Not by bread alone

It’s before dawn on Yom Hashoah (27th of Nisan 5771) and the Yahrzeit candles for: my grandmother, Chaya bat Yitzchak; my grandfather, Zvy ben Yosef; and my uncle, Mordechai ben Zvy; are alight nearby. I dedicate this personal note to their memory.

Man does not live by bread alone, but he needs bread in order to aspire to higher aims.

At the seudah shlishit yesterday, Rabbi Freilich asked: what is more important – Yom Hashoah or Yom Ha’atzmaut? I’m certain that they are both absolutely essential, but I feel in my heart that Yom Ha’atzmaut predominates. I wonder why?

Yom Ha’atzmaut follows Yom Hashoah. The latter promises a better future, while the former commemorates a terrible past event. We hope that such a Shoah will never be repeated, however if we don’t remember the past, we are condemned to repeat it.

On the other hand Yom Ha’atzmaut is older than Yom Hashoah. The exodus from Egypt was the birth of Jewish nationhood. We stood as a people and proclaimed that though we are slaves, we are nobler than our wealthy and powerful taskmasters. Our father Abraham loved his fellow man and showed hospitality to desert wayfarers, while our taskmasters worshipped idols and treated their fellow men as cattle. “Love your neighbour as yourself” is greater than wealth and power.

We undertook our first national project: to reject subservience to wealth and power and return to claim the land of Abraham. We sacrificed lambs, which our taskmasters idolised, and the household of Joseph, 70 souls that went to Egypt and had grown to a “mixed multitude” of probably 2-3 million spiritual descendents of Abraham: all ages and from many backgrounds including “converts” (and including 600,000 able-bodied men), stood as one nation.

3,500 years later, this national project to redeem the land of our spiritual forefathers, is still a work in progress. We are still struggling to defend ourselves, our land and our national legitimacy. As we read at our Seder table: “in every generation they rise up against us, to annihilate us…”

Since we left Egypt, we have faced: Amalek; the despots and dictators of the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans; the Spanish Inquisition; the Crusaders; the Tzars; and the Nazis. Today we face the false “mullahs” of Iran; the baby dictator Assad in his fine suits; the thugs and murderers of Hamas and Hezbollah; the genocidal dreams of the murderous, so-called “Palestinian resistance”; their useful idiots around the world who either deceptively pretend to be pursuing “social justice” or stupidly believe that they are; and the just plain antisemites whose hatred blinds them from seeing that we are one people, one nation, one spirit. We conclude our Seder with Had Gadya to remind ourselves of this on-going parade of enemies.

Yom Hashoah is emblematic of the inhuman tyranny that stands against us. Yom Ha’atzmaut is our antidote.

The Rabbis who proclaimed 27th of Nisan as Yom Hashoah, sandwiched as it is between Pesach and Yom Ha’atzmaut, did so for this reason. We stood as one, first in Egypt. Then despite tribulations like the Shoah, we continue to aspire to higher aims. But just as we took the remains of Joseph with us from Egypt to Israel, we also carry with us the souls of all the loved ones we have lost, on our way to celebrating Yom Ha’atzmaut

We continue our national project: to reclaim the land of our father Abraham as our national homeland. But we do so, not because we aspire to wealth, nor to power. We don’t wish to rule over others, but we will defend ourselves, because only by having our feet rooted firmly in the earth, can we hold our head and hearts above the clouds. Only thus can we ensure that the spirit of Abraham, who loved others as himself, and every soul that is with his, will endure forever and in the world to come, when nation will no longer lift up sword against nation.

Man does not live by bread alone, but he needs bread in order to aspire to higher aims.

Jerusalem Day at the Western Wall

Tonight I celebrated the 43rd anniversary of the re-unification of Jerusalem amongst my People at the Western Wall. The plaza was filled with tens of thousands of people, from babes in arms to the elderly, shoulder to shoulder, waving flags, dancing and singing songs of praise to our beloved city...

AM YISROEL CHAI!
OD AVINU CHAI!

