Shema Koleinu, Hear Our Voice – David Finlay

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 4 May 2024

This week we completed the festival of Pesach, this remarkable story of moving from oppression to freedom. Tomorrow is Yom Hashoah and once more we must remember the dark times in our history.

Six million Jewish men, women and children who never went on to fulfil their potential. Six million Jewish men, women and children with families and friends. The number of people whose lives were ended in the Shoah is difficult to comprehend. Which is why the stories of individuals who lived at that time help us to understand the tragedy in personal terms.

Some who survived the Shoah are still with us to tell us their stories. Many others recorded personal testimonies which we can listen to online. Other survivors such as Primo Levi and Eli Wiesel wrote moving memoirs about their experiences in the camps.

And particularly poignant, there are the diaries written as the awful events of the Shoah were unfolding.

When we think of diaries written during the Shoah we immediately think of Anne Frank, a young girl in hiding in Amsterdam with her family confiding her thoughts to a diary which would subsequently be read by millions of people around the world.

But there were also many other diaries written by Jewish people at that time. When I started to research this subject it became clear there were many remarkable personal stories told in diaries, a number of which have only recently been published.

Some wrote diaries as a private record of their experiences and feelings. Others wrote diaries desperately wanting their stories to be heard. Shema Koleinu, hear our voice, as we pray in the daily Amidah and with particular feeling on Yom Kippur.

As we prepare for Yom Hashoah I wanted to allow some of the voices of those who wrote Shoah diaries to be heard. Inevitably some of these diaries are sad because we know the writers did not survive the Shoah. But I think we honour their memory by taking a moment to listen to what they were trying to tell us.

One of a number of diaries which have only been published in recent times was written by Helene Berr, a young French woman living with her family in Paris. She was a gifted violinist who was studying English at the Sorbonne and, despite the restrictions placed on Jewish people, Helene was able to continue her studies and living at home for much of the War.  She was also brave, working with others to arrange a type of Kindetransport for Jewish children living in occupied Paris to go and live with families in what was then the safer region in the South of France.

One of the reasons that reading these diaries of the Shoah is so moving is that the authors are recording their feelings in real time. We know what the future held, they did not and were often very uncertain about what the future would hold for them. This is captured in Helene Berr’s diary in November 1943 when she was still living at home with her family:

“We never heard anything more about those who were taken away. There has been talk of gas being administered. There must be some truth in these rumours. And to think that every extra person arrested yesterday, today, this very minute is probably destined to suffer this terrible fate. To think that, if I am arrested, in a week I may be dead and my whole life, with the infinity I sense within me, snuffed out abruptly. The same fate awaits every individual who has been through this trial, and who is also an entire world.”

Eventually Helene Berr’s fear that she would be arrested came to pass.  She died aged 24 in Bergen Belsen in 1945, just five days before it was liberated, after being hit by a guard when too weak with typhus to respond to an order to stand. Her diary survived because she had passed it to a non-Jewish friend of the family and after the war he gave it to her fiancée who had survived the war. Fifty years then passed before Helene Berr’s niece tracked down the diary and it was finally published.

As well as the many diaries that were written to record individual personal experiences during the Shoah particular steps were taken to create a record of life in the ghettos which Jewish people were required to live in. Emanuel Ringelblum was a social worker who organised a group of Jewish men and women to document life in the Warsaw Ghetto. One of the people who helped him was Rachel Auerbach. She was then smuggled out of the Ghetto and remarkably survived the War. Her diary which was written in Yiddish is very soon to be finally published in English. There is a beautiful essay which she wrote about the loss of those she knew in Warsaw entitled Yizkor which is available in English online.

As Warsaw came under German occupation Herman Kruk was a Jewish librarian. He was one of many people who fled Warsaw desperately trying to reach Vilna which at that time was seen as a relatively safe place in nearby Lithuania. Herman Kruk’s remarkable 700 page diary records in graphic detail people dragging themselves and their belongings down country roads or hitching a lift on a horse and cart. For a while they reached safety in Vilna but it too came under occupation and Herman Kruk then continued to chronicle life in what became the Vilna Ghetto before being sent to a camp in Estonia.

On Erev Rosh Hashanah 1944 Herman Kruk met with five friends in the camp and together they buried the final part of his diary. The following day, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the camp guards, knowing that the advancing Allied troops were close to the camp, took those in the camp out to the woods around the camp and shot them, including Herman Kruk. The next day, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Allied troops arrived. In the woods they found just a few terrified people who had somehow escaped. One of those was one of Herman Kruk’s friends who had watched him bury the final part of his diary. He went back and recovered the diary. The final entry of Herman Kruk’s diary read:

People in this camp often ask me
Why do you write in such hard times?
Why and for whom?
I record everything for future generations
Let it show what I could not live to tell

We are those future generations. As we prepare for Yom Hashoah let us not forget the words of those who wanted to say, Shema Koleinu, Hear our Voice.