Giving Thanks to God at Auschwitz
97 Mangels accompany their family patriarch on a journey to the gates of the hell from which they were miraculously born
Yisroel Teitelbaum
Yisroel Teitelbaum
Yisroel Teitelbaum
Yisroel Teitelbaum
There is knowledge of the survivors’ hearts that belongs to Hashem alone. And for the time being the survivors themselves can transmit their experiences across the generations, in hopes that the firsthand immediacy and reality of the Holocaust and its possible meanings will outlive them. “You know what we got for rations, for food?” Rabbi Nissen Mangel brandished the knots of his clenched hand: “This size of bread, and three quarters all moldy!”—such was Mangel’s daily sustenance at Auschwitz, 79 years earlier. “But we ate the mold also. You realize, this was also a nes? You know what the mold is? Organic antibiotic. What you make penicillin from? From mold. This saved so many Yiddin. Can you imagine? Nissim nissim nissim nissim!”
Miracles, miracles, miracles, miracles! Rav Nissen lost his father, his grandfather, his home, and his childhood in the Holocaust. Within this infinite cruelty he lived out events impossible enough to affirm God’s presence and power. There was the miracle of Josef Mengele twice deciding not to order the execution of young Nissen Mangel, and the miracle of the SS officer who made sure Mangel survived the forced march from Auschwitz to Gunskirchen, the Austrian camp near Mauthausen from which he was liberated in May of 1945. There was the miracle of being alive each morning when the march resumed. “When the SS got tired at night, 1 or 2 o’clock, we lay down. Where did we lay down? A field of snow. Subfreezing temperature in snow, without a blanket. How come we didn’t freeze to death? Ask how such a thing is possible. Nissim!”
It is churlish to dispute the miraculousness of Mangel’s survival. He is one of the last of the living who was there. The Germans tattooed a number on his arm. Mangel’s sister lost several toes to frostbite in the frigid weeks before the Red Army’s arrival on Jan. 27, 1945. She too survived the war, and lived well into the 21st century.
Mangel’s translation of the entire Rosh Hashana machzor in three months on instruction from the Lubavitcher rebbe seems a milder assertion of cosmic unlikelihood than the fact of either sibling surviving the tortures the Nazis inflicted on them. “Aaron, you ask me: Where was God?” Rav Nissen said, in response to the usual theological queries about the genocide of Europe’s Jews. “I say, ‘how could a person not believe in God?’ All the nissim until now. Nissim, nissim, nissim! I told you the tip of the iceberg. But even the tip, you say: ‘How did it happen?’”
Rav Nissen and his family share a theology that prohibits Jews from living lives of despair. However horrible things are, however little we understand them, however much we may doubt, we do not have the right to see it all as meaningless.
When I visited Rav Nissen’s Crown Heights home on a Sunday afternoon in the winter of 2023, the earth-colored holy books spilled out of every crawl space, just as one of his grandsons promised me they would. “My cousin Laize came to this realization a few years ago that any book he’s opened in my grandfather’s house has notes tucked in it,” Ari Herson, the Chabad Hasidic movement’s young emissary in Mendham and Chester, New Jersey, had told me in Poland, three weeks earlier. “Every nook and cranny in that house has sforim. You open the closet upstairs and on top of the clothing there’s a pile of sforim.” Volumes towered to the ceiling in the solarium enclosing Rav Nissen’s porch, overlooking Empire Boulevard. More books filled the top shelf of the closet where his black jackets hung. At 90 years old, Rav Nissen would teach a shiur later that night on the Ein Yaakov, the narratives of the Talmud, with the ruach and the acuity of someone decades younger.
Rav Nissen does not look like an old man. Below his unwrinkled face is a sturdy white beard which angles aerodynamically away from his chest, out into the world and the universe. There is no fatigue in his eyes, which radiate the same metaphysical seriousness as the rest of his compact body, which is not the least bit frail. He has a sense of humor, but it’s possible it’s been many decades since a frivolous thought crossed his mind. As an 10-year-old in Auschwitz, Rav Nissen pulled a heavy cart from barrack to barrack, a job that allowed him to search for his lost mother and sister. He remains a strong and determined carrier of heavy obligations.
Rav Nissen speaks with the dignified timbres of the murdered world, Germanic gravity in throaty counterpoint to the cheder and schmatta peddlers and wandering Hasidim and other idylls of Jewish nostalgia—and in counterpoint to all the much heavier realities of 20th-century European Jewish life and death that this nostalgia is meant to protect us from. The final period before the Nazis murdered nearly everyone who spoke with the polyglot Yiddish accent of Kosice, Slovakia, was an era of overwhelming danger and possibility for Europe’s Jews, one where New York, Vienna, Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin, Vilna, and Jerusalem all offered competing visions of the future. Emigration, secularism, assimilation, extermination, or perhaps even redemption, whether through communism or Zionism or Yiddishkeit, loomed beyond the close horizon. The accent’s near-extinction in the present day doesn’t make Mangel a curiosity displaced from a foreign past as much as it elevates him to near-mystical isolation: He comes from a place and a time free of narishkeit, a world whose vast potential ushered millions of Jews into killings pits and gas chambers.