An Inspiration to us all

Srulec (Yisrael ben Zvy z"l) - Haifa, January 1976

By the time my father, “Srulec” was in his mid-teenage years, the Nazis had forcibly moved his family from their farm in south-east Poland to the Rzeszow Ghetto. The men were marched out to forced labour daily, under guard.

One day, Srulec was singled out of a column of inmates, and accused of smuggling. The Nazi guard was about to shoot him in the head before a superior officer intervened. In fact he survived another 60 years, and died ten years ago, in Perth, of a heart attack. His life is an inspiration to us all.

Srulec was enslaved to the Nazis in construction at Jasionka Airport, tree felling at Huta Komorowska (where he was separated from the only remaining family survivor), at Plaszow labour camp and then the Mathausen Concentration Camp complex in North Austria, where, at the horrific “death-by-work” camp, Gusen 2, he laboured in the subterranean aircraft assembly works code-named Bergkristall. He suffered inhumane conditions, vicious physical abuse and psychological torture. More than half of the prisoners at that camp died of exhaustion, of epidemics due to the disastrous hygienic conditions, were tortured to death, shot by SS guards, or were gassed. The typical life expectancy was 3-4 months. Srulec miraculously survived there for nine months.

Towards the end of the war, he was in a group of prisoners that the Gestapo attempted to bury alive with explosives in the Bergkristall tunnels, before being marched to the hidden forest camp at Gunzkirchen to be starved to death.

Major Cameron Coffman was the commanding officer of the US troops that liberated Gunzkirchen Lager on 4th May 1945. That day he wrote:

“… Nazism at its worst was unfolded in stark reality before Doughboys of the 71st Infantry Division today when they stumbled upon a carefully concealed concentration camp six kilometers north of Lambach, Austria, which held 18,000 persons ... The living and dead evidence of horror and brutality beyond one's imagination was there, lying and crawling and shuffling, in stinking, ankle-deep mud and human excrement. …Row upon row of living skeletons, jammed so closely together that it was impossible for some to turn over, even if they could have generated enough strength to do so, met our eyes. Those too weak to move defecated where they lay. The place was crawling with lice. …A little girl, doubled with the gnawing pains of starvation, cried pitifully for help. A dead man rotted beside her…”

After liberation, Srulec resolved to make Aliya. He arrived in Israel in 1947, where he served in the Haganah for seven years. He made his home in an abandoned single-room apartment in the old, stone port of Jaffa, and drove giant Brockway trucks transporting supplies in defiance of the siege of Jerusalem, in the Negev, and in the Galil.

In 1949 Srulec married and started a family. In 1955, with his young, pregnant wife and 5-year-old son, he immigrated to Perth to join his brother, who had also miraculously survived.

Immediately after arriving in Perth, Srulec’s daughter was born. He found work as a mechanic, but resigned within months, as soon as he had saved enough to put a deposit on an old Bedford truck which he used to start his one-man business collecting bottles, scrap metal, and batteries, and eventually buying wool. His burning ambition now was to give his children the life and particularly the education he had never enjoyed himself.

For 35 years Srulec travelled to Southern Cross and other rural districts buying and selling wool in ever increasing quantities. His wool-buying business was a modest, but solid success. It underpinned the material security of his new family, which grew as the children married and had children. He acquired real estate assets including farming and rental properties. For the whole of his life, until his sudden death on 30th September 1999, he carefully guarded these achievements so that he could live independently and provide support, if needed, to his two children and six grandchildren. In retirement, his life was totally dedicated to them.

Srulec’s lifelong motivation, which he pursued with a fierce and relentless determination forged in fire, was to rebuild and strengthen his family and Yiddishkeit, which the Nazis had tried to destroy.

We commemorate the tenth yahrzeit of Srulec (Yisrael be Zvy) on Hoshana Raba (9th October 2009).

May his memory be a blessing, and an inspiration to us all.

May their memories be for a blessing

Today on Yom Hashoah (27th of Nisan) I wish to honour the memory of

Hersz Lieblich צבי בן יוסף
Chaja Lieblich (Bratshpis) חיה בת יצחק
Moniek Lieblich מרדכי בן צבי

...and to transmit the light of their yahrzeit candles around the world.

































