thousand Jewish children were sent to Great Britain, without their parents, from Austria, Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Elsa made the journey with one of the children of Robert Wasselberg, who had to decide which of his three children would take the last spot available on a Kinder Transport.
Arno Klarsfeld is the son of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, who dedicated their lives to hunting down Nazi war criminals. Arno said that he “broke intellectually and morally” with France in September 2001, after the attacks on the Twin Towers. He moved from Paris to a small apartment in Tel Aviv, refusing the subsidies provided for immigrants and taking up the study of Hebrew. He was outside the Mike’s Place pub in Tel Aviv on April 30, 2003, right after an attack by a suicide bomber with an English passport who had come from London to massacre Jews. Those charred bodies, those human remains lying there on the pavement, gave Arno the last push toward enlisting in the Israeli army. One of those lifeless bodies was that of Yanay Weiss, the son of Lipa Weiss.
The saga of Lipa Weiss is emblematic of how much the survivors of the crematory ovens have suffered from Islamic fanaticism. He was fourteen years old when he was deported to Auschwitz, where in a few hours he saw his entire family vanish in the gas chambers—his parents, his grandparents, his brothers and sisters. After the war, he joined a kibbutz in Israel. Two years before his son Yanay was killed at Mike’s Place, Lipa had lost his granddaughter Inbal in a suicide attack.
Lipa’s story, recounted here at length for the first time, began in Zdeneve, a tiny village in the Carpathians, in December of 1924. “Mine was a classic Jewish family,” he says. “As a child I studied in a cheder; I learned Hebrew and the Bible, translating our sacred language word by word into Yiddish, which was spoken at home. Up until the age of fourteen, I studied at both the Jewish school and the public school. I learned the stories of Adam and Eve, Isaac and Jacob, about how Joseph was sold by his brothers, about the captivity in Egypt, about Moses and the liberation and the conversations with the Pharaoh, the Exodus, the desert and the Ten Commandments, about Joshua at Jericho. These stories were the origin of my faith. Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem were my homeland, and I wanted to see them in person. This was the origin of my faith in Judaism, my faith in God and Jewish values. When I got older, my father questioned me every Sunday morning about the previous week’s reading from the Torah. All this was done in a kind and respectful way, and this instilled in me a profound respect for my father and mother. She cooked my favorite dishes for me when I came back from school.”
Until 1938, under the democratic Czechoslovakian government, the Jews were not discriminated against, and those years had a very strong impact on Lipa’s personality: “Respect for Shabbat, the prayers in the synagogue, strengthened my faith in a merciful God, and this would give me the strength to confront the horrific period that would follow. I believed that God would save us.”
The Weisses went through years of dire poverty. “Farming was the way of life in our region, growing potatoes for domestic consumption, and working in the forests. There were no industries or businesses. The Jews sold basic necessities to non-Jews. When Hungary came back to power in 1939, new economic laws were imposed on the Jews. The men, including my father, were conscripted to work on the fortifications, because we were on the border between Poland and Hungary. My family was not able to support itself, and since I was the oldest child I went to work in the forests to permit my mother to buy oil, sugar, and salt. We had two cows, and they gave us about a gallon of milk a day. We also had the potatoes that my parents grew in a little garden plot. Over time we were even able to buy clothes, which were mended and passed from one child to another.”
With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Nazis and the Soviets, the Polish region on the border with Hungary was put under Soviet control. And the Jews were accused of being Communist spies. “The most difficult thing was proving Hungarian citizenship from generation to generation, and it was too expensive to bribe the official,” Lipa recalls. “My father returned home for the feasts of Rosh Hashanah and Passover, and two more children were born.” During that period, the fate of the Jews was bound to the success of the Germans. The worse the war went, the more ferocious the SS became. “After the fall of Stalingrad in 1943 and the beginning of the German retreat, the Nazis started to deport the Jews to Ukraine, and the Ukrainians killed them by every means possible. They took families out onto the Dniester River, or killed them in the forests with axes and knives. When the Russians approached our area, the Jews were banned from leaving the villages. I was allowed to work in the forests, but not to enter a non-Jewish house.”
The Hungarian regime under Horthy understood that the war was coming to an end, and withdrew its army to the east. The Germans entered, and together with the Hungarian fascists they began to confine the Jews to ghettos. “In April of 1944, at the end of Passover, when my father was at home, we were told to pack our bags, one bag weighing forty pounds for each person, and to get ready to leave our home. The next day we were deported to the ghetto of a city named Mukachevo. There was no water, no bathrooms or kitchens. Whole families packed together, one next to another. There were no medicines, and the sick died, the elderly died. Every day the bodies were burned in the communal crematory in the cemetery. We cooked potatoes and beans, and every day a list was drawn up of the people to be deported to Auschwitz.”
Lipa Weiss would be one of the few Jewish survivors of the death machine of Adolf Eichmann, who deported the entire Hungarian Jewish community to the gas chambers. The Ungarische Aktion was the apex of the German capacity for extermination. About one-third of the victims of Auschwitz came from Hungary. Twelve thousand Hungarian Jews arrived every day, and Eichmann needed just twenty officers and a hundred functionaries to annihilate one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe.
Lipa remembers very clearly the time he saw the SS: “They were looking for the important men in the community. They pulled them out of the roll-call line, in front of their wives and children, and began to torture them. They ordered them to remove their hats, cut off their beards, and whipped them to the point of exhaustion. For us, these men were the highest authorities, models of honesty, morality, and piety, and they were publicly humiliated. When they were no longer able to react, they were left to die where they were lying. The stronger ones, who stayed alive longer, were shot. On the lists were the names of the people to be deported—entire families, the sick, pregnant women, the elderly.”
Then came the day of deportation. “No one was allowed to bring more than ten pounds of luggage. There was barbed wire on the boxcar windows, and when the deportation began the German and Hungarian prisoners began shouting. Everyone, regardless of age or physical ability, had to get into the boxcars. An SS official checked to make sure they were full. We had no food or water. We didn’t know where they were taking us, but we were on the train for four days. At the few stops, they threw out the urine and feces. Without warning, the train arrived at its destination. The doors were opened, and we were ordered to get out fast, without taking anything with us. We came down a ramp, and that was the first time we saw the prisoners who were already there. Their job was to separate the men from the women and children. I don’t know how, but suddenly I found myself among the men. My mother, my seventeen-year-old sister, who was holding my one-year-old brother, and the other children all disappeared, and I didn’t see them anymore. It was night, and they took us away. In a camp, the SS inspected us to see who was able to work. Those who were able went to the right; otherwise they joined the women and children.”
Lipa looked out between two strands of barbed wire. “On my left, I saw the smoke of the crematories, and what looked like dead bodies being lifted by the hands and feet and thrown into the fire. We heard terrible screams. Later we found out that the gas chambers were there. They divided us into groups of ten and ordered us to run. We hadn’t had any food or water. We came to a big shower room, where the men and women were stripped and beaten, and examined to see if they were hiding any valuables. The hot water was turned on for a few minutes, and then suddenly it turned cold. We went into another room where the barbers cut our hair. We were given a uniform, a hat, and an aluminum mess tin. That was all we had left in the world.” The mess tin was the most important thing—without it you didn’t eat. “The next morning, the men and women walked in two parallel lines. I saw the girls from my section, and I could