The accent is close to extinct—but Jews are not. In Krakow three weeks earlier, the day before his 90th birthday on the Hebrew calendar, some 95 of Rav Nissen’s living descendants and in-laws gathered with him and his wife, Raizel, in the Remah Synagogue, the medieval shul of Rabbi Moses Isserles, the great interpreter of the Shulchan Aruch. Five surviving children—Malkie, Gittel, Nachum, Menachem, and Yisroel—dozens of grandchildren, and at least 25 great-grandchildren packed into the wooden pews. Their universes existed because of the survival of this one man and the nissim that made it possible. Among them were rabbis and electronics wholesalers and importer-exporters and medical professionals and custom kippah-makers and a young backpacker who had flown in from Brazil, mid gap year. There were IDF veterans, one of them on leave from the newly erupted war against the exterminationists in Hamas, along with a U.S. Air Force chaplain. There were offspring who had drifted away from observance and others who had dedicated their lives to Judaism. There were Borsalinos and baseball caps, beards narrow and wide and wild and tamed and nonexistent, sheitels alongside free-flowing natural hair. A young boy in a white- and blue-striped sweater had tzitzit he hadn’t grown into hanging a little below his knees. A slightly older cousin had a powder blue Instax instant camera dangling around his neck. Newborns still many years away from their first conscious memory dotted the crowd, ensconced in BabyBjörns and bear cub onesies and an armada of strollers. There were at least a half-dozen pregnant women.
“For us to be here, l’havdil, it’s for physicists to be in the laboratory of Einstein,” announced the family’s tour guide. The Remah Synagogue, the shul of Rabbi Moshe Isserles, was the last stop on a twilight walking tour of Kazmierz, for centuries the downtown of Jewish Krakow until Nazis and communists cleared the way for the neighborhood’s current existence as an international hipster hangout. It is a sturdy and unornamented building, too solid and humble to ever be destroyed, with walls thick and ancient enough to keep out the surrounding world.
This crowd already knew that Isserles, known by his Hebrew initials as the Remah, was the genius who had further elucidated the Shulchan Aruch, Rabbi Joseph Karo’s still-authoritative 16th-century code of Jewish law, becoming in effect the work’s co-author. The guide posed a question to the numerous Torah scholars on hand: How did Rabbi Isserles end his contribution to the Shulchan Aruch? One of the bolder adult grandkids spoke up. But he knew his role in this particular Mangel family give-and-take was to prime the person such questions were really meant for, so the grandson hesitated a split second long enough for Rav Nissen to roar: “V’tov lev mishta tamid!” A good heart is always feasting. His tie was tucked inside his sweater, sleeves drooping softly at the ends of his arms. “And how does he start!” Rav Nissen then declared: “Shvisi Hashem l’negdi tamid!” I place God before me always.
Here in Krakow, future epicenter of tragedy, joy and Hashem were the Remah’s two tamids, the interconnected constants of Jewish existence. Rav Nissen made neat divisions in space with the rabbinically expounding slice of his left hand, knees bent in a quarter-bow, eyes circuiting the crowded frontier of his descendants, who were impressed though hardly surprised at this feat of Judaic recall. The sharpness of Rav Nissen’s mind, like the existence of his vast family, and maybe also the endurance of the Jewish people 80 years after the Holocaust, transcends such concepts as “surprise” and bores right into those hidden substrates of reality where God might plausibly dwell.
Rav Nissen Mangel’s 90th birthday on the Hebrew calendar, the 11th of Cheshvan 5784, fell on Oct. 26, 2023. For over 20 years his children and grandchildren had discussed the possibility of a family trip to Auschwitz. The idea was for everyone to gather at the site of the miraculous survival to which they all owed their existence, and to thank Hashem for the life of their tatty, their zaide—or, as time went on, their alter-zaide. Rav Nissen’s vitality into his 70s and then his 80s was no guarantee that it would ever be possible to get 50 and then 60 and then eventually nearly 100 people to Poland at the same time. There is an element of randomness to any elderly person’s physical health. “He’s got a 20-year plan, but he’s 90,” Mendel “Mendy” Herson, the associate dean of the Chabad rabbinical college in Morristown—the movement’s key training ground—and the son-in-law of Rav Nissen, told me in Krakow.
After the COVID pandemic, Rav Nissen’s children and a few of the more enterprising grandchildren and in-laws, the women in particular, took on the steep logistical challenge of making the trip a reality. The trip was so important and difficult an undertaking that it was never in any serious danger of getting canceled after the Oct. 7 attack. Three weeks after the onslaught the 97 Mangels were staying at a glassy new hotel across the Vistula River from the spires of old Krakow and a block away from the Plac Bohaterow Getta, the square that was once the entrance of the Nazis’ urban prison camp. The walk from Eastern Europe’s best-preserved medieval cityscape to the plaza of metal chairs coldly memorializing the recent-enough extermination of Krakow’s Jews takes about 15 minutes. The square invites ghastly feats of imagination that the rest of the confectionery, tourist-jammed city seems to actively discourage, as if the idea of this place—and perhaps of European civilization—were to make you forget that the murders actually happened centuries after the painting of da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine,” which hangs in Krakow’s Czartoryski Museum. Auschwitz is an hour down the road, far enough that a visitor can forget that it’s even there.