I'd like to share with you some words I spoke on the occasion of the consecration of a memorial, on Friday 26th December 2008, at Karrakatta Cemetery in Western Australia.

...They were the grandparents and uncle of my cousins Anne and Karen, and my sister Helen and I …three gitte neshumes, simple folk from a farming region in the south-east of Poland, who died as martyrs …al kiddush Hashem, probably in July 1942, when their Ghetto was transported to the Belzec death camp.

...we are thankful, and feel privileged, that we can place a memorial to them here at Karrakatta, close to where we laid our fathers to rest a few years ago.

…Obviously we never met these ancestors, because they were murdered before we were born, however I think it’s appropriate to tell you a little of what we know about them.

Hersz Lieblich

My grandfather Hersz Lieblich was born c1890. He was a farmer and a grain dealer in the village of Kamien, just north of Rzeszow.

When Dad and I visited Hersz’s farm in northern summer of 1990, it was full of strawberries. Perhaps he also grew strawberries in his time. He certainly grew beans, because during that visit, a neighbour recalled that when the Nazis came to evict the family from their home, Hersz ran and hid in the bean fields.

I gather from this anecdote that Hersz didn’t readily submit to Nazi authority.

Chaja Lieblich (Bratshpis)

Hersz’s wife, my grandmother, Chaja, was born in Stobierna, also near Rzeszow, in 1896. We recently discovered that her grandfather Mordechai emigrated to Philadelphia in 1914, following six of his children, and leaving the seventh child Isaak (Chaja’s father) in charge of their horse-trading business. Mordechai purchased a ticket to also bring Chaja to USA, but she never used it.
I guess her emigration was prevented by the Great War, after which she fell in love, married Hersz, and went on to have three sons with him: Josef (Yossel), Israel (Srulec) and their youngest, Mordechai (Moniek).

I gather that Chaja was a seamstress, because a neighbour told us in 1990 that she still had a handkerchief that Chaja had made her.

Moniek Lieblich

Moniek was born c1925-6, almost certainly not long after Chaja’s grandfather died in Philadelphia, and so he was also named Mordechai after that patriarch.

He was about Bar Mitzvah age when the Nazis evicted the family from their farm and forcibly transferred them to the Rseszow Ghetto.

Their Deaths
In the Ghetto, the elder boys, Yossel and Srulec were forced to work for the Nazis. They were on a work detail at nearby Jasionka Airport, for several months, at which time the Ghetto was transported to the Belzec Death Camp.

History shows that it was a particularly brutal transport, with the residents of the Ghetto being herded through the town to the railway by the Nazis and the local population who jeered and beat them in the street.

Some of the leaders of the Ghetto were killed in the town or in the nearby Glogow Forest. I imagine that perhaps the rebellious Hersz died that way, in his early fifties.

Chaja, then 46 years old and her 13-or-14-year-old son, Moniek were probably herded onto the train and gassed to death at Belzec soon after that.

When our fathers Yossel and Srulec were brought back to the Ghetto from Jasionka, their parents and brother were gone.

Rebuilding the family
Yossel and Srulec survived the Shoah and eventually settled here in Perth to rebuild their lives.

I’m sure that Hersz, Chaja and Moniek would be satisfied that their surviving sons raised four children and ten grandchildren, all true to the tradition from which they sprang.

They are in our thoughts, together with Yossel and Srulec, each time we name a new-born child, celebrate a Bar/Bat Mitzvah, or celebrate a marriage. With each milestone the family grows stronger and builds anew on what was destroyed.

...We are proud that, the family is going from strength to strength …and that Am Yisroel Chai, v’Kayam!

Bridging the generations

A personal note, 15 June 2008:

I recently discovered another branch of our family, consisting of over 200 relatives, in the USA. The last time that the two branches had been in contact was four generations ago, in 1914. Why is this important?

There are over 75 Jewish Genealogical Societies world-wide: 50 in the U.S. and Canada, plus in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Netherlands, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and Venezuela. They are active societies, holding conferences and workshops, meeting regularly, and publishing newsletters. They have established web sites and searchable web indexes of old records, to facilitate the identification and location of relevant documents, many of them handwritten. Some of these web sites also facilitate contact between researchers who, unknown to each other, may be researching similar family names in a geographic region.

