. And there was always in my imagination, in my thoughts, what would he have done? What could he have done? And then, of course, at a given point, the reality sets in of how he was murdered. And that reality becomes a mainstay of one's rationale, because at that point, the Holocaust is no longer “just”, and I'm using just in quotation marks, it's no longer “just” the annihilation, the mass killing, the genocide of six million. It becomes the deliberate murder of one child, of my brother, and of my grandparents, my mother's parents.

And that personalizes the experience in a way that the abstraction does not. So that's the... And I think that for many children of survivors, the story is not the same but similar. The ghosts, the absent individuals, the absent faces, the absences, the fact that at a Seder or at a celebration, there are very few family members.

For my parents, their friends from the DP camps, their colleagues from the DP camps, became family. And some of my closest friends are the other children who were born in Bergen-Belsen, whom I knew growing up. And we became each other's family because of the absence of the biological families. 

As a child, I'm curious, how you experienced your parents' survival? Was it protection? Was it a burden? Was there some kind of an expectation imposed upon you? Well, first of all, I've learned about and knew about the displaced persons camp of Bergen-Belsen, about my birthplace, long before I found out about the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz and the horror that preceded the DP camp. Which is natural because those were effectively adventure stories. They were stories of triumphs. They were stories of how my father managed to circumvent British orders, how people related to each other, and friendships.

And so, in a very strange way, when I found out about the horrors of the Holocaust, I also knew that certainly for my parents, the Holocaust was not the end. This was not a darkness from which there was no escape, there was no coming out of. Which of course there was a darkness for all those who perished. But in a way, I also knew that there was a subsequent chapter to it. And I think that made it not easier, but it made it more processable, if you will, to understand the Holocaust in the context, not just of the life that had existed before, but of the immediate aftermath. And that put it into context. And it also meant that I understood, certainly for myself, from a very early time, that I could not view my parents as victims, because they were not victims. They were role models. They were individuals who had reclaimed not just their identities, but the control of their own lives almost immediately afterwards, and had then contributed tremendously to protecting the other survivors at Bergen-Belsen, to helping forge a political path, which at that stage was a Zionist political path. And that cast the experience, not into a different life, but in context.

One of the things I've always admired about you, since we've known each other, is what seems to be your ability to have taken this experience that you've inherited and to translate that experience into the very thick, complex tests of confronting racism, genocide, and oppression well beyond Jewish history and well beyond the Jews. Am I right in seeing this as a moral inheritance of the Shoah, of the Holocaust? How has that played out for you? You've written that we have no right to criticize the world's silence during the Holocaust unless we get rid of our own silence, unless we fight injustice today. What was the genesis of these convictions in your life? 

Well, in large part, it was my parent's example. My parents did not judge people based on their ethnicity or based on their religion, but on what was happening to them and who they were. Empathy and compassion and a willingness to help, was for those who were in need, and not because of who they were. And then, of course, we came to the United States and I had the enormous privilege of growing up in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War Movement and understanding the contemporary realities. And it becomes, you know, you cannot, I cannot, deal with racism emanating from Nazi Germany and then not recognize racism in Selma or Birmingham. They're not comparable, but on the other hand, they are analogous. They are parallel tracks.

I remember the first time when I walked through the permanent exhibition of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, that was in 1993 when the museum was first opened. My mother was a member of the council. She had been a member of President Carter's commission. 

I had served on numerous committees, but that was the first time, just when the museum opened when I walked through it. And I remember walking past in the first gallery, artifacts from the 1930s in Nazi Germany. And I remember seeing a sign from clearly a German hotel. It was in German, saying, "Jewish guests are requested to eat their meals in their rooms." And that was clearly at a time when the process of discrimination was ongoing, but clearly German Jews were still able to go to a hotel and stay there, but they were being segregated away from the good German population, good German customers, clients in the hotel. And I remember thinking that this was very much what a colored person, a black person would have found in many parts of the American South.

In the 1950s into the 1960s, the idea of, "You are not welcome here." And that became a guiding principle for me of looking at suffering and looking at discrimination and fighting it regardless of who the victim is, and more importantly, not prioritizing oneself over others.

I'm going to dip my toe into some very hot water right now. We talked about Birmingham. Let's talk about America today. I'm wondering if you sense the echoes. And what are the echoes?

The echoes are frightening. The echoes are frightening on both extremes, on both political extremes. The echoes are frightening in hearing people praise and identify with terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, that want to destroy the State of Israel, and that basically want to eliminate a Jewish presence in Israel in its entirety.

And when you hear calls like "Globalize the Intifada," those have consequences. And they have consequences not just in rhetoric and, quite frankly, not just in encampments on universities that can be controlled. But they have consequences, as we saw recently, at Bondi Beach in Australia. These are very dangerous. And the fact that there are any number of political figures, on the American left, in the party with which I identify, who either espouse it or do not condemn it, is extremely worrisome. At the same time, we have the other extreme, the Tucker Carlsons, the Nick Fuentes, the personalities on the ideological right, who are white supremacists and, effectively, fascists, in the traditional sense of the term. And there are so very few in the Republican Party who have the courage to call them for what they are.