This was my first trip to Poland since reading the great literary memorial of the Holocaust, Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life, a 1,000-page recreation of the Lodz Ghetto in narrative. In Lodz I learned that literature preserves the past far better than physical reality can. In century-old row houses within the former ghetto the weight of Jews awaiting death had indented the stairs—and so had the weight of people who hadn’t known those people, or who knew and didn’t care, or who had once cared but grew used to not thinking about them. Fire Brigade Square, where Chaim Rumkowski, Lodz’s “King of the Jews,” begged the inmates to surrender their children for transport to Auschwitz in a vain attempt at saving themselves, is now the tranquil backyard of a day care.
For those of us who are totally severed from pre-American Jewish life—the ones who do not know who in their family lived or died in the Holocaust, and who have received no intergenerational memory of what their lives or deaths were like—literature is perhaps the only thing that can bridge our alienation from the Old World and our distance from its destruction. The Mangels have available to them the only means of memory superior to literature: They have Rav Nissen, and they have each other. Family creates the human architecture through which stories endure as something real. As one of the only non-Mangels on hand in Poland, I could experience their Auschwitz reunion as one of the only effective revolts against forgetting.
“Hodu Hashem ki tov / ki l’olam chasdo,” “Give thanks to God because He is good / Because His loving-kindness endures forever,” was the family reunion’s motto. The Hallel service’s climactic cries of hope and gratitude, recited on Pesach and Sukkot and other holidays, couldn’t be put on the trip’s official sweaters, since the presence of such holy words would mean that, as with a tallis, Jewish law would prohibit the garments from ever being taken into a bathroom. The eventual sweaters showed a block-letter mem within an outline of the modern-day country of Poland. “Happy birthday Zaide!” read the inside of the official kippot, bearing the same logo. The trip would include a day in and around Krakow; a visit to the tomb of the Hasidic master Rav Elimelech of Lizhensk, a distant Mangel relative; and a day at Auschwitz, followed by Shabbat in Warsaw.
Large gatherings of Mangels weren’t so unusual—there was always another simcha on the way, another wedding or holiday that could get several dozen of them in the same place at once, in family strongholds like Pittsburgh or Cincinnati or Cherry Grove or Crown Heights. Everyone understood the importance of a Mangel journey to Auschwitz; Rav Nissen himself had returned there several times since the five months he spent there as a boy in 1944. But there were anxieties churning beneath the years and then decades of delay. The trip would be a mass transmission of the family’s story across four generations and beyond, with everything this implied about the looming, inevitable loss of a living connection to Jewish Europe, the Holocaust, the Lubavitcher rebbe, and everything else contained within Rav Nissen’s remarkable and ever-telescoping life.
Other concerns were less existential: No one could know what it would really, actually be like for everyone to travel to Auschwitz with Rav Nissen, who had followed the rebbe’s advice to share stories of his survival with the public but did not often volunteer them around his family. Rav Nissen told me he did not discuss his Holocaust experiences with the rebbe: “Our relationship was on more of a spiritual level, a Toyrah level,” he said.
“We heard the stories growing up, somewhat,” Malkie Herson told me late one night in Krakow. The Chabad rebbetzin of greater Somerset County, younger daughter of Rav Nissen, had never been to Auschwitz before. She sat across from her husband, Mendy, and next to her brother Nachum, an Ohio-based Chabad rabbi with the same intent face and wispy beard as his father. The details came out gradually, over the course of many years, though never all at once. Though Rav Nissen had recorded his story after his children were adults, I got the sense the grandchildren were almost unanimous in not listening to the series, in part because their parents discouraged it, though also out of a cross-generational fear that the public version of Rav Nissen’s story would contaminate their own private relationship to him. At home, Nachum explained, his father “was never bitter, never angry. He never had nightmares. His whole approach to the Holocaust and his survival was so positive: God saved my life, what am I supposed to do with it?”
We were in the ground-floor dining room of the hotel, boxes of fruit and kosher snacks piled nearby. A neighboring room offered a bounty of Frisbees, bouncy balls, off-brand Duplos and Magic Markers, though a bedtime-dodging pair of great-grandkids preferred to burn off their late-night energy by chasing each other down the hallway.
“He specifically did not take reparations from Germany,” Malkie continued. “He didn’t want to give credence to the idea he’s carrying around psychological trauma with him, though obviously he is.” His children were left guessing at what exactly this trauma might consist of, given how little of it trickled into observable life. “We didn’t grow up with Holocaust stories,” she said.
It would take the reverberations of a later tragedy for Rav Nissen’s family to glimpse his highly attuned mind and soul left naked before something beyond explanation. In 1988, Lazar Mangel, Raizel and Rav Nissen’s oldest son, a young Chabad shliach, was killed by a drunk driver on his way back from an evening minyan in central New Jersey. His wife was pregnant with a daughter. At this granddaughter’s engagement party, a little over 20 years later, Rav Nissen spoke with tears streaming down his cheek, something even close relatives had never seen before and would never see again.