Why do people spend time and effort tracing their roots, finding information about their ancestors, and piecing together their family narrative over many generations?

What we each do in our lives is based on what our parents did before us, and for us; and it sets the scene for how our children will behave after us. We each contribute to our families’ and our people’s history and destiny.

In each generation, when they rise up against us, our enemies try to disconnect us from this shared history. The Assyrians scattered ten tribes, which are now lost to Klal Yisrael forever. Hitler tore a gaping hole in the heart of our people: burning books and murdering millions.

We, the generation after Hitler, are the remnants, the scattered fragments of generations before us. But even when a book is burnt by a tyrant, the wisdom of the book cannot be destroyed. Even in the gas chambers and crematoria, the neshamot of the martyrs endure. If we don’t abandon them, the wisdom of our forefathers will build a better world and their legacies will flourish. We, the remnants, remain connected to our shared destiny, at least spiritually.

And so I encourage my children to cherish their identity and their proud heritage.

I also rake over the ashes of the Shoah seeking to connect to previous generations and to honour the memories of my late father Israel (“Srulec”) Lieblich (Yisrael ben Zvy) and my late Uncle Joe Liblich (Josef ben Zvy), who, as far as we knew, had been the only living remnants of our paternal line.

I was researching our family history, when I crossed paths with another researcher, Joe from Philadelphia, on the same web site (which automatically informed each of us that the other was searching for the same surname in the same area.)

Joe is the grandson of one of six siblings who came to Philadelphia from Galicia, at the turn of the century. Their father (Joe’s great grandfather), Markus (Mordechai) Bratspis, joined them in 1914, aged 61. The passenger manifest establishes that he was a “trader” who left a son “Bratshpis Is.” in Stobernia, Galicia. Bank records also show that immediately after arriving in the USA, Markus bought a ticket for a “Chaie Bratspis”, then 18 years old, to be delivered to “Isak Bratspis” in Stobierna.

On the other hand, my father told me that his mother’s name was Chaya Bratshpis. (Both my sister and first cousin are named after her.) Her father was Yitzchak, and they were from Stobierna. My Uncle Joe was born in 1923, my father in 1924 and they had a third, younger brother Moniek (Mordechai ben Zvy), born probably in 1925-6. (Dad and Uncle Joe survived the Shoah. Their parents Zvy and Chaya, and brother Mordechai, were lost.)

The documents, and other anecdotal clues, prove that the seventh child, “Isak”, who Markus left behind in Stobierna, to look after their horse trading business, was my great grandfather Yitzchak (the father of Chaya, my grandmother). Any plans for her to travel to USA was probably prevented by the outbreak of the First World War, then by Chaya’s marriage to my grandfather Zvy. Furthermore, as Markus died in 1925, it seems likely that Chaya named her third son, who was born shortly afterwards, “Mordechai” in honour of her grandfather in Philadelphia.

My own son Samuel Mordechai is named after my uncle Mordechai, and so therefore, in turn, after the patriarch of the extended family in Philadelphia, Markus (Mordechai) Bratshpis.
And thus, the spiritual connection, which was always there, has been tangibly re-created. As one friend said, it’s like the resurrection of the dead. What was just ethereal - a dream - has been made into flesh and blood.
In the coming weeks, my son Judah hopes to visit this new-found branch of our family. When he does, please G-d, he will bridge five generations of separation.


The following are the only known pre-Shoah photos of relatives of Joe and Srulec Lieblich, who survived the Shoah and lived in Perth.























Sheva Weintraub (nee Bratshpis) c1940. Sheva is sister of Chaya Bratshpis, mother of Joe and Srulec Lieblich. Sheva and Chaya’s grandfather Markus Bratshpis, followed six of his children to Philadelphia in 1914, leaving his seventh child, and their father, Isak, in Galicia to look after the family’s horse trading business.

