I am not and have not been over the years a particular fan of Senator Ted Cruz. But Senator Ted Cruz has taken the courageous stance of calling them out for what they are, and basically saying they have no place in mainstream politics. Unfortunately, he is rare in that connection. And what is most worrisome to me is that the center seems to be shrinking.

And those political figures whom we need going into the future, of bringing us together and basically bringing us back to a working relationship, with people with whom we do not necessarily agree, are becoming fewer and fewer.

My favorite bookstore in Washington, D.C. is called Politics and Prose. So, if I could start a new bookstore, it would be Politics and Poetry. So, let's move from politics to poetry. You're not only an activist, you're not only a reservoir of memory and memories, but you're a poet and you're a rather good poet. In fact, you'll recall that we did a podcast on Martini Judaism about your most recent book, Burning Songs, Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz. But there was a previous book as well and it's rare, I think, that we can find someone who can combine all of these different aspects of human experience, politics, prose, and poetry. Would you share with us a poem from that previous book?

…which is called Night Fragments and it encapsulates the identity of the children and, to some extent, grandchildren of survivors, but especially the children of survivors.

night fragments created

And it's a poem that I wrote at a given point, saying that we, in turn, need to find the memories. We need to come to terms with the memories that we have inherited. We can't just take them for granted. They are our parents, our grandparents, the survivors' memories. But we have to transfer them into ourselves and then be able to transmit them into the future. And that is a massive task for us because we are at a particularly sensitive moment when the survivors are dwindling from the scene. And we need to make sure that their memories, their collective and individual memories, are made part of our collective consciousness, not just for the second and third generations, but for all of us. But before we go away from poetry, if you'll allow me a second, there was a poem which was in the coda of burning psalms. And it is one which I wrote a year and a half into the Gaza war, or about a year into the Gaza war, when we're already becoming very problematic. And from a human rights perspective, the accusations of genocide were being thrown around. I do not believe that Israel was or is perpetrating a genocide. On the other hand, I do believe that the human rights condition of the Palestinians in Gaza is horrific. And whether or not other crimes were committed in the matter for the courts and historians to determine. But that doesn't take away from the human catastrophe that was taking place. 

And so, I wrote a poem which I believe is essential for us in this conversation. It's a poem called "The Child." 

murdered children

and it is

we cannot erase

And as I was writing it, the image I had in my head repeatedly hovering over the writing of that particular poem was the image of my brother. And it was the fact that he was a child just as so many children in this present conflict are in pain, are being killed, are starving, and if we don't do it for political reasons, if we can't get on the same page ideologically, and you know this is not a conversation which we bring in either Israeli or US politics, but at least let's try and get back to some kind of empathy and understanding and feeling for the innocents who are being killed on both sides. 

This is as if you were saying that we on both sides are passing a goblet of tears, warm salty tears back and forth to each other, and there is a universality there. 

Yes, and we need to be able to recognize that pain. Well, there are two things that are to me critical. One is to feel the pain of the other, and the other, and this is something I have felt, and this is what caused me to get involved. One of the things that caused me to get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, going back 40 years as an activist, we must stop demonizing each other. Which doesn't mean that there aren't people on both sides who deserve demonization. Hamas deserves demonization. Individuals in Israel such as ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich deserve demonization. But on the whole, we can't have Jews, Palestinians, Israelis, Zionists, immigrants, migrants, being demonized, and that is what is happening far too frequently, and we must get that control of the dialogue, that control of the rhetoric back, and perhaps get it muted. 

Menachem, it's almost as if you're seeing something that I've perceived for much of my life in terms of the trauma response. Among the second-generation survivors whom I've known in my own life, starting with my childhood, I would say that politically and morally, ethically, they fall into two particular camps. One is in speaking of our enemies. The first camp is they should go to hell. The second camp is no one should go to hell. The first camp, of course, is a kind of a belligerent, pugilistic thing that can go through themselves. And the second one, which I think you embody, is no, this experience has taught us empathy. The first group says this experience has taught us how to fight back. And the second group says, yes, that is true, but also a sense of empathy with the others. 

Yes, and let me just qualify. The murderers, the killers, they should go to hell, and I am more than happy to help them along the way. You know, they belong in the category of people who, if they are hanging off a cliff by their fingertips, the dilemma is whether to keep walking or to step on their hands. There is nothing redeeming about a Nazi who operated a gas chamber, about a Nazi who herded people into a train or from the train to the selection. And there's no point of talking about redemption. There is no redemption possible for the Hamas killers of October 7. There simply isn't. They were killers, they were rapists, and they are not part of the civilized human family but, the settlers who rampaged through Palestinian villages on the West Bank are in very much the same category. But they are not representative of all the settlers. When you go to Efrat, you have individuals who want to live together with their Palestinian neighbors and who want to have relations and who are looking for a constructive solution to the conflict. And we have to be aware of both sides, but the vast majority are the innocents. They are the ones who did not do anything to anyone. And we simply cannot afford to get ourselves into the rhetoric that you hear far too often, including from some of your colleagues in the rabbinate, in which there is no empathy given to Palestinian civilians, to women, to children. I am horrified when Doctors Without Borders are excluded from Gaza because it means that there will be inevitably, people dying because they're not getting the medical care that is provided by Doctors Without Borders. And the Netanyahu government does not appear to be replacing those NGOs with others who are providing the same humanitarian help.