“At this moment I want to thank Hashem for the blessings and goodness he’s given me my entire life,” Mendy Herson recalled him saying. “He said: ‘There are things I don’t understand, but I will not let them get in the way of seeing the blessings I have in my life.” The crying Rav Nissen hinted at his inner torments by saying, “I have a lot of questions for Hashem.” He did not need to spell out what those questions might be: Why did the Nazis murder my father and grandfather, people who were even stronger Jews than himself? Why did I lose my first son so senselessly, in the midst of a holy act? What sort of God would test His children like this?
For a rabbi tested as profoundly as Rav Nissen, there is meaning and order concealed within the failure to fully understand Hashem. Through the distorting apertures of despair, the fact of the world’s horrors and miracles dwelling so closely together, of the blessings and curses emerging from the same wellspring of holy mystery, can begin to look like perversity—or worse, like the outcome of sheer cosmic randomness. But Rav Nissen and his family share a theology that prohibits Jews from living lives of despair. However horrible things are, however little we understand them, however much we may doubt, we do not have the right to see it all as meaningless. We cannot approach God as if He is mindlessly unfeeling or depraved. “I live in the Hasidic world,” Mendy Herson told me. “I live in a world of believers. Rav Nissen more than believes he has been blessed with goodness.”
On the charter bus to Auschwitz I was seated next to Laizer Mangel, a bearded redhead, a Crown Heights rabbi in his mid-20s and the grandson of Rav Nissen’s who had launched the custom kippah business. With the help of various overseas vendors Mangel could orchestrate the mass production of nearly any conceivable kippah with any logo, pattern, and inner lining—for a simcha or a Chabad house or a fraternity or a business—and he could do it in two weeks. Diverse sources of 21st-century Jewish demand were equal to Mangel’s ability to control a very specific global workflow. “A kippah can be made of either four triangular panels or six triangular panels. Six used to be more common but now, thankfully, four is more common. But the market demands that if someone makes a custom kippah, they should have the ability that each of their panels can be a different color.” We drove past the Krakow airport, where a mothballed Ukrainian government jet awaited the end of the nearby war. An armored tank-tread ambulance, painted white with the red cross, rumbled by on the back of a flatbed truck. “Do they want the clip with multiple prongs?” Mangel continued. “Do they want the standard clip that’s less expensive? Then I need to match the thread of the logo to whatever color accent border or whatever color accent material—and that’s the kippah market now.” (Ten months after the trip Mangel made the kippot for my recent wedding, and did a tremendous job.)
‘He gets to see four generations of his family, wholesome and celebrating and saying that we don’t die, we live.’
The scenery flashing by outside was a prelude to a site of horrors that exactly one person onboard could comprehend. We wound through rolling green hills, through villages with a single roundabout, past apartment blocks and grocery stores and strip malls, and also an indoor water park— “the Auschwitz water park!,” one of the older grandkids exclaimed. It was all too normal. The bus grew uneasy at how normal it was.
Ari Herson, seated behind me, had been to Auschwitz with his grandfather nearly 20 years earlier. He had heard stories of his zaide’s childhood in Kosice more recently than that, when Rav Nissen came to live with the Mangels’ New Jersey branch as the COVID pandemic swept through New York City. Ari heard about the real china Rav Nissen’s family reserved for Shabbos use, about the zmiros they sang and the ornate legs of their carved Shabbos table. He heard from Rav Nissen about singing in the synagogue choir, about his family’s reserved bench in the city park on Saturday afternoons after shul.
Like his kippah-making great-grandson, Rav Nissen’s father, Eliezer, had been in the garment trade. He had done well enough to become a generous funder of schools and charitable institutions in Kosice—he also had the cash to buy a villa in Bratislava for his family to flee to when the deportations accelerated. Before the war the family had a country house in a village outside Kosice, a place Ari visited with his grandfather during that earlier trip to Europe.
“There’s two rows of homes and in the middle is this little creek, barely even a stream,” Ari recalled as the bus passed another sign for the ominously approaching town of Oswiecim. “My grandfather walks up and he says: There used to be a creek here. And as he starts saying this you can see that in his head he’s less present, like he’s being transported back to his childhood. Then he’s talking about how him and his cousins would go into the creek and run after the little kechkelach—the little ducks. And the ducklings would run in a row and they’d run after them and they’d throw bread to them.” Ari watched in amazement as this trickling stream froze his grandfather in a moment of prewar innocence, returning him across the span of nearly his entire lifetime to a world at the cusp of unknown terrors and miracles.
Back in Crown Heights, I asked Rav Nissen about what Jewish Kosice had been like. The Jews of Slovakia were less assimilated and more religious than their neighbors in Czech lands, he explained. Kosice became part of Hungary, which meant the Nazis did not begin deporting Jews until they directly occupied and governed Hungary relatively late in the war. His memories are of a place too pure for our world and too wondrous to possibly survive.
“The rebbe of the cheder had a big, big big garden and had a lot of trees,” Rav Nissen recalled. “He put on the branches cherries, and when we learned well he took us out from the cheder, and he held our little little legs—you know when you pick up the sefer Torah, yes? That’s what he did to us! And we climbed, we took the cherries. Hashem sends us the cherries! Can you imagine this? For us, Hashem sends us cherries, good ripe, sweet cherries. And it was beautiful.” Memories of the destruction began shortly after that. “As a child, 8 years old—this still rings in my ear—” Rav Nissen told me moments later, “my mother said, if Papa is going to Auschwitz I want to go with him, together.”