Summer Picnic in Galicia c1930. From L to R: (unknown), Shmuel, Leah*, (unknown), (redhead- name not recalled), Ephraim*, Tsluva*, Chaim Weintraub (brother of Hirsch, who married Sheva Bratshpis - Chaim is the only person in these photos known to have survived the Shoah.), "Lum-e (lame) Zaylig", Getzel*, Shloime(?)*

[*cousins of Joe and Srulec Lieblich, who survived the Shoah and lived in Perth]

The Shemini Yahrzeit

...and now, something personal, written 2 October 2007:

I returned a few weeks ago from a visit to the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp in North Austria and the nearby sites of various “death-by-work” sub-camps where my father had been a prisoner. He would have certainly died there, in Gunzkirchen near Wels, but for the 71st Infantry Division of the US Army who discovered the forest camp where he had been marched in the last days of the war, along with thousands of other prisoners, to be starved to death in wooden barracks, a short walk from Red Cross stores laden with food.

Several people have commented that this emotionally-charged visit must have been difficult for me. It wasn’t. I stayed at a business-class hotel in Linz, overlooking the Danube, and I moved around the various sites, museums and the documentary archives in Vienna, in physical comfort and safety, despite remnants of anti-Semitism that are still obvious in the area. I feel privileged to research, explore and better understand what my father experienced.

Last year at the time of Dad’s Yahrzeit[1], on Hoshana Raba, the seventh day of Sukkot[2], I felt that that seventh Yahrzeit was a very important milestone; a significant new stage in my life. I asked myself: what is my responsibility? What is my mission? What can I learn from Dad’s life?

Now Dad’s eighth Yahrzeit is approaching, tomorrow. What does this shmenini[3] milestone mean to me?

The day after tomorrow is Shemini Atzeret [the Eighth Day of Assembly]. At the time of the Temple the nation gathered in Jerusalem for Sukkot. Afterwards the nation will not gather again in Jerusalem until Pesach. Shemini Atzeret adds to Sukkot and delays the dispersal briefly. We linger in the sukkah, reluctant to part. We express the same feeling by reciting Yizkor that day. We are reluctant to part with our loved ones…

The eighth day of Pesach is also a shemini milestone. On the seventh day of Pesach the Red Sea split… a miracle so great that the entire Jewish people declared ze Eli (“This is my G-d”). So why do we say that the eighth day of Pesach surpasses the seventh? In Parshat Beshelach[4] it is written that “… Israel saw the mighty hand which the Hashem had wielded against the Egyptians, and the people revered the Hashem[5], and believed in the Hashem,” why is “believed” used? If we actually “saw” the miracle why did we have to also “believe”? But even a miracle doesn’t fully express Hashem’s essence: the promise of a better world to come. We saw the miracle, and we also believed in a better future. This is also why on that day we read a Haphtorah [6]with prophecies of when “a wolf will dwell with a lamb” and “a small child will lead them”. So the eighth day of Pesach is at a higher level than the seventh.

Yet another shemini milestone is Parshat Shemini[7], which is read on the Shabbat[8] immediately after Pesach. Here shemini refers to the eighth day of the consecration of the altar in the temple. During the seven preceding days Moses ministered in the consecration, but on the seventh day Hashem told Moses that his brother Aaron would take over. He was to be the Cohen Hagadol (High Priest). The words ki hayom Hashem nira uleikhem (“for to-day the Lord appears to you”) indicate that despite all the sacrifices and efforts of the inaugural seven days, Hashem’s presence was felt only when Aaron put on the robes of Cohen Hagadol, on the eighth day. The inaugural seven days of consecration refer to the ultimate of human efforts. However, the eighth day refers to a level that transcends human efforts…a greater potential. And “all the people saw and gave praise and fell on their faces.”

And so shevi’i (seven) refers to the complete natural order. (Seven days in a week, seven years to the Shmitta[9] year.) Shemini (eight) refers to a level that transcends the natural order: is not bound by finite constraints. It hints at the better world to come, the ultimate achievement of tikkun olam. This is why the Mashiach[10] is also called the 8th of the princes of men; and why the Temple kinor (violin) had 7 strings, but the kinor in the days of Mashiach will have 8 strings.

And so on my father’s shemini Yahrzeit, I feel able to rejoice in his memory. I feel confident in the future.

