'The Holocaust shaped my grandfather, but amid the tragedy: Hope' - opinion

"Saba Moshe," or Moussa – as he called himself when speaking to an Arab – or Min Hamayim Meshitihu (“From the waters, I drew him,” Exodus 2:1) when checking the acumen of a yeshiva student, who would more often than not, correctly guess his name, was someone who was many different things to many different people. That, one could say, was what enabled him to survive what was probably the greatest human tragedy inflicted by mankind.

The Holocaust shaped our grandfather more than anything else. Yet I wonder, whether we, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren (whom he called his “great-grands”), when we recall him with our eyes closed, actually think about him that way. He did see horrific things, but at least for me, ever so impressively, the Holocaust was always the backdrop of his life, not the forefront. 

Saba grew up in a place where, in his own words, “If you stood on your head, the water went up to your ears.” 

Wounds that never healed

Rymanow was the name of the town, special in Hassidic lore, but for him the place of his cherished youth, defined by mischievous behavior, “lifting” a neighbor’s bike and being too small to reach the seat, teaching himself to pedal standing up. Small, little blonde-haired Saba, with piercing blue eyes, sneaking into the mikveh and learning to swim there (because, of course, the river wasn’t deep enough). 

Whenever his mother went to the market on Monday, she would bring home a treat for him, the memory of which he relished to the day he died. Along with his treat, she brought home the chicken to be slaughtered for Shabbat, which was kept in the attic, and tended to by him. On Thursdays, Saba would take the chicken to the shochet, the ritual slaughterer; it was subsequently checked by Saba’s mother, Esther. When cleaning it, if she spotted something that could make it treif (not kosher), young Moshe, the yingele (little one) with the kaszkiet, or kasket (flat hat) was sent to take it to the rabbi who would rule on the matter. If the chicken had a nick, a perforation, or a blemish inside, there was, to quote him, “no chicken that Shabbat.” 

For someone who “never had a childhood,” something he said often, during his more somber moments, he would spend a lot of time with childish mirth in his later years. Torn away from the heder of his youth before his bar mitzvah, with no formal education after seventh grade, he was a man who suffered from open wounds that never healed. When he said “I never had a childhood,” he meant it. 

Nevertheless, he did remember making his own sleighs, frolicking about jocularly – and the special foods prepared for each and every occasion (especially the katschke, or duck which was fattened for Passover, that his loving niece, Freida Barth, would make him 70 and more years later, during his annual stays in Kew Garden Hills on his visits from Israel).

However, Saba’s memories of his earliest years were rife with antisemitism, as regular as “Sunrise, Sunset,” a reference, of course, to Fiddler on the Roof, one of his favorite musicals, which he knew verbatim and sung at every wedding; as well as the far darker song, “Tell me, where can I go? There’s no place I can see.”

In his later years, he numbered every great-grandchild as another personal victory. The last great-grandchild he lived to hear of was Alma, born to Yonah and Niran. “Number 19,” he said, and of course, when he said that, I knew that my cousin Yonah had become a mother. 

However, we were anything but numbers to him – very far from the number on his arm, a number which is too hard to write, because it so little resembled who he was. He was a man of mirth, of joy, even of ebullience, either with Savta at his side or thereafter with the schnapps he needed to forget his sorrows. 

WHEN, ALREADY at the advanced age of 90, just shy of a decade ago, he took the extended family to Auschwitz, right behind the infamous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei,” Saba, our tour guide, was asked to pay admission to enter. He rolled up his sleeve, and said, “That’s funny, the first time they let me in for free.” 

There is so much to say, and much of what needs to be said is secondary to who he was as a person: a short man, who was larger than life. At a smidgen over five feet tall, in the Korean War, he was stationed in Germany “as occupying forces” (when saying that word, he always dragged out the word “occupying,” pronouncing each syllable slowly, and clearly, to show the magnificence of the moment). He became a muscular man, a weight-lifter, feared as an arm wrestler and someone you didn’t start up with. 

But any faithful description of Saba’s life cannot be truly faithful without mentioning, Mazal, Savta, famed for the large red and white magnet on her fridge in Bronx, NY, “Michelle’s Kosher Kitchen.” So much time has gone by since she passed away. Saba was a widower for 27 years. Every single year at her memorial service in the cemetery, after the Kel Maleh Rachamim prayer, he would say: “Ma, I’ll see you soon.” 

He was a man torn between what once was – the life, ever so joyous they had shared, raising their beautiful, proud, successful children – and the imperative he felt to live on, even after she had died. A man who had gone to sleep in the camps praying for two things, “as much bread as he could possibly eat; and to die in his sleep so his suffering would be no more” is a man we should – and must – celebrate. 

Raphael Wilson, a close friend, once said about my grandfather, our blessed Saba, that like the blessed rabbi of Fiddler on the Roof: “Your grandfather looked the devil in the face, and spat him in the eye!”

That was Saba. We all got spat on in the eye a little too, but he loved us so much, because we were him, and he was us, and his survival was our survival, our people’s survival, the most hopeful statement you could possibly imagine in the face of the greatest tragedies and calamities mankind could conjure up.

Every one of Saba’s grandchildren knows the lyrics of “Elephant, Elephant, Tiger” by heart. Once, the story goes, when putting one of us to sleep, he began singing, “Elephant, elephant, tiger; Tiger, tiger, lion; Lion, lion, alligator – alligator,” and then he ever so gently tickled the sole of the unsuspecting grandchild; and as he sang the final words: “Boom, boom, boom,” he gave three direct, perfect, and precise slaps to the sole of the appointed foot. Since then, every single one of Saba’s grandchildren has known these words by heart, and many of us still put our children to bed in the same way, the child eagerly delighting in the tickle and then the imminent, “Boom, boom, boom.” 

The writer is the grandson of Moshe Barth, and the son of his firstborn son, Dr. Abraham Eddy Barth and Dr. Dassie Barth. He lives in Kiryat Yovel with his wife and three daughters and works as a college and high school English teacher and translator.