Stefan Feuchtwang reads a prayer from Belsen
Channel: Mike Cushman
Date: 2022-04-20

Stefan Feuchtwang reads a prayer written by his uncle Rabbi Bernard Davids inside Bergen-Belsen, 1944

My uncle, Rabbi Bernard Davids and another Dutch rabbi composed a prayer in the concentration camp of Bergen Belsen in 1944, for members of their Rotterdam community imprisoned with them. It was added after having said the prayer for blessing unleavened bread, matza, over a dried crust of leavened bread, chametz, despite the commandment to cleanse chametz from the surroundings. The prayer over unleavened bread is to celebrate God’s gift to his chosen people on their journey out of slavery in Egypt. I will read the special prayer in a moment. But first I want to say something about the parallels between the journey from pharaonic oppression, and the journey of so many other refugees from oppression, not to a chosen land but to many welcoming lands.  Matzo is the bread to sustain refugees on their journey, when they cannot bake. But in Belsen the stale crust was the meagre treasure of survival in much more dire circumstances. 

Like the young mothers and their babies seeking refuge from Putin’s devastation of their cities, my mother carried me, but in her case alongside my father, escaping the Gestapo from Berlin to join my father’s mother who had already sought refuge with her daughter Erica married to Rabbi Davids in Rotterdam. We lived for a year from April 1938-39 with Erica and Bernard, their children and my grandmother before my father succeeded in finding a sponsor in London to avoid the Nazi Holocaust that the rest of the household could not escape. Some time after we left, they were hauled off to Westerbork, the Dutch transit camp, and from there in 1944 to Belsen.

My uncle, Bernard Davids and his son, Elija, did not survive Belsen, but his wife, his mother-in-law, and their two daughters Miriam and Shulamid, did. My grandmother was released from Belsen in 1944 in a strange exchange for German Christians in Israel.  Miriam and Shulamid eventually settled in Israel after Soviet troops liberated them from the enforced train journey to abandonment in a western German village when the British were approaching Belsen. My cousin Shulamid missed her Rotterdam childhood and her beloved brother, who with her father had died in the camp, that after many years in Israel she returned to live and marry in the Netherlands and instructed that when she died she wanted her ashes to be joined to the mass grave where her brother’s body was thought to have been dumped.

I learned this shockingly moving last wish from the wife of one of Shulamid’s two sons as we attended a commemoration of Rabbi Davids and his son Elija in Rotterdam in 22 November 2021, last year.  The ceremony was the laying of so-called stumble stones, stolpersteine, small paving stones onto which a bronze plate was fixed naming them, their life dates, and the death camp, replaced stones laid into the road outside the doorway to the residence from which they had been taken. The German artist Gunter Demnig who inaugurated the making and laying of stolpersteine had for several years done the labour of making the stones and laying them, in Germany, Holland and other countries as an act of reparation among the many undertaken by many German people. They are now prepared and laid by municipal public works departments as they were in Rotterdam last November. I salute him and them with gratitude. Tourists and other passersby stumble upon these bright stones and are reminded about what happened there. Stumbling against an unevenly laid cobble had in Germany once aroused a curse on Jews who must, so anti-Semites thought, have caused this and all other mishaps. Now they remind us of the Nazis’ lethal rounding up of Roma, Jews and many others from their homes.

Stephan reads the English translation. Both it and the Hebrew can be found by Googling ‘Passover Prayer in Bergen Belsen’

“Heavenly father, it is apparent to you that it our will is to do your will and to celebrate Passover by eating matzah and refraining from chametz. But on this our hearts are distressed because the oppression prevents us [from fulfilling your command] and we find our lives in danger. We are ready and willing to live by your mandate that we ‘live by the commandments and not die by them’. And we observe your warning ‘protect yourself and sustain your soul greatly’. We therefore beseech you to keep us alive, sustain us, and redeem us speedily, so that we may observe your statutes, carry out your will, and serve you wholeheartedly. Amen.”