The bus crossed a thick belt of railway a dozen tracks wide. In the parking lot at Birkenau, under a ribbon of blue horizon squeezed between concrete clouds and a death camp, parents of the several dozen small children on hand realized they now had to explain to those children where they all were.
“They’re gonna tell us a little about what happened,” one mother told a 3-year-old boy with an edge of hesitation. “It’s a very special place where we can daven and say tehillim.” Behind her loomed the square brick turret under which a million murdered Jews had passed, entrance to this place of prayer and psalms. Recitation of the psalms had in fact already begun in the parking lot, as a Borsalino-covered young teenager in Shabbos dress muttered holy poetry feet away from a bus driver sucking down damp cigarettes. Another mother explained: “When zaide was a little boy they made him work really hard. They weren’t nice. They didn’t like Jewish people. Mendel, did you bring the cookies?”
The Mangels began a slow procession down the train tracks, with Rav Nissen in the lead—totally collected, serious as ever, Raizel closely at his side. Malkie was too overwhelmed to have any thoughts she was ready to share. Her brother Nachum paused before the red gate, terminal point of Jewish Europe and human civilization, our people’s closest thing to a living hell we can actually visit. During our slow walk across the parking lot and the train tracks the clouds had gotten puffier and the sky had cleared into something almost indecently welcoming and calm. Behind us were the rooftops of tranquil, boring little Polish towns in which no Jews now lived.
“The way my father always describes this is that you’d see the smoke and the fires billowing from the chimneys and smell the stench of dead bodies,” Nachum said. “And now, life is normal.” The rabbi had touched on a fear I shared, the guilty suspicion that the images involuntarily generated by the American-conditioned Jewish psyche were light years away from the reality of the mass murder and suffering that much of Europe inflicted upon our families 80 years ago. There are depths our imaginations couldn’t reach even with the help of living survivors, which meant we couldn’t possibly carry on what they had been through. “This is the question I ask myself every time I visit a Holocaust site,” I told him. “Can you really see it? Can you see what your father saw here?”
Nachum paused, and said: “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Rav Nissen’s voice soon pulled us back: “The first time I came it was in a cattle coach,” he proclaimed to three generations of Mangels. “Now, I came in business class! I’ll speak to you after, about what is the cattle coach.”
First, though, was a family photo on the inner side of the entrance to Birkenau, centered on the tracks through which Rav Nissen, his sister, and his parents had arrived at the death camp. Children chucked railroad gravel into rain puddles, and other children used the train tracks as a balance beam, with yet another young faction taking fanciful giant steps between each wooden railroad tie, careful never to touch the rocky, muddy ground. Instructions echoed across the former arrival platform: “Mangel, Mangel, Mangel, Roth, Herson,” went the five family-organized sectors into which this crowd was to arrange itself. “Roth on my right side!” “No one should be standing behind Gittel, I can’t make it any clearer!” “Nobody should be standing behind Rabbi Herson!”
Raizel and Rav Nissen stood between the tracks in the middle of the crowd, his hands over his stomach and his head bowed gently. The great grandkids sat cross-legged in a row at their feet, and once the 60 other adults and children were arranged they kept an unreal degree of composure amid so intense and long-awaited a moment, even with the wind whipping kippot and tzitzit—Yisroel Mangel, a Chabad shliach in Cincinnati, leaped to rescue his father’s hat as it sailed toward a pool of rainwater. They sang through the rounds of photos, with chants and niggunim and zmiros and several rounds of “hodu Hashem ki tov, ki l’olam chasdo” filling the death camp.
Looking toward the family I realized that others not yet born would see what I now saw—paradise at Auschwitz, four generations at the entrance to the place that had failed to kill their patriarch, the fruit of the nissim surrounding a man who, with Hashem’s help, had defeated the death factory and everything it stood for. Those Mangels would look at an image of what I was now actually seeing and know its meaning without having been there and without even knowing Rav Nissen as a living person. I wondered if Rav Nissen felt the gaze of these eyes, as if the cold noon sunshine was the light of future descendants he would never meet in life.
The anxiety palpable throughout the day so far, and suspended only briefly during the photo, quickly reasserted itself. Everyone knew this was the one and only chance for the entire family to get the story firsthand in the place where it happened. “Tatty,” said one of the sons, “everybody wants to hear you speak.” Family lore lies concealed in every inch of this evil place. How to unlock it all in just a couple hours? “These train tracks—” he stammered. “Where did you go on these train tracks?”
Rav Nissen spoke. “I was playing here on the tracks when I came to Auschwitz as a child.” He pointed to a guard tower by the platform. “And the SS that were here start to scream: Get away from the tracks! I didn’t hear. I couldn’t hear. He started shooting in the air. It brought my attention. I was playing here as a child.” He gripped the shoulder of a great-grandson: “I was a little bit older than him.”
They sang through the rounds of photos, with several rounds of ‘hodu Hashem ki tov, ki l’olam chasdo’ filling the death camp. Looking toward the family I realized that others not yet born would see what I now saw—paradise at Auschwitz.
