Known to thousands of readers for his inspiring bestseller Go My Son, Holocaust survivor Chaim Shapiro maintained his emunah throughout a life of adventures and losses.

Alone at age seventeen, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, separated from his family and loved ones who remained behind at the mercy of the dreaded Nazis, never seeing them again. Despite all odds, he kept Shabbos and kashrus, and above all his emunah in Hashem, as he made his way across the barren wastelands of the Russian continent, fighting against the Germans along the way, until finally arriving on American soil to start anew as an immigrant. He raised a family in a foreign world, fighting a whole different type of battle. Now the story begins again ...

If you read it, you haven’t forgotten it. Chaim Shapiro’s classic epic, Go My Son, depicting the adventures and tragedies of his life in Russia during the Holocaust, is a story that is not easily forgotten. Sales of over 30,000 copies over the last nineteen years have made it one of the greatest Jewish bestsellers of the past century and it is a staple on most people’s bookshelves. A friend of mine has been reading the same beat-up old copy every morning during breakfast for the past ten years, and he considers it his “guide to emunah.” I couldn’t put it down once I started, and it had me laughing, crying, or a combination of both throughout the whole 400-plus-page journey. It is not often that I am so inspired by a book that I desire to seek out the author in person. I once wrote a letter to the author of a book I had read that I had found incredibly moving. Years later I found the letter in a desk drawer somewhere and regretted never having sent it. Before I even finished reading Go My Son, I was already trying to track down the author so that I could express my appreciation to him personally. Unfortunately I was too late — Reb Chaim had passed away eight years before. However, my search was not in vain. I ended up finding his eldest son, Rabbi Alter Shapiro, a principal of the Mesivta of Greater Los Angeles, in the process. Reb Alter, author of A Legacy of Faith, a collection of essays written by and about his father, was able to give me a picture of Reb Chaim that went beyond the pages of Go My Son as he began to rebuild the broken pieces of his life, together with his wife, Hadassah, in America. I didn’t merit to meet Chaim Shapiro in person, but he left all of Klal Yisrael an eternal legacy engraved within the pages of his books.

Snapshots

Chaim Shapiro was born Erev Yom Kippur in the year 1922 in Lomza, Poland. He passed away two days before his seventy-eighth birthday and his levayah was on Erev Yom Kippur itself. He is buried in Beit Shemesh. His loss was tangibly felt in the shul in Baltimore where he was the regular baal tefillah for Yom Kippur. His heartfelt prayers and powerful baritone would bring people to tears year after year but it was more than his yiras Shamayim and beautiful voice that was responsible. His voice held within it the pain of someone who had lost his entire family and seen the destruction of a world, as well as the weight of a person who survived. When he first came to America, he kept his story a secret. There was such anti-Communist fervor in America at the time that he was afraid to reveal the fact that he had been an officer in the Russian army. Nonetheless, he remembered every single detail of how life had been before the war, like the snapshot frozen in our minds of the last time we saw a loved one who passed on. Reb Chaim used to say that his grandfather had a photographic memory, his father inherited half of it, and he himself inherited a quarter of it. The pictures he painted for us of his own journey, as well as life in the shtetel, the yeshivos, and the gedolei hador are so vivid, it was as if he never really left that world.

Reb Chaim was eventually invited to Baltimore in the early 1950’s to learn shechitah with two rabbanim there, one of whom was Rabbi Yosef Feldman, the father of Rav Aharon Feldman, the present Rosh Yeshivah of Ner Yisrael. He worked for most of his life in the slaughterhouses of Baltimore, working hard to support his growing family. In the early years, when his salary as a shochet in Baltimore was meager and not enough to support his family, he was offered a shochet job in Omaha, Nebraska where he would earn nearly five times as much money. He flew to Omaha to see what it was all about but when he saw how far the community was from Torah Judaism he flatly refused, even though it would have put an end to their financial problems. “I didn’t come to America so that my children could become cowboys,” he said. Alter Shapiro, Reb Chaim’s son, recounts the irony that his father, who was so moser nefesh for Yiddishkeit, never took his own kids to shul when they were growing up during the early years after the war. “Who doesn’t take their children to shul on Shabbos?” he asked me. “The truth is, he was embarrassed. The shul was full of old American Jews who were am haratzim, ignorant people. My father was the chazzan, the gabbai, and the baal koreh. He came from a completely different world, from Rav Elchanan Wasserman’s yeshivah in Baranovitch, from Rav Baruch Ber’s yeshivah in Kamenitz, and from the glorious Torah cities of Lomza and Tiktin. I am sure he felt, What am I bringing my son to shul here for? This isn’t Yiddishkeit.” When Reb Alter was fourteen years old, he didn’t play basketball during recess. They would walk around discussing the sugya from the Gemara together.

