“I know,” these children will be able to testify. “I saw a real survivor, I saw the numbers. I know”

H

ow can we sustain the memory of the Holocaust? There are memoirs, videos of survivors, conferences, newspaper articles, films, court records, histories, family stories, and much else. All this is all to the good.

But there is another way to sustain the memory of the Holocaust, overlooked for younger segments of the population and taken for granted by older segments. This means of memory is visceral and visual; at the same time, unthreatening and age-appropriate.

And almost too late.

Not too late, however, for the friends of Chazzan Zachary Kutner. He is 99 years old now. He is an amazing blessing. Last Shavuos, when he led the davening for Yizkor and Mussaf, it was as if 30 years had been peeled away — so powerful was his voice, so evident his kavanah, as it has been all these decades.

Chazzan Kutner is no doubt one of the very, very few who survived seven (!) selections by the accursed Mengele.

Roughly five years ago, Chazzan Kutner led an ordinary weekday Shacharis. When the davening was over, the person sitting in back of me, who was visiting his adult son in Denver, was crying. I was puzzled and asked why.

He said, “I haven’t heard a davening like that since my youth.”

I first saw it before I knew Chazzan Kutner, but I don’t remember when I first saw it.

I do remember this. When we were living in Jerusalem in the 1970s and early 1980s, I found myself frustrated one Erev Shabbos in a bakery in Geula. There was no rhyme or reason as to the order in which customers were served. It was a matter of who could more skillfully move ahead or catch the eye of the lady serving the challah and other items. I was impatient. I was frustrated. I was about to say something to the lady behind the counter. Then, for some reason, I glanced.

I froze.

I had glanced at her arm.

It was tattooed with numbers.

There is only one kind of place in the world where those numbers could have come from.

I was chastened.

I was pleased I hadn’t said anything but ashamed that I had contemplated doing so.

We have all seen those numbers, one might say, but have we? Who is “we”? It is not my younger grandchildren.

It dawned on me. Shortly, the survivor generation will pass entirely, and a whole generation of Jewish children will grow up, never having seen those numbers.

I suggested to my children: Visit Chazzan Kutner with your younger children when you visit Denver. Or, in your own community, visit another survivor — there are hardly any left old enough to have been in the camps and to have those numbers on their arm.

Don’t let this slip away.

Don’t consign your children’s eventual knowledge of the Holocaust to the indirect media that someday will be all that humanity has.

ON a recent visit, my son and his eight-year-old son visited Chazzan Kutner, who is completely lucid. I am not sure what they talked about, and I am not sure how much a single conversation sticks in the mind.

But I am sure about those numbers.

So unusual. So different. So unexpected.

Something a child has never seen.

Something visual and visceral.

My grandson saw those numbers, and all of the children who see them will, G-d willing, live to 120. Their memory of those numbers, cruelly tattooed on a Jew’s body against his or her will, can sustain the memory of the Holocaust well into the next century, not via mediated means of remembrance.

“I know,” these children will be able to testify. “I saw a real survivor, I saw the numbers. I know.”

Not hearsay, but direct testimony.

The other media of memory we have are indispensable, but they are not the same as speaking to a survivor. And when we can no longer speak to survivors, when there will be no more survivors to speak to, our younger children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren can retain an unmediated memory of the Holocaust, via those numbers.

These younger generations, based on their own personal knowledge, can also refute Holocaust deniers.

These numbers are simultaneously an abstract symbol and a concrete, living reality of the Holocaust.

Do not let them die with the passing of the survivors who bear them.

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg is the editor and publisher of the Intermountain Jewish News, for which he has written a weekly column, “View from Denver,” since 1972, and the author of numerous seforim about the mussar movement and other subjects.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1079)