I cannot write a review of this Holocaust memoir. I cannot write a review of a single chapter. I cannot even review a single page. That is because a couple of sentences tell the whole story of the Holocaust. Sentences of this sort appear on page after page of this memoir by Joseph Rebhun, MD. Do we really lack knowledge of Nazism and of its evil if all we have are these short sentences from his Leap to Life?
LEFT (creased photo): The author’s sister Clara and his sister-in-law on an outing with their children in Cracow. The author is in the double-breasted jacket. He carried this photo in his knapsack until he was liberated in 1945. That is why it is creased.
RIGHT: The author’s sister Clara and her husband Israel Hoben. Both were killed by the Nazis in Belzec.
BOTTOM: The author’s brother Isaac J. Rebhun, MD, his wife Eva, and daughter Nunka. They were all killed by the Nazis in Treblinka.
One day the news spreads that, not far from the city [Przemysl, Poland], a train loaded with ammunition has exploded. This is probably the work of guerrillas. Before we have a chance to confirm the news independently, German soldiers pick up a number of Jews from the streets, lead them with raised arms to an execution place, and shoot them all.
Or these sentences:
I want to find out the truth about what has happened to those who were taken to be “resettled.” The woman . . . tells me:
The old ones, the sick, and some children were taken by trucks to the outskirts of the city, Wziesienie. Here they were shot, and the dead and the still living were thrown into prepared graves by Polish and Ukranian members of the work units, Baudienst. . . . Some boys from the Baudienst were assigned to extract any gold teeth or teeth with gold fillings and to remove rings from those who still had them.
Then the Baudienst covered the graves with soil, still wet-brown from all the blood. And the earth moved. . . .
Every Holocaust memoir is the same and every one is different. Among the similarities are the sheer degradation of and brutality against Jews and the unprovoked murder of Jews by both Germans and their many collaborators, the Nazis’ maliciously clever deceptions that entrap Jewish communities in ever small spaces and ultimately in death pits or gas chambers, the (often multiple) odds-defying escapes by the survivors, the inexplicable choices and twists of fate that led some to survive and others not, the survivors’ mixed emotions of profound guilt, elation and surprise, the mind-numbing effects of the survivors’ inconceivable suffering and of the perpetrator’s evil— and, by extension, the mind-numbing effects on the reader of the inconceivable suffering.
Among the uniquenesses of Leap to Life is the author’s capacity to step back from all the evil and suffering around him and inflicted on him.
He understands everything happening around him and to him. He is alert to every change in behavior and mood by the Nazis and by the Judenrat and the Jews around him, including his family members. Yes, he is alert. He hears the rumor of trains packed with human cargo and thenceforth prepares for it. Still in the ghetto he acquires a pocket knife and wire cutters and carries them on his person at all times. He learns the best direction from which to jump from a moving train, which he expects he will need to do (and which, eventually, he does, although by then his wire cutters have been confiscated and somehow he manages to cut a hole in the cattle car’s door with nothing other than a pen knife and then to maneuver his hand outside the car to unhitch the handle that locks the door).
Another uniqueness of Leap to Life is the author’s reflections on the trajectory of Jewish history, of Jewish meaning, of Jewish commitment, amidst the horror.
The snow is melting and the slushy surface of the pavement footprints brings to mind the fragile state of my people. How many of those whose feet left the imprints on the ground will die before signs in the snow that they left behind vanish? I wonder what of us will remain after a thousand years of Jewish existence in Poland? Will the earth be inherited by the Reisners with their Christian upbringing and Teutonic heritage? Will the Nibelungenlied, the German epic poem, replace forever the sounds of the Psalms? Never! If someone gave me a theoretical choice, would I leave the shrinking prison and go over to the camp of the persecutors? Perhaps G-d has forsaken us? Would I change my mother Serel for an Ingrid or my father Baruch for a Hans or a Siegried — or King David for Frederick Barbossa? Never! I shudder and feel nauseated.
Its many reflections and vivid memories notwithstanding, the book is always dominated by its terrifying sentences.
And Reisner, the most feared of the Gestapo, continues to play his games. When he is least expected he appears suddenly on the street like an apparition. A chimera with a human head, he smashes with his fist the face of the first victim he chances to meet. He beats him until the person falls to the ground. He tramples him until Reisner himself is red in the face and covered with sweat. He then finishes the suffering with a bullet.