As a child, Reb Alter recalls not knowing what to think about his father. “He was a great talmid chacham, but he didn’t reveal it to anyone when I was young.” Reb Chaim used to walk very, very slowly down the street with his hands behind his back. “It used to drive us nuts as kids. He didn’t talk to us; he was just wrapped up in his thoughts.” Reb Chaim once wrote in a letter to a friend of his, “How could Hashem trade all of European Jewry for what exists in America? You see all the Torah in America and Eretz Yisrael? It isn’t worth one percent of what existed in Europe. These Jews He wants more than those?” American Jewry in the 1950s was very different back then than it is today. “He was a person who really, really deeply felt the loss and the tragedy of the destruction of European Jewry,” Reb Alter explains. “It was completely beyond his comprehension why such a thing could happen. He never doubted Hashem, but he could not begin to understand why things happened the way they did. He lived with the question all his life. The question is so big and so unanswerable that people try to forget about it, but it was deep, deep in his heart.” He once met Rav Wolbe, zt”l, in Flatbush and spoke to him for over an hour and a half with numerous questions he had on the actions of specific gedolim during the war and why more wasn’t done to help save Yidden. Rav Wolbe listened patiently throughout the whole conversation without saying a word. Several months later, he told Alter that he had an answer for his father that he wanted to write in a letter but unfortunately it was never sent.

Mission Accomplished

Reb Chaim was the only one from his immediate family to survive the war. “He never thought of himself as a hero,” Reb Alter explains. “Hashem saved him, but everyone else was not saved. Why was he saved?” He lived with the survivor’s guilt until he came upon a teshuvah in the Divrei Malkiel (Rav Malkiel Tennenbaum, ztz”l) that provided him with an answer that he quoted often. The Divrei Malkiel addresses a minhag prevalent in various parts of Europe to bury women who died in childbirth in a separate section of the cemetery. He refutes the notion that this minhag is because the Mishnah in Shabbos attributes death in childbirth to laxity in certain mitzvos. He says that the reason is that they gave their lives for the perpetuation of the Jewish people and are therefore too holy to be buried with the masses. After reading this, Reb Chaim realized that he was looking at the Holocaust the wrong way. The question wasn’t why he was saved and they weren’t. It was really the opposite: the six million martyrs that went through the chimneys of Auschwitz merited to be kadoshim — why wasn’t he zocheh to be one of them?

In an interview with Where What When, a local publication in Baltimore,  toward the end of his life, Reb Chaim was asked why he thinks some people stayed frum during the Holocaust while others did not. He responded that he knew a woman whose three children were taken from her during the war. When she begged the Nazis, yemach shemam, to spare them, they asked her to choose which child she wanted them to spare, a torture that cannot be imagined. She passed out from the sheer terror of such a decision, amidst her children’s screams and pleas that she should choose them. When she awoke they were all gone. “When I see that woman going every Shabbos to shul, she is doing a chesed with HaKadosh Baruch Hu! Even if she goes once a year on Yom Kippur, she does tzedakah.” He quoted a Rashi in Chumash that Avraham did tzedakah with Hashem because he still had faith in G-d despite all of the struggles and disappointments in his life. “Those who came out of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, if they don’t believe in anything, I don’t blame them ... Don’t judge your friend until you find yourself in his position.”