I’m proud of his resilience and consequent survival; proud that he emerged from the Shoah, like steel from the hottest fire: a paragon of strength and determination. I’m proud that he rushed from Europe to Eretz Yisrael [11]to defend the rebirth of the nation. He has led us, by his example, to continue to defend the nation and Klal Yisrael[12].

I’m thankful that he chose a safe haven in Australia, a land of freedom in which our family is regaining its strength and numbers, and a land which is amongst Israel’s best friends. I truly believe that I, and my children, can and will make a difference in contributing towards tikkun Olam[13]. We are all privileged to build on his achievements and thankful for the capability to now act in his stead.

[1] Yahrzeit – the Jewish custom of annual commemoration of the death of a parent, sibling or child. The commemoration is in accordance with the lunar calendar, as is the determination of the Jewish festivals.
[2] Sukkot – the feast of the Tabernacles.
[3] Shemini – eighth
[4] Parshat Beshelach – portion of the Torah: Exodus 13:17-17:16
[5] Hashem – “the name” (the Almighty …)
[6] Haphtorah – a reading from the Prophets
[7] Parshat Shemini – portion of the Torah: Leviticus 9:1-11:47
[8] Shabbat – the sabbath
[9] Shmitta – the sabbatical year (every seven years) when the land lies fallow.
[10] Mashiach – the Messiah
[11] Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel.
[12] Klal Yisrael – refers to the Jewish world globally and all-inclusively.
[13] tikkun Olam – “repairing the world”, refers to doing good deeds and making the world a better place for all.

Not Forgotten

...and now something personal: a sequel to a posting last October dedicated to the memory of my father Yisrael ben Zvy [Israel ("Srulec") Lieblich] (6th June 1924 – 30th September 1999). This is from an article on a JewishGen Web site about "The Forgotten Camps". I have just now learned with the assistance of the Mauthausen Museum that this is the camp from which my father was liberated on 9th May 1945....

Ebensee (Austria)
(sub-camp of Mauthausen)
by Mark Vadasz

Location: At the southern tip of the Traun lake aprox. 75 kilometers SW of Linz (Austria).
Established: 18 November 1943
Liberated: 9 May 1945
Estimated number of victims: Aprox. 20.000

Together with the Mauthausen sub-camp of Gusen, Ebensee is considered to be one of the most diabolic concentration camps ever built.











Liberation of Ebensee on May 9th, 1945.


The construction of the sub-camp began in late 1943 and the first 1.000 prisoners arrived on 18 November 1943 from the main camp of Mauthausen and other Mauthausen sub-camps. The main purpose of Ebensee was to provide slave labour for the construction of the enormous underground tunnels in which armament works were to be housed.

After rising at 4:30 A.M. the prisoners dug away at the tunnels until 6 P.M. After some months work was done in shifts 24 hours a day. There was nearly no accomodation to protect the first batch of prisoners from the cold Austrian winter. Thus the death toll increased astronomically. Bodies were piled in heaps and every 3-4 days they were taken to the Mauthausen crematorium to be burned. Ebensee did not yet have its own crematorium. The dead were also piled inside the few huts that existed. The smell of the dead, combined with sickness, phlegmon, urine and faeces, was unbearable. The prisoners wore wooden clogs. When the clogs fell apart the prisoners had to go barefoot. Due to this total illtreatment combined with food allocations consisting of , in the morning: half a liter of ersatz coffee, at noon three-quarters of a liter of hot water containing potato peelings, in the evening 150 grams of bread, the death toll continued to rise. Soon lice infested the camp.

The camp was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, small towers with machine guns and shacks for the SS.

The Mauthausen commendant Franz Ziereis sent his most capable and vicious man to head the camp, Georg Bachmayer. After establishing his rule, he once again returned to Mauthausen and left the camp under the command of an Obersturmfûhrer who proved to be totally deranged. The combination of these two became a reign of terror.
Survivors in Ebensee.

One of their favourite methods of torture was to tie a prisoner´s arms behind him, with the hands side by side and thumb to thumb and then suspend him from a tree about eighteen inches off the ground. Bachmayer would then let his favourite dog, an Alsation called "Lord", loose. The prisoner would be left in this unspeakable torture to die a slow and agonizing death.