A single freight car was on display farther up the platform. “We came from Slovakia in such a cattle coach,” Rav Nissen shouted, his voice rising over the wind. “Like this we were traveling for two days. Can you imagine? In such a cattle coach—mamash like a sardine.” And then, just feet away: “We were waiting here for Mengele, Dr. Mengele, ‘Malach HaMuvos,’ the angel of death, to make a selection who should come to the gas chamber and who should go to work.” “Where did he sit?” Yisroel Mangel asked his father, an arm around his shoulder. “He had a table,” Rav Nissen replied. “Where?” asked another relative. “Right here?” “Yes, yes,” confirmed Rav Nissen.
There was ritual significance to the question of the exact location of Josef Mengele’s desk. That we’d found the spot meant we were at the site of a minimum of two great nissim in the life of Rav Nissen. Though just 10 years old, the future rabbi successfully misled Mengele and said he was 16, old enough to work, and thus old enough to avoid an immediate trip to the gas chamber.
Were it not for his mother’s bravery he might have been sent to the gas chamber immediately, or been too demoralized to attempt the lie that saved his life. “And the Sonderkommando,” the Jewish camp officer, “comes and takes away the valises; tells my mother in Yiddish: Give away your child, and save yourself. Why? Because if a mother had a young child not only the child heads to the gas chamber but the mother as well. He said save yourself; why should you die for your child, give away your child to an elderly person who is going to the gas chamber anyways, and save yourself.”
Rav Nissen again clutched the nearest great-grandson. “Children, mamash I felt my mother holding my hand very tightly. My dear Nissen, my dear child, don’t worry, I won’t give you away.” The Sonderkommando came back to plead with her. “My mother again the second time holds even tighter than how she was holding my hand before, and she says again, don’t worry Nissen, I won’t give you away. Anyways, rabbosai, my mother didn’t give away, and boruch Hashem I’m here with all my children!” Nearly a hundred Mangels broke out in song: “Hodu Hashem ki tov / Ki l’olam chasdo!”
We had reached another of the trip’s purposes, which was to give thanks to God at Auschwitz. “Rabbosai,” said Rav Nissen, “we’re now gonna say the brucha.” There is a blessing that can only be said at the site of a lifesaving miracle. In slow and deliberate Hebrew the patriarch blessed the God that made a miracle here, “she’asani nes b’makom hazeh,” a prayer that echoes the words of the biblical Yaakov, father of the Jewish people, who said after his combat with the angel: “ma norah hamakom hazeh,” how awesome—or dreadful—is this place. Makom can mean a physical place, but it is sometimes a synonym for God, in recognition that there are points in space, places we can actually visit and see, that are as overwhelming and as incomprehensible as we imagine God to be.
“Amen!” came the shout across the dust and the gravel where Josef Mengele had ordered entire Jewish communities to their murder. And then came the prayer of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, also said with appropriate gravity, every syllable sounded with the knowledge the prayer would only be recited once—only here, only now. They blessed the God “she’asa nes b’avinu b’makom hazeh,” “who made a miracle for our father here.”
“Do you know what that brucha means?” a mother asked her child, her voice at the edge of weeping. “It’s a brucha you say when a miracle happened to somebody at a specific place. When you go back to that place, you bless Hashem for doing a miracle. Hashem saved our zaide.”
“You can’t say that brucha anywhere else, only here,” said another woman to another great-grandchild of Rav Nissen. “If Hashem didn’t do that miracle for Zaide right here, we would not be here.”
I rode to the ruins of the Birkenau gas chamber with Rav Nissen and Raizel in a plexiglass-enclosed golf cart. Their descendants walked parallel to the three of us, following the train tracks about 50 yards to our right. Behind the family was barbed wire and a green hellscape of empty fields. Rectangles of cheap red brick were the last surviving remnants of the camp barracks, whose ruins formed a life-size schematic of a system of concentric fences and gates and prisons, a nightmare grid of total order. I wondered if Rav Nissen looked out and saw the camps as he had seen them in childhood, a death factory where he had once dragged a cart through the frozen earth—or if he saw only his family, here in the present, living and vital and growing. He maintained sublime self-control, both now and across the entirety of a day that seemed, to me at least, like it had been more emotionally grueling for most of his family than it had been for him. Rav Nissen had lived with the reality of Auschwitz for eight-ninths of his life. He had seen the evil here with his own eyes. Now at the exact same place he was gazing upon the ultimate proof that the God of Israel could contain its enormity and answer its evil.
“I can’t be more thankful to Hashem, after going to seven different death camps, and the death march—and for a little boy to produce such a beautiful family, can’t I be more grateful to Hashem? I never expected I’ll survive.” He was talking quickly, excitedly almost. Raizel was anchored in silence. The golf cart reached the caved-in roof of the gas chamber, left in much the same condition as when the SS dynamited it before the German retreat 79 years ago, slabs of concrete in toppled heaps across two perpendicular trenches the size of basketball courts where they had murdered a million Jews.