Over the years, as Yiddishkeit developed more and more in America and in Eretz Yisrael, he began to see more hope and started to open up a little and share his story. By the time he saw his children and grandchildren living as frum Torah Jews, his melancholy was replaced with joy. One time when he saw children being driven to yeshivah he told the harried mother who drove the carpool “To see this, Yiddishe kinderlach coming to yeshivah, I was zocheh to be saved!” That woman related that from that moment onward, the “mundane” act of driving carpool to yeshivah took on a whole different meaning for her! (Legacy of Faith, 23). The famous words that his mother imparted to him when she bade him leave Poland for Lithuania at the start of the war became his dictum for life and the title of his book: “I gave birth to four sons. One God took back. The others I’m determined to return to Him as pure as they came. I don’t want you to become a communist atheist. I want you to remain a good Jew, and I’m prepared for the worst. There is only one thing that matters to me now — to know that you are a good Jew! Go, my son, go!” When he looked at his children and grandchildren he would often say, “Mission accomplished.” His wife, Hadassah, used to hate it when he said that; she felt like he was shortening his life. He once wrote in an essay, “Why me; why was I saved? I see the answer in the faces of my children and grandchildren.”

Breaking the Silence

After over a decade of silence, Chaim Shapiro decided to share his tale. He wrote a short essay summarizing the story told in Go My Son for Reader’s Digest that was rejected. Alter advised his father to send it to the Jewish Observer and it was very well received. That was the beginning of a change in Reb Chaim. Six months later, he wrote something else for the Jewish Observer that was reprinted in Jewish publications in both London and Denver that Alter, then a high school student, edited himself. From then on, Reb Chaim began to write on a regular basis for the Jewish Observer about gedolim, many of whom he knew firsthand, and about life in the shtetel. When he started to write Go My Son, Reb Alter would read the manuscript, amazed that he had never heard any of the stories before. It had a very strong impact on him and changed the way he thought of his father. “It had a very powerful effect on me in a spiritual sense,” he said. “It hit me to hear that his entire family was killed by the Nazis. I started to try to live more l’shem Shamayim and whatever I became, I became.”

Reb Chaim taught himself English. “The punctuation and spelling was totally original — meaning atrocious,” Reb Alter said. “The way he wrote was the way he spoke. He could have written in the most beautiful Yiddish and probably Russian and Polish as well and he had a lashon hakodesh that was better than Bialik.” He took out one book on creative writing from the public library. He once read Alter a quote from the book that said that the more descriptive the writing, the better it will be. “That was the one thing he learned about how to write and Go My Son is so descriptive about everything, you feel like you are there!” It was originally written in the third person under a pen name because he still had a cousin living in Russia and he was afraid that she might be persecuted for it. After many years of work, he submitted a 900-page manuscript to Doubleday. In the end they rejected it because it wasn’t risque enough and he refused their proposal to add inappropriate content. After it was rejected, the 900-page manuscript was put away in the basement and there it stayed. Years later, it was somehow dug up and someone recommended that it be sent to Feldheim. It sold thousands of copies that first year and has since been reprinted dozens of times. It was eventually translated into Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and even Braille. A kiruv organization in Russia gives it to their students before they start learning Torah and it was made into a children’s book to teach English to kids in Israel. Years later, Reb Chaim wrote another book, Once Upon a Shtetl (ArtScroll), which is a series of essays of his memories of life in Europe.

At Home with the Gedolim

Reb Chaim’s storytelling went beyond his writing. Whenever he spoke at a simchah he could bring an audience to laughter and tears within minutes. “A good maggid in Europe could bring half of the audience to tears and the other half to laughter at the same time!” he used to say. He would tell one interesting story or joke after another. Gedolei Yisrael like Rav Moshe Feinstein, Rav Yaakov Kamenetzky, and Rav Yaakov Ruderman were captivated by him and would talk to him for hours. Sometimes they would be rolling with laughter; other times they would cry together. He felt at home with them. One talmid of the Mir in Brooklyn recounted that Rav Shmuel Berenbaum, ztz”l, would never interrupt his learning for anyone except Reb Chaim. Reb Chaim would take long walks with Reb Yaakov Kamenetsky during the last years of Reb Yaakov’s life in Baltimore and one of the Shapiro daughters eventually married Reb Moshe’s grandson. He was part of their world.