In early 1944 a new commandant was appointed in Ebensee, Obersturmfûhrer Otto Riemer. During his period the conditions deteriorated even further. He personally beat, shot and tortured prisoners daily. He openly offered extra cigarettes and leave to those sentries who could account for the largest number of deaths. If a sentry at the end of a day had not a sufficient number to his credit, he would knock off the cap of a prisoner and throw it into a forbidden area. When the prisoner went to retrieve it, he would be shot dead.

Riemer like Bachmayer was a great lover of wine and women, and he would often go to wild drinking parties with some of the younger SS. On one occasion, May 18 1944, he returned to camp after an all-night drinking session with 12 of his SS command. They entered the camp shooting wildly with their pistols and roaring with delight as panic stricken prisoners scurried out of their way. 15 prisoners died as a result of this display.

Eventually the camp expanded and prisoner blocks were established. The leader of block 19 was an extreme sadist. He would wait for his prisoners to return from the day´s toil and then compel them to perform exhausting physical exercises far into the night. The following morning after a sleepless night, the men would be forced out to another full days work. Nearly all the members of his block died from exhaustion within ten days. By this sytem of elimination he had succeeded in killing in a most economical manner and was rewarded. When the sub-camp at Wels was constructed, he became the camp leader.

Ebensee also had its own crematorium. It was built apart from the other buildings with an enormous single chimney which rose high into the air.

Block 23 corresponded to the "Bahnhof" at Gusen or the "Russenlager" at Mauthausen. Here the dead and the living dead were flung together in big heaps. When the camp was at full strength, as many as 600 prisoners lay on the bare floor at one time.

When the war was coming to an end, the mass evacuation from other camps put tremendous pressure on the Mauthausen complex which was the last remaining camp in the area of Nazi power.

The 25 Ebensee barracks were designed to hold 100 prisoners each. At the most they held 750 each. To this number one has to add the prisoners being kept in the tunnel systems and outside under the open sky. The creamatorium was of course unable to keep pace with the deaths.

Naked bodies lay stacked up outside the blocks and the crematorium itself. At the closing weeks of the war, the death rate exceeded 350 a day.To reduce congestion, a ditch was dug outside the camp and the bodies were flung into the quicklime. On one day in april 1945, a record number of eighty bodies were removed from block 23 alone. Amongst the pile, feet were seen to be twitching. During this period, the inmate strength reached a new high of 18.000 prisoners.

US troops liberated Ebensee on May 9, 1945. Around May 19, 1945 Bachmayer commited suicide after first shooting his family. Riemer managed to escape.

The Seventh Yahrzeit

Now, for a change, some personal thoughts, dedicated to the memory of my father Yisrael ben Zvy [Israel ("Srulec") Lieblich] (6th June 1924 – 30th September 1999)....

[For those unfamiliar with Yiddish or Hebrew expressions, there's a glossary below]

I look at the photograph of my father, which arrived this week by email from Austria. He is being attended by medics; a gaunt skeletal figure with a calmly determined face, being literally brought back to life from the brink of death. It’s a photograph he never saw, but which my sister discovered in the Mauthausen Museum 18 months ago; an image captured by US forces when they liberated that concentration camp near Hitler’s home town of Linz: that vicious place of “death by work”, the “mother” camp of human cruelty.

We observed Dad’s seventh Yahrzeit[1] this week. Until now, I’ve thought that his sudden death was just a “short while” ago. Now seven years have passed; no longer such a short while. We count seven days to Shabbat[2]; seven weeks from commemoration of the going out of Egypt[3] to that of the giving of the Torah[4]; seven years to the Shmitta[5] year, when land lies fallow and debts are extinguished. At each of these shevi’i[6] milestones, we forsake the physical and material, and we rely more heavily on the spiritual. We teach ourselves to be unselfish and remember the greater good.

