By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — It’s one thing to visit in a synagogue and talk with God about life and death, fate and fortune, mortality and miracles, cruelty and compassion. It’s another thing to share this conversation with a sweet old man who has experienced all of these things and could easily debate with God on every score.
On a recent Shabbat, I was invited to sit with such a man, consecrate life at his side, chant the blessing over the Torah scroll as he watched, and mourn the dead in the same cadenced devotion as this man who survived five Nazi death camps and today is a benefactor of human kindness.
There is nothing but tenderness in the eyes of Lou Dunst, now in his late eighties, with a voice as soft and a manner as considerate as the European genocide of the Jews was blood-curdling and ruthless. He has traveled the world with his story of both unimaginable horrors and mind-boggling survival; he has inspired youngsters to do good works and he has moved police officers and Navy Seals to tears and reflection. He needs to tell the story, I think, or the story will consume him.
What do you think about when you commiserate with God next to a man who doesn’t understand why God spared him while the world was choking and smoldering with hate and murder? That there really is a God? Or that God is an illusion, a device for the rationalization of the most ungodly things? That life is the most hopeless of enterprises where evil wins and hate vanquishes and violence reigns and war is unchecked?
Or that life is the most precious of things, made sacred by each breath of a kindly man who was dug out, all but lifeless, from among a tower corpses of stinking to death and thrown into the sewers of hell while the Allies advanced with their tanks and the Germans were retreating with their secrets?
“I’m not an educated man,” says Lou to me in almost a whisper, though he matriculated through the University of Hate. “You know, the Germans closed the schools to us.” Indeed: Jewish children were banned from schools, playgrounds, ice cream shops, from having books, shoes, hopes, and dreams. The Gestapo would roam the streets of Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia and so many other nations, randomly shooting kids, raping their sisters, and beating their fathers to death. Their crime: being Jewish.
Lou survived, in an astounding escape from the pyramid of the dead, by virtue of a valorous and quick-thinking US serviceman as well as the uncanny (God-directed?) search through the right pile of corpses just in the nick of time by his own brother. He has dedicated his life for the last seventy years to charity, education, restoring burnt Torah scrolls, and rebuilding devastated synagogues in Europe and elsewhere.
Why does he do it? “I was delirious and just cried out to God, ‘let me live, so I can tell the story!’”
And we are all blessed that it wasn’t Six Million and One.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com