He writes in one of his essays, reprinted in Legacy of Faith, about a story he recalled when he was sitting outside of Reb Levi Yitzchak’s shul in Berditchev. He had just arrived in the town toward the end of the war with his tank unit. Berditchev used to be known as the Jewish Capital because the population was 90 percent Jewish. Reb Chaim searched the streets looking for a familiar face but he did not come across a single Jew. He was heartbroken. It was then that the truth of the rumors about the Holocaust hit him. As he was sitting outside the shul, sobbing in despair, he remembered a story from his childhood, about how an elderly talmid chacham in his hometown once gave him a potch in the face for misbehaving in shul. After davening, his father walked over to the man and told him with the greatest respect that his son was indeed misbehaving but that he had no right to hit him and that he should never do it again. Reb Chaim turned his tear filled eyes to heaven and said “Tatty in Himmel! Is that how You take care of Your children?” He said that at this moment he was certain that Reb Levi Yitzchak was behind him and had already mobilized the entire Heavenly Hosts asking “Where are the Jews of my Berditchev?” He said Kaddish for all the Jews of Berditchev there outside the shul all alone; there was not a minyan left in the entire city. When he first arrived in America he recounted this story about the old Yid in his town to many of the gedolim whom he met and without fail they all burst out in tears.

His daughter-in-law, Shira, recounted how much he respected her for being a learned woman. He got tremendous nachas when she was hired to teach 12^th grade at Beis Yaakov of Baltimore. Two of his relatives were among the first students of Sarah Schenirer and he was now seeing the fruit of her labors. He used to sing soul-stirring niggunim with his children and grandchildren, recalling songs that he heard during his childhood and during his travels.

No End to the Miracles

Reb Chaim’s prayers for Klal Yisrael came from the depths of his heart and they had the uncanny ability to cause miracles. “He had a love for humanity, Jew or non-Jew, which you see in Go My Son,” Reb Alter explains. “He understood much more deeply the difference between Jew and non-Jew than you and I do — he would speak against the Polish and German peoples with a vengeance, but if he met an individual he would treat him with total compassion regardless of who he was.” He used to give charity regularly to a poor Italian family whom he worked with in the slaughterhouse in downtown Baltimore. A close friend of the family was married for five years without any children. Soon it became known to him that there might be medical issues that could prevent them from ever having children. Reb Chaim was brokenhearted when he learned about this. That summer he went to Eretz Yisrael and when he came home he told his son that he had taken Hashem to a din Torah. He said “Hashem, You may have claims against me, but my claims against You are much bigger.” He felt that he had an account of zchus avos for all of his relatives who were killed al kiddush Hashem. Within six months she conceived naturally the first of many healthy children.

A story is recounted in A Legacy of Faith about the Jewish photographer at their youngest son’s wedding, who had been married for nine years without any children. Before the wedding Reb Chaim asked the photographer, a total stranger, to bring his wife to the chuppah so that he could bless her. She failed to show up at the wedding. As he was about to walk his son to the chuppah, full of emotion, he grabbed the photographer and ordered him to call his wife. Amid tears, he blessed her over the phone that she should have children. She gave birth nine months later. Reb Chaim once received a letter from someone who told him that he had a very hard time putting on tefillin every day. Only after he read Go My Son and saw Rabbi Shapiro’s mesirus nefesh for that mitzvah against such odds did he start to wear them each day. Another woman wrote to him from the Peace Corps in Africa. She told him that she was beginning to become more observant and that she didn’t relate to Shabbos until she read Go My Son. A short time later, she introduced herself to Reb Chaim at a lecture he gave, and told him that she was on her way to study in a seminary in Israel!

A reader of  Go My Son is often stunned by the continuous series of open miracles that Hashem performed for Reb Chaim throughout his travels. Reb Alter once met a well-known speaker from Arachim who had been conducting a lecture about the Torah codes. After the lecture, Reb Alter introduced himself and asked him if he had ever read his father’s book. “I started it,” the speaker said, “but it was too fantastic; it must have been made up.” Alter thought to himself, You travel the world teaching people about Hashem’s existence through the wonders of the Torah codes. Hashem doesn’t only work with computers! Reb Chaim was once walking in New York shortly after immigrating to America when he came to Delancey Street. A little boy asked him if he could help him cross the street. He didn’t understand what the boy was saying because he spoke no English at the time. He finally caught on and taking the boy’s hand, led him across the street. He realized that he was that little boy, and that Hashem had been holding his hand leading him all those years that he survived in Europe — through the Ural Mountains, across the Volga River, through the Kazakhstani desert, into Germany, and finally to America. Hashem never let go of his hand, but more importantly, he never let go of Hashem’s. That is what he taught us — never to let go.