Reb Loewy of Prague in Tiferet Yisrael, chapter forty describes the significance of the number seven. He points out that physical reality as we know it is defined by the number six. It’s the number of physical directions that we wave the four species[7]: front-right-back-left-up-down. On Hoshana Raba[8], the seventh day of Succoth[9] (and the day of Dad’s Yahrzeit) we focus on the seventh dimension, the centre-point, and the point of repose, the holy, and the spiritual. This seventh Yahrzeit seems to me like a very important milestone; a significant new stage in my life.

When Dad died, we lost his physical expressions of love and material support; we had to learn to nurture the memory of his love in our own hearts and to draw spiritual support from his neshama[10]. More than that, we were now called to nurture his neshama by continuing his life’s work, by adopting his mission. Now, seven years later, I feel this message even more strongly. So I ask myself: what is my responsibility? What is my mission?

I can draw so many lessons and so much inspiration from his 75 years of life. 15 years of happy Polish-shtetl childhood in a close-knit extended rural family, six adolescent, earthly years of unspeakable cruelty, horror and the loss of six million during the Holocaust, then 54 years of determined rebuilding initially in Europe, then Israel, then Perth….

I draw the greatest inspiration of all from his decision, immediately after being brought back from the brink of death at Mauthausen, to make Aliya[11]. After his liberation from Mathausen Concentration Camp, his primary motivation was to rebuild the family that Hitler had all but destroyed. But where was he to do this? Where was his “home”? Clearly the village where he grew up to witness his whole extended family cruelly destroyed, would not provide his safe haven. His Yiddishe folke[12] would … He needed to be part of a greater cause, to join with Klal Yisrael [13]in a national project, in order to create a home, to fulfil his own dreams for a new family, and to give meaning to his indestructible, iron will to survive.

He joined the Haganah[14], where he proudly served for seven years, 1947 -1955. It was only after he had started his new family that he realised that although Israel was a paradise compared to the Holocaust, the struggle for survival continued unabated. Israel was surrounded by enemies and life was hard. It was when he received a parcel from American friends, including vitamins for me, his new baby boy, that he determined to emigrate to Australia to join his surviving brother in the new world, where he would not have to rely on charity.

Here in Perth he built his family; two children and six grandchildren. His life was dedicated to us and to the family life he knew: Shabbat, yom-tovim[15], shul [16]…. and to the welfare of Israel.

And so what, now, is my mission? Clearly it is to continue to build the family. This is the primary mission.

But just as Dad recognised a greater cause, that would create the ultimate safe haven for this family: Zionism and the building of Eretz Yisrael[17]; so we can be inspired to a greater cause too: tikkun Olam[18] to create a better world in which the ethics of our fathers, and Eretz Yisrael, are loved and valued; to provide a safe haven for Klal Yisrael.

In a world where Israel’s right to exist is questioned by some, and the UN can’t even define terrorism, let alone defeat it, there is much work to be done. We may not complete the task, but we should not desist from it.

[1] Yahrzeit – the Jewish custom of annual commemoration of the death of a parent, sibling or child. The commemoration is in accordance with the lunar calendar, as is the determination of the Jewish festivals.
[2] Shabbat – the Sabbath.
[3] commemoration of the going out of Egypt – this is done by observing the festival of Pesach or the Passover.
[4] commemoration of the … the giving of the Torah - this is done by observing the festival of Shavuot (“weeks”) seven weeks after Passover.
[5] Shmitta – the sabbatical year (every seven years).
[6] Shevi'i – “seventh”
[7] wave the four species – during the festival of Succoth, Jews wave examples of four species (three types of twig and an Israeli citrus fruit) during prayer.
[8] Hoshana Raba - the seventh day of Succoth.
[9] Succoth – the feast of the Tabernacles.
[10] Neshama – spirit / soul
[11] Aliya – “going up”, refers to emigrating to Israel.
[12] Yiddishe folke – in Yiddish “Jewish folk”, refers specifically to the traditional eastern European Jewish culture.
[13] Klal Yisrael – refers to the Jewish world globally and all-inclusively.
[14] Haganah ­– “defence” refers to the Israel Defence Force, particularly at the time of independence.
[15] yom-tovim – Jewish festivals.
[16] Shul – the synagogue.
[17] Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel.
[18] tikkun Olam – “repairing the world”, refers to doing good deeds and making the world a better place for all.