We were into the afternoon—time was unstoppable; the family clamored to hear more, even if they were stories they already knew. Rav Nissen told them about finding his father’s pocket-sized travel tefillin in a mountain of confiscated clothing near the gas chamber complex, not far from where everyone now stood. “I never saw such a smile on my father. A little while later he started to cry. B’simcha crying; not crying from suffering but joy. Who had tefillin in Auschwitz?” Rav Nissen told about the moment when as a young boy he lay sick with scarlet fever and his father walked backward out of the fetid concentration camp sickroom, the way Jews walk to avoid turning their back on a holy site or on their rebbe. “I had my eyes open but I couldn’t speak,” Rav Nissen recalled. “He looked at me and was crying. And this was the last time I saw my father.” Days later he was deported to the camp in Germany where he would soon die at the age of 42.
Strollers lost cargo in the wind, pink baby blankets and plush animals dropping to the rocks and mud. Birkenau is still an environment of total oppression: Almost no sunlight penetrates the few intact barracks; crows perch on the old electric fence, and a bowl of green hills hides the disgrace of it all from the rest of humanity. Even now it feels like a nasty secret shoved out of view.
In Lager F, Josef Mengele’s domain, “there was a whole colony mit peyos, grandparents, parents, children—mamash a whole colony of little dwarfs!” Rav Nissen recalled as the family crowded inside one of the barracks, among the wooden shelves where dying Jews once slept. When they met again, Mengele stared at Rav Nissen “for a minute or two—but this felt like an hour,” before deciding not to send him for experimentation or to shoot him.
We boarded the bus for nearby Auschwitz, a forced-labor prison with an eerie resemblance to a college campus. The shadows lengthened under a yellowing sky, and at the entrance the strollers had to be carried up and down long flights of stairs. Now-exhausted Mangels walked speechless through the displays—the valley of shoes, the glaciers of pots and pans, the metal nest of eyeglasses, the suitcases with names scrawled on them, ones you knew from your own synagogue or day school: Herz, Frankel, Kohn. Family packed together around Rav Nissen as he found his father and grandfather in a book containing the names of every Holocaust victim, a small-print volume 6 feet long and so heavy that it had to be anchored to the wall. Mincha took place outside next to Block 4A, facing the electric fence, under the spotlight of a dying autumn afternoon, a bright yellow band burning on the horizon as the clouds floated away. At twilight the sky glowed a supernatural neon blue.
In the basement ballroom of an Oswiecim hotel, Rav Nissen pinned a blue Birthday Boy ribbon to his coat. The day concluded with a fleishig buffet and a 90th birthday party. For Chabadniks, a birthday is an occasion for giving blessings—the higher the birthday, the more powerful the blessing. A patient line of descendants snaked toward Rav Nissen, who took his l’chaims from a wine glass holding a generous pour of Aberlour 12-year double-cask matured scotch. He blessed in excited Yiddish, his energy somehow undimmed: He joined foreheads with his sons and grandsons and wished gezunterheit, frelich reit, nachas for your kinder, all your heart’s desires! Nachas is the happiness your children make you feel. He pinched the cheeks of his smiling great-grandkids.
“I think this is the meaning of nachas, right?” said Mussie Mangel, a bright-faced young granddaughter who had helped plan the trip, and who was now seeing the culmination of years of hope and hard work. “He gets to see four generations of his family, wholesome and celebrating and saying that we don’t die, we live.” All around us the children hurled balloons at each other and played circular games of tag. One child realized he could fit inside the loop of an inflatable number 9 and wore it as a belt for the rest of the night. “Finally after a day at Auschwitz we’ve discovered the meaning of nachas!” I exclaimed, the day having finally drained me. Mussie countered thoughtfully: “We experienced the meaning of death, and now we’re celebrating the meaning of life.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be part of anything like this again,” I told Rav Nissen when the line of Mangels finished at last. “What had it been like for you?” He replied: “If they ask me, are you going to go back to Auschwitz again? I’ll say: That’s the end. Now I’m just going to Yerushalaim to be with Moshiach. But no more Auschwitz.”
In Crown Heights, weeks after the trip, Rav Nissen continued to describe his survival to me in theological terms. On the march from Auschwitz, an SS officer whose identity he could never determine repeatedly saved Rav Nissen’s life, first by declining to shoot him after he stepped out of line, then by acting as a human crutch when it became too painful for him to walk, then by bringing him water and coffee. “I felt this hot water go into every sinew, every vein,” he recalled. “Chazal tells us that Moshiach will bring mechias meisim, resurrection. How is the resurrection? Hashem will take a dew of revival, put one drop in everybody’s mouth, and they will be revived, yes? I felt this dew of revival.” Perhaps the officer was Eliyahu HaNavi. “Hashem sometimes sends Elijah the Prophet to save a wretched child,” Rav Nissen noted. He granted that it was perhaps even more of a nes if Hashem had softened the heart of a Nazi henchman. As for the murdered: “How come for my own father Hashem didn’t make the miracle? I have no answer. I can’t understand God.”
It might strike the skeptically inclined as being a little too cosmologically convenient to find great religious meaning in one’s own fortune and sacred puzzlement in fates much darker than yours. But belief in God in the face of limitless suffering is in fact the opposite of convenience. It would be easy to flip over the entire existential game board and treat the reality of unfettered human cruelty as the negation of all cosmology, final proof that no power exists above and beyond us. In such a cosmos, good emerges only by accident, as an ingrained evolutionary response, or at the random or self-interested whim of those who temporarily suspend their power to destroy.