Yom Kippur in Kazakhsta

(Excerpted from Go My Son p. 314)

The morning before Yom Kippur, I set out at the crack of dawn ...

Much sooner than I expected, my water bottle was emptied. I had eaten one piece of bread; the other two I didn’t dare to touch. My mouth was dry, and my head was beginning to spin. How far did I have to go yet? There are no signposts in the desert ...

I began to fear that I had stopped to rest too often. Judging by my diminishing strength, and from the fact that the sun had already passed the western side of the horizon, I tried to convince myself that the town was not far ahead. The thought of being late for the services drove me on. But my feet hurt me so much that I could hardly move them. I had to stop and rest, again and again ...

My heart was crying. So close to a Jewish community, and services on Yom Kippur, and I felt I could not walk another step! Then I thought of Lazer Kantor’s words: “Remember, Chaim, we are depending on you. After all the risks we took to organize the services, please don’t fail us!” I tried to think about man’s latent powers, the hidden reserves of strength which awaken only in time of danger ... Where were my reserves now? I talked to myself as if body and soul were two separate entities — but to no avail ...

An old Korean on a donkey passed by. No Korean ever helped a despised Ooroos [Russian], and any European face was anathema to them, so I expected no help from him. But suddenly he stopped, and turned around. Without saying a word he handed me his water bottle, then helped me up on his donkey. I held on to him tightly, and thanked him, first in Russian, then in Kazakhi, for I didn’t know a word of Korean. He was as mute as his donkey! Soon we arrived in town. He gently pushed me off the donkey, and without saying a word, he kept on riding! I was amazed at his strange behavior. Was he really mute? Or was he Eliyahu Ha-Navi ...?

Instead of candles, a kerosene lamp was burning in the synagogue. Its flame created flickering shadows, like human souls coming to participate in this holy night of Kol Nidrei.

A woman arrived, carrying a baby in her arms. I was surprised, for I knew that Kantor had forbidden the people to bring children with them. The woman unwrapped the baby, and it was — a Torah scroll! Everyone kissed the scroll with emotion and tears. Reb Lazer placed it in front of the kerosene lamp. Then he turned to me and said, “Remember, if the alarm bell rings, forget about me, yourself, or anything else. Just grab the sefer

Torah and run! Run so fast that their unclean hands will not have a chance to touch this holy scroll!”

... I began the Kol Nidrei prayer in a hoarse, low voice. The ancient melody sounded strange here, but the mood, the environment, were right; the weeping was heartbreaking.

“From this Yom Kippur until the next Yom Kippur, may it come to us in happiness!” I chanted.

Mr. Kantor occasionally had to remind the congregation of the reality outside. “Please, lower your voices. Try to cry only within yourselves,” he begged them. But who can control waves of emotion? Indeed, here were not only waves, but an entire sea! Bitterness and pain, held in for so long, were finally finding expression, and could not be stopped.

“Oh Lord,” I translated into Russian for the benefit of those who did not understand Hebrew, “Renew our days as of old!

“… Oh cast us not off in time of old age; forsake us not when our strength faileth!”

Finally we came to the last prayer of the evening. With deep emotion the prayer rose up: “Our Father, our King! Have compassion upon us and upon our children and infants!

“Do this for the sake of those who were slain for Thy Holy Name; who were slaughtered for Thy Unity! Do it for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of Thy name!”

I cried bitterly; I was pleading for my family’s safety. Completely unaware of my surroundings, I wept: “Because of this holy scroll which You gave us we have been murdered, robbed, and tortured in every generation!” I stretched out my hand to touch the sefer Torah, but it wasn’t there! Something had gone wrong!

I slowly opened my eyes. Through a veil of tears I saw the blue uniform of a policeman ... He stood there in stern silence with his police cap in hand.

Old Lazer Kantor approached the lieutenant and said, “Take me. I’m guilty! This young man is completely innocent. I made him come here.”

The officer replied with a thin smile, “No, old man, what can I do with you? That young man is the one I’m after!” He then turned to me and said, “Let’s go. You’re under arrest!”###END SIDEBAR###

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 228)