STRANGER TO HER PEOPLE

                                                  

 

 Jenny stopped outside a door and checked the paper she held in her hand. It was the same address. She cau­tiously opened the door and looked around. Nothing seemed to be going on. She had expected to see a lighted hall but found only a darkened doorway. She looked down at the paper to double check the address, and a door at the end of the hallway suddenly opened. A young man stepped out. He looked no older than seventeen, with blond hair clipped short at the sides, wearing jackboots and a bomber jacket adorned with an SS emblem. He looked Jenny over before nodding his head and heading towards the front door.

Pulling together all her courage, Jenny drew in a deep breath and walked through the door. She found herself, unnoticed, in a fairly large hall and quickly slipped into a seat in a row near the back. Someone was making a rousing speech in German, but Jenny could not quite understand it. She looked around. At the back of the speaker on the stage were three ceiling-to-floor narrow banners of bright red. In the centre of each was a white circle, and in the centre of each circle was a black swastika.

Jenny shivered as she gazed around at the people. It was the faces of the younger people that caught her atten­tion, the faces of the young neo-Nazis and skinheads. Their faces were permeated with hatred. Faces, which otherwise would have been good-looking, were transformed into portraits of cruelty and ugliness.

She remembered what she had heard from one of her fellow university lecturers about the simple German or   Polish or Ukrainian soldier who had taken part in the practical aspects of the killing and cruelty. After the war, they had come home unable to forget their taste for blood, their sadism smouldering under the ashes of defeat to arise in white fury at any opportunity. Violence and hatred had been brought into their homes and in fact had never left them. Here was the outcome. Here was the younger gen­eration, so filled with burning hate that nothing was sacred to them.

Jenny trembled. Here she was, a Jew, in a hall filled with Nazis. She took refuge in the fact that they would never suspect she was Jewish. No one in this country knew, not even her uncle. She was quite safe.

Another speaker took the podium and began to speak about a glorious, united Germany. His presentation was powerful and dynamic, yet elementary enough for Jenny to understand.

"All you have to do to see what is wrong with Germany today is to come out of the railroad station of any big city and look at the crowds on the streets," he began. "Some­times you wonder if there are any Germans left at all. Everything is in foreign hands."

Jenny noticed the people around her nodding their heads vigorously in assent.

"We want Germany in German hands!" the speaker shouted, raising a clenched fist in the air. "This is our country. This is our land. This is Aryan land. We will not hand it over to foreigners.

“ We will not surrender to the Turks or the Vietnamese or the Jews. Germany has become the crown colony of Judas, but we will snatch it back. This is the hallowed soil which we have sanctified with our blood, our loyalty and our obedience. This is the land of our noble ancestors, those courageous warriors to whom these forests and mountains gave birth. We will fight for this land. Germany is ours!" His voice rose in excitement, then modulated down to a whisper and then rose again. The crowd was mesmerized.

STRANGER TO HER PEOPLE

First Edition Published and distributed
in the U.S., Canada and overseas by
C.I.S. Publishers and Distributors
 Lakewood, New Jersey 08701
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number
93-72273

Later published with Create Space

 Independent Publishing Platform

"What's going on?" Mr. Taub asked.

 "Nothing very serious," Rabbi Davis replied. "It looks like we're going to have a longer stopover in Zurich than expected. The plane carrying the American group we're supposed to hook up with has engine trouble. The plane will apparently be delayed for several hours. We're going to have to wait for them before continuing on to Denmark. Accommodations are going to be provided for the eight hours in a downtown hotel."

Most of the people groaned.

     "Why can't they just meet us in Denmark?" asked a middle-aged woman with bleached blond hair.

"Don't be silly, Myra," responded the man next to her.

"This actually may work out better for me," Jenny whispered to Dina. "I can contact my aunt now. Maybe I can even visit her."

      "That's great," Dina said. "If you go, I'll save a bed in my hotel room for when you come back."

Jenny Reynolds, a young South African convert to Judaism, was full of eager anticipation as she set out from Johannesburg on the "March of the Living" tour. Over the next few weeks, as part of an organized groups of thousands of holocaust survivors and their families, she would visit the scenes of the German destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War. It promised to be a profound intellectual and emotional experience, an experience that would be burned into her memory for the rest of her life. Her pilgrimage to the scenes of the holocaust does indeed become an experience that she would never forget, but in a very unexpected way. During an unscheduled overnight stopover in Switzerland, Jenny is shocked to discover that there may be a dark secret buried in her family's past 
This is the original version of Stranger to her People, edited and published by CIS

CreateSpace eStore: https://www.createspace.com/3818274

   

  “But there is nothing here. There's nothing left. Can this be Treblinka?" Dina gazed about at the green trees and lush grass. The she looked to the right and left of her at the thousands of marchers, all in blue jackets, like a living stream pouring across the once deadly land.

       "It was destroyed," Jenny explained. "The Germans destroyed it themselves in 1943. They didn't want anyone ever to find out about it. Even when it was in existence, no planes were allowed to fly over it, no unauthorized person was allowed near it." She looked around in amazement. "Now, there is nothing."

       Across the lawns were concrete slabs marking the path of the train lines. Now it was an attractive little station with   flowers in neat window boxes, sixty miles northwest of Warsaw. This was the other end of the train lines they had seen in Warsaw.

Jenny looked at it, remembering what she had read. This is where the trains arrived, the trains that brought Jews from Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Bul­garia and Greece. Three to four trains arrived daily, sixty cars in each train, eighty to a hundred and fifty prisoners in each car. For hours, sometimes days, these trains stood on sidetracks to allow other transports to pass, while inside the passengers were dying of hunger and thirst.

From the moment the trains stopped, the doors were pulled open and the victims were roughly pulled out and beaten. Treblinka prided itself on the efficiency and speed with which it fulfilled its task of extermination. Men and women were quickly separated and families broken up. They were forced to undress and bring their clothing to a large pile. There they were given string to tie their shoes together to assist the sorters at a later stage. The women's hair was cut off and glasses, teeth, etc., were removed and collected.

Naked and barefoot, regardless of the weather, they would be forced along the "Pathway to Heaven," bitten and torn by wild dogs, whipped and beaten by the guards lining the one hundred-and-fifty-yard path. This path led to the gas chambers.

With Special Thanks to:

    Rabbi Isadore Rubenstein,

    Division of Informal Jewish Education.

    S.A. Board of Jewish Education..

    - who shared his experiences on

      "The March of the Living".