Rav Nissen did not live his postwar life as if this were the case. He did not live as if humanity’s potential for evil were the full sum of existence. This, to me, gets at the true nes of Rav Nissen’s story, the proof that we really might be at the mercy of a God who, despite being nearly as capricious and inscrutable as His children, is finally caring and sane: The message of Rav Nissen’s life is that good can still exist as the great motivating power of the universe, even for people who have every reason to despair. “The Baal Shem Tov said: A person should see the world is not hefker,” Rav Nissen told me—a person should see that the world is not ownerless. To really be able to see and believe the world is not hefker, and then to act on this belief for eight decades after Auswchtiz, is a nes.
After the war, Rav Nissen ended up at a yeshiva in England. In the early 1950s, Canada opened up to immigration for Jews from Czechoslovakia. (Around the same time, the newly communist country permitted Jews to leave for Israel—Rav Nissen’s mother, who survived the war, became a nursing volunteer at Bikur Cholim Hospital in Jerusalem.) His English rosh yeshiva allowed him to study at a Chabad institution in Montreal on the condition that he learn no Chassidus. That didn’t last: By 19, Rav Nissen had met Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe. He met Raizel, the college-educated daughter of religious parents who had immigrated from Russia, shortly after that—she sat beside her husband at the dining room table in Crown Heights, listening with the same intense silence I’d seen in Poland and contributing the occasional quip (“Thank God I have him. Whatever I do, it can’t be as bad as what they did to him!”). In past decades she was his typist and research assistant, ransacking the stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza on her husband’s behalf.
For over a half-century Rav Nissen taught, wrote, translated, and lectured. The rebbe, with whom he met on a near-weekly basis, commissioned him to write the English translations of the movement’s various prayer books, meaning Rav Nissen’s name now appears in hundreds of places in just about every Chabad synagogue on every continent on Earth. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in philosophy at NYU, but realized he got much deeper satisfaction from bringing people closer to Judaism as a rabbi than he could from any secular job he might be qualified to do. He passed on his passion for outreach to his children, all of whom became Chabad shluchim, representatives of Yiddishkeit in a world that had once tried very hard to kill Rav Nissen. He brought into being a true miracle, the miracle of his family. He proved the truth of what the rebbe told Rav Nissen when he pointed out, in June of 1982, that three months might be too short of a time to both produce and publish a translation of the Rosh Hashanah machzor: “Shoom dvar e efshar.” Nothing is impossible.
It is not self-evident that an Auschwitz survivor would believe this. Perhaps believing it at all is a miracle.
Rav Nissen told me of an incident over half a century earlier in which he met his opposite, a Jew whose faith the Holocaust had broken. It was a Friday afternoon in a residually Jewish Lower East Side, on a street that still had schmatta sellers. “So we just pass by, my wife and I, and a person stops me and says: Young man, I have beautiful white shirts, bargain prices; why don’t you come in the store, choose yourself half a dozen shirts. So I tell him: My dear man, I like nice shirts, I like also bargain prices—yeah, a Yid, bargain prices!—but not now. Why not now? So I said: It’s Friday, it will soon be Shabbos, I have to catch three buses home. So this person says: Because of Shabbos you won’t buy such beautiful shirts? So I say yes, I won’t buy. So he starts to mock and scoff and ridicule Shabbos: What Shabbos, who keeps Shabbos? You still believe in the Torah? I say yes, I do believe in the Torah, and for me Shabbos is very important. He starts to mamash speak against the Torah. I tell him, my dear friend, how can you speak like this at the Torah? He says to me, I was in Auschwitz; anyone who was in Auschwitz can’t believe in God anymore.”
Rav Nissen pulled up his sleeve, displaying his tattoo for me as he had for the shop owner decades earlier. I had not seen it before. “When he saw, his face became white. He thought anybody who is in Auschwitz, it is impossible they believe in God.” Perhaps the tattoo had surfaced an unspeakably painful memory the man had not been prepared to relive. The fellow survivor stared at Rav Nissen dumbfounded, went into his office at the back of the store and slumped down in “a beautiful leather chair” that now seemed to devour him. “He was immersed, lost in his thoughts.“ Rav Nissen didn’t wait until he reemerged. Shabbos was coming on fast.
When he was next in the Lower East Side, Rav Nissen looked for the store and discovered it had closed. Word on the block was that the owner had traded his shop for a new one in Borough Park, an Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn. “Based on an educated guess,” Rav Nissen said, “he changed his mind and became shomer Shabbos.”
Couldn’t Rav Nissen have searched a little harder for this man? I found myself wondering. Perhaps he had made a decision, maybe a subconscious one, to respect the doubt and the pain of another survivor. Perhaps he knew better than to look. If Jewish life endured after the Holocaust because of people like Rav Nissen, religious leaders who based their lives on the belief that Hashem had preserved them for holy work ahead, it also owed something to people like the shirt seller who lived on despite never making sense of it, who fought with their own torment, who agonized over why the fire hadn’t claimed them, and who forged new lives in new countries amid a world they believed to be ownerless.
We are running out of time to hear from the people who were there about what they faced in the Holocaust and what it meant for them. Still, we can take cold solace in the fact that an infinite amount of time with them would be inadequate.
Armin Rosen is a staff writer for Tablet Magazine.