"My story is one more proof that HaKadosh Baruch Hu doesn’t abandon us, even in the darkest places”

"Although 80 years have gone by, I still have dreams about that day early in the war — the day my father took a pair of scissors and cut off my peyos.”

Ninety-year-old Reb Aharon Weiss takes a deep breath. It’s obvious that he’s not used to sharing his story — and even if he does on occasion, the searing memories take him back there every time.

“I want to give people chizuk, to strengthen Klal Yisrael’s emunah. At this time, everyone needs it — and I want to tell you that my story is one more proof that HaKadosh Baruch Hu doesn’t abandon us, even in the darkest places.”

Aharon Weiss’s incredible story of survival — how as a young boy he managed against all odds to sustain not only his mother and two siblings but ten other families as well — was brought to the public’s attention thanks to Israeli writer Emanuel Ben Sabo, his friend and neighbor in Afula, where Reb Aharon is the longtime gabbai for the town’s largest shul. Ben Sabo has authored dozens of books, many of them based on memoirs of Holocaust survivors. For decades, Aharon Weiss was known simply as the shul’s candy man — he never discussed his past, and until Ben Sabo decided to publish his story, few people, even close neighbors and friends, had no idea what took place in an underground hideout 80 years ago.

Aharon Weiss was born 90 years and five months ago (“at my age, you start counting the months too,” he says) to a religious family in the southern Polish town of Kielce. Shortly afterward, the family migrated to Transylvania, where young Aharon spent his childhood in cheder and yeshivah — until one night when he was ten years old, when the family was awakened by banging on the door, announcing the Nazi arrival.

“We left home that same night and set off on foot with a few hundred other families to the city of Turda in central Transylvania, not far from Cluj,” Weiss recounts. “There we learned that we would have to crowd together into a makeshift camp that they’d arranged for us.”

The trek alone was something he’ll never forget — he still feels it to this day.

“Our group included everyone, from the elderly to newborn babies, all of us walking in the same direction. Those who could walk made the journey on their own two feet, those who couldn’t were put on wagons. I was one of those who walked. The soles of my shoes were attached with wooden nails, and at one point the soles came off and I could barely walk. We were trekking through snow, and as I dragged my bare feet along, at a certain point I couldn’t even feel them anymore. To this day I have chronic pain in my toes and I can barely move them.

“By the time we reached Turda, I was on the verge of collapse — I practically crawled to the factory, which was a big, 300-meter-long room. Around it were clustered a few small houses and a shul. That was our camp.”

At this point the group still didn’t know what awaited them.