Rebhun’s suffering is not only physical. Before he jumped from the speeding train to Auschwitz, his mother jumped. Then, the terrain shifted and it became dangerous for him to jump. By the time he did, the train has long left his mother behind, and he had to decide whether to try to reconnoiter the territory to find her, to see whether she was alive or dead, and to stay with her or to bury to her, but it was impossible. He would never make it back. It was too far. He couldn’t recognize the place where she jumped in any case, for they jumped at night (otherwise, they would easily be seen and shot by Nazi guards on the train). He carried with him then and for the rest of his life profound guilt for abandoning his mother.
Amidst his suffering, outer and inner, physical and emotional, amidst his constant strategizing — do I hide in the barn without permission? do I leap on a civilian train even though I have no papers? do I risk a trip to the Gestapo to try to get papers? do I descend to the bunker? do I fraternize with co-workers (in one of many temporary jobs he manages to secure) and risk being exposed as a Jew from my made-up stories about my background, or do I keep silent and raise suspicions that way — amidst all this, he questions his faith. He is a thinking Jew and his fate and the fate of his people make no sense when stacked against his faith.
However, when he is severely beaten, when he is hardly sensate, when the brutal blows are so frequent that he can feel the blows but not the pain, when the dogs plunge their teeth into his flesh and pull it away he can feel the flesh being pulled away but not the pain, when he is hardly conscious and hardly alive, the elements of his faith planted deep in his soul in childhood emerge untainted, unaltered.
In childhood, I learned a prayer personifying G-d’s powers in angels, and I now repeat it constantly. On my right side is Michael, on my left Gabriel, in front of me Uriel, behind me Rafael, and above my head the divine presence. . . . I symbolize the prayer even further, imagining the powers of G-d enveloping me with a protective mantle.
This idea probably helps me to assume an external appearance of strength, fearlessness, and indifference — features that are hard to possess for a Jew who is hunted and, if caught and identified, promised grotesque torture before death.
The sentences are relentless:
“Sit down,” orders Goral. I do not remember the entire conversation, but the following question stands out in my mind. “Tell me, Mr. Rebhun,” says Goral, “what do you think and how would you judge the fate of the Jews?”
They are putting me to the test before they deliver me to the Gestapo, I think. “The Jews got what they deserved,” I say, and I feel a burning hell of humiliation consuming me.
They let me go. But why? Do they want only to scare me or to humiliate me, or are they not certain whether I am Jewish?
Rebhun’s reflections, burning in their honesty, soften once for him and once for me — two instances of light in this riveting, impossibly gut-wrenching memoir.
The light for Rebhun: humanity. He recounts the way he, beaten to a pulp, was treated by a Polish physician, Dr. Bylina, who, unbeknownst to Rebhun at the time, knew that his patient was Jewish, and treated him anyway, thus risking his life.
Astonishingly, many years later, Rebhun, now an MD himself, rediscovers Bylina, who asks Rebhun to treat his own daughter, who suffers from allergies and asthma, which make her dependent on cortisone.
Rebhun had trusted Bylina. Now Bylina trusts Rebhun, whose treatment cures Bylina’s daughter.
The light for me: justice. Rebhun recounts his testimony at the trials of the Nazi Reisner in 1968 and the trial of another Gestapo man, Walter Stegemann, in 1980. Stegemann was charged with the annihilation of 20,000 Jews in Rebhun’s home town, Przemysl. As Rebhun entered the German hall of justice, Rebhun feared for his life. Perhaps he would be shot — the witness eliminated. He measured his pulse. It was 120. “I heard my voice answering the questions of the presiding judge. . . . I felt as if I were beaming down to earth a story that I had experienced on another planet, a story that my audience [in the courtroom] found difficult to imagine.”
Another sentence:
Perhaps [G-d] bit His fingers in shame for this species that dared to say that a man like the one who sat to the left of me [Stegemann] had been created in His image. My G-d, I share your shame.
Later, Rebhun testifies against a more famous Nazi, Josef Schwammberger, who evaded justice for 40 years by hiding in Argentina.
Stegemann and Schwammberger get life in prison. Small, too late, almost a desecration of its own, given the enormity of their crimes, nonetheless, their ultimate fate is, in Leap to Life, a light.
One more sentence:
I am alone among strangers on this planet, not believing that there are any other Jews left alive, or that I can find the right path through the wilderness to break out of the vicious world that surrounds me. . . . I pass individuals on the street who look like members of my own human species, but I am as scared of them as I am of rabid animals.
© IJN 2024
