We can empathise with people who think that, those that ‘perished in the death camps would only have died in vain if they are not revered as witnesses and martyrs.’ We need to find a good reason for the terrible losses and make sense of the senseless. However, there may not be a good reason for their deaths. Judaism celebrates life, seeks to sustain life, so Jews do not pursue any form of martyrdom. It has been thrust on them throughout history, when they gave up their lives rather than convert. They were slaughtered simply for their beliefs or for their ancestry.

People died bravely, faithfully, expressing their allegiance to their God. That is their own extraordinary witness, their light penetrating the dense darkness. This is the sanctification of God’s name, Kiddush Ha Shem and the one who is murdered for their faith is called holy, kaddosh. They deserve a dignified memorial.

Ivor Katz, an eleven-year old boy from Czechoslovakia, was such a light. Ivor did not die because he was judged by God as unfaithful. He died because he was judged by man to be a faithful child of God.

When Hugo Gryn was a boy in the camps, his father gave him advice which he attributes to his survival. His father advised him not to be angry. They could live without food and even water for days but could not live one day without hope. Ivor’s poem contains such hope. A hope he did not live to see fulfilled.

Every small act of faithfulness is acknowledged by heaven and nothing is lost. So, in Ivor’s memorial, angels with ribbons celebrating his beautiful poem surround the Jewish cemetery in Prague. And so, he is not fully gone. His spirit lives on in these words.

Some Day by Ivor Katz 11.4.1932 – 18.12. 1943

Some day we shall outrun this hour, Some day there will be comfort for us, And hope again burst into flower, And peace and guardian care restore us, The jug of tears will break and spill, And death be ordered: ’Hush be still!’

The true dawn will come at last, Wine from water be revealed, Some day all our tears be past, Some day all our wounds be healed, All our slavish chains, some day, God will smite and strike away.

Some day Herod, mad with fear Shall go raving to his ending, And the Shepherd-king appear, In royal purple robes ascending, He who once suffered, even as we, By King Saul’s hate and cruelty.

Some day all sorrows will take flight, This life thus wretched and laborious. The saviour will appear in might, With his all-conquering power victorious. Some day, if God will, we’ll stand Free men in the promised land.

Some day the aloes will bloom fair, Some day the palms bear fruit again, Some day the burden of despair Be lifted to assuage our pain. And in God’s house we’ll live anew. Some day all these things will be true.

We may have seen photographs of people, including children, being hung. Ellie Wiesel describes such a scene in his book ‘Night’. A small child is flinching and dying slowly because his weight was not sufficient to strangle him quickly. ‘Where is God now?’ asks a man who is forced to watch. Ellie writes. ‘And I heard a voice within me answer him: Here He is. He is hanging here on these gallows.’

In his ‘Perils of Indifference’ talk, at the Whitehouse, in 1995, Wiesel said,

Some of us then felt that to be abandoned by humanity was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent One. For us to be ignored by God was a harder punishment than for us to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God; not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in our suffering? Yes, even in our suffering.

Every trauma leaves an indelible mark on us. We wrestle with our understanding of who God is when we suffer unduly and unfairly. When our faith is challenged, faithfulness becomes our choice. We are faced with stark alternatives, life or death, goodness or evil. As Viktor Frankel said, ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’

Frankel makes a further observation that sounds counter-intuitive. He says that,

Amongst those who went through the experience of Auschwitz, the number whose religious life was deepened – in spite, not to say because of this experience – by far exceeds the number of those who gave up their belief. To paraphrase what La Rochefoucauld once remarked with regard to love, one might say that just as the small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it – likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicaments and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened.

This is difficult to understand unless we have experienced it. His observation is not meant as a criticism but as a note of encouragement. Faith is like a fire burning more brightly under pressure.