It is impossible for me to disagree with you there. It's as if you reached into my soul and you're reading it out loud. I want to go back to, well, let's talk about soul for a moment here. You and I have chatted about this and we have said that one of the failures of liturgy, I'm sure at Park Avenue synagogue, as is true in any synagogue that I've served, is that we have not fully admitted the Shoah or anger at God into our liturgy. And by the way, in this sense, we are not true in a Jewish history, because our ancestors in the Middle Ages were quite comfortable admitting their anger at God over the outrages of the Crusades, let us say, into the way they prayed. Why do you think there is still that resistance about admitting anger at God and the totality of the modern experience into how we pray? 

Look, there are very few theologians, Jewish theologians, who have actually confronted the problem in a satisfactory way. The God is dead and we have killed him, the Nietzsche approach, exemplified by Richard Rubinstein, is not, it doesn't work. And the problem that we have is that if we were to reflect and express our anger in the liturgy, which is what, as you know, I want to see happen, we also have to call into question the rest of the liturgy. We have to call into question the praise we give to God. If we talk about God as Avinu Malkenu, our parent and our sovereign, and we thank him for inscribing us in the book of life, in the book of health, in the book of sustenance, we also have to recognize that the same Avinu Malkenu, the same parent and sovereign, did not do so, during the years of the Shoah, during the years of the Holocaust. And it's not that we should break relations with God. We don't break relations with a parent, but we confront the parent and we say, "Where were you? What did you do? Why were you absent?" And that is a dimension that I believe is critical if we are to put Holocaust memory, Shoah memory into the consciousness of the Jewish community going forward, because it's not going to come from academic courses at universities. It is not going to come from books and films; however good they are. It is something that has to be part of our intuitive religious liturgical experience. And, that's the task that lies ahead. And, I'm hoping that at some point it will resonate.

We'll be right back. And now an important message from the sponsor of today's episode.

We say “Never Again”, so a group created the “We Remember” campaign in partnership with the World Jewish Congress. This is a campaign that delivered billions of impressions worldwide and led to the support of a myriad of extraordinary Jewish non-profits, helping build awareness and raise funds through marketing for essential work. The group is also proud to support this podcast. They are Rung-UP. Go to rung-up.com. Please remember.

This is To Be Continued. I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. We're talking with Menachem Rosensaft. Menachem, I'm wondering if you worry, as I worry, about what will happen to Holocaust memory when your generation is gone. What will remain and what responsibility will remain? 

We have to transmit it in a format that resonates with today's teenagers, with today's 20- and 30- and 40-year-olds. We cannot convey it, transmit it, in the same way that it was transmitted to us, because they are living a different existence than we did, and we have to give it in a form that will resonate with them. And that includes putting it into the liturgy, as we discussed, in a format that makes them understand when they come to a Shabbat service or a Rosh Hashanah service, that there is something there that they need to think about. There is something there that will cause them to read a book, to read a memoir, to delve deeper into it, because if it's only an academic exercise, then it's not going to make it. It's not going to stand the test of time.

No question. I have two final questions that touch on tender spots. When you think of Benjamin today, and Benjamin would now be in his mid-80s – what do you hope he would understand about the life that you've lived in his shadow? 

I would hope that he, just like my parents – my mother died in 1997, my father died in 1975 – I would hope that they would recognize themselves in me. I would hope that they would think that I am carrying on their tradition, and I am hoping that Benjamin would in some way identify with what I have tried to do with the legacy I've received, which includes Benjamin.

The final question. Is there anything you wish that you had asked your parents about their inner lives or their families before the war that you never got around to asking?

Well, actually, yes. My mother died at the age of 85, and she had been ill. She had written her memoir. And yes, there are questions, specific details that I would have liked to have asked her, but I think there was closure. My father died very young, and I never got to ask him a lot of things. We talked about it, but there was always time. He was 64-years-old when he died, and there's an enormous amount that I wish I had had the opportunity to sit and talk to him about, to know more, to know more about his childhood, to know more about some of his experiences during the war and afterwards. But unfortunately, you have to play the card you are dealt. And in this respect, my goal is to make sure that I live a life of which they would be proud.

No doubt you have. This has been such a gift. Thank you, Menachem. Thank you for what you have given all of us and the generations today. We thank you again, our guest and our friend, Menachem Rosensaft. 

This episode has been a production of the 2G-3G Project, produced by Eli Hershko, co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman, and I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. 

You would do us a mitzvah. It's not one of the major mitzvahs, but it is a mitzvah. Give us a five-star review wherever you download your podcasts. Spotify, Audible, and please share all of this with your friends and your family. We are everywhere you can find podcasts, and so we hope that you will do so. And we are on YouTube. 

And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, please send us a note at