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Soldier, Holocaust Survivor
Have Emotional Reunion After 65 Years
(Editor's Note: This article
originally appeared in The Detroit News on
April 9, 2010. It is reprinted here with
permission.)
Posted: April
9, 2010
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BY LAURA BERMAN
The Detroit
News
In the fall of 1945, a Soviet
soldier hoisted a 5-year-old boy aloft and paraded him through
a Lithuanian synagogue that had been closed throughout a long
Nazi occupation.
For
65 years, the boy and the soldier carried that moment in their
heads and hearts. Unknown to each other, they told the story
to family and friends. A Toronto songwriter memorialized it in
song. The boy became a man and included the anecdote in his
2003 book.
On Thursday, they met and embraced
for the first time since then in Rabbi Leo Goldman's Oak Park
living room.
"It was very emotional, much more
than I would have expected," says the former small boy. He is
Abraham Foxman, the New York-based director of the
Anti-Defamation League. In that role, he is a public voice
against racial and religious intolerance.
The soldier is Goldman, 91, an
Orthodox rabbi in Oak Park and an educator who continued to
work as a Beaumont Hospital chaplain until a few months
ago.
"We tell this story every year,"
says Rose Brystowski, the rabbi's daughter, who says her
father has become too frail to interview. "It's very moving to
us, because it's about survival, about a child symbolizing the
future of our people."
The memory remains vivid for
Foxman: He had lived with his Catholic nanny, separated from
his parents and concealed from the Nazis as a so-called
"hidden child" for four years.
The nanny saved his life -- but
also taught him to spit on the ground when a Jew walked
by.
In mid-1945, he was reunited with
his parents. His father waited four months to take him to a
synagogue on the holiday of Simchat Torah, an ancient and
festive holiday that celebrates the reading of the Torah --
the Old Testament -- on hand-written scrolls. "That was very
smart of him because it is a fun holiday for children," says
Foxman, who remembers walking by a church and making the sign
of the cross entering the synagogue for the first
time.
For Goldman, who had been wounded
twice as a soldier, and lost his parents to the Nazis, the
return to the synagogue in Vilna that day was also momentous.
The concentration camps had been liberated, Jews were
reuniting with their families across Europe, and in Lithuania,
it was no longer a capital crime to be Jewish. Most had been
dispersed or exterminated. Only 3,000 of Vilna's 100,000 Jews
remained.
"Are you Jewish?" the Soviet
soldier, asked the boy. When he nodded yes, Goldman said, "I
have travelled thousands of miles without seeing a Jewish
child." Then he stooped down, lifted the boy and danced around
the room with him.
Neither man ever forgot that day,
that celebration of religion and survival under extraordinary
circumstance.
But only last summer, after an
Israeli researcher finally put together a song, "The Man From
Vilna," about the incident with a Michigan rabbi, did Foxman
learn that the Jewish Soviet soldier he wrote about in his
2003 book, "Never Again?" was Goldman, still alive and living
in the United States. The songwriter had credited Goldman as
the story's source.
Getting
to Thursday's reunion was circuitous: Three years ago, Foxman
told the story at Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust Memorial
Museum. There, a researcher embarked on a quest for the
dancing man in uniform Foxman described: Eventually, she found
the song, inspired by Goldman's story, and the rabbi's name in
the credits. For Foxman, that day "was a memory, a bittersweet
memory." The soldier -- a stranger -- had embraced him in
public, in a synagogue. He had carried him like a trophy
around the synagogue.
"That was for me the first time
anyone took pride in me," says Foxman, who as "a hidden child
didn't know who or what I was."
For both men, the memory was frozen
in time, unattached to any living person.
"I thought that story was a kind of
legend," recalls Brystowski. "I always believed it in my
heart, but on another level, I wondered, did that really
happen?"
She was stunned when she learned
last summer, when Foxman called, that "this prominent, grown
man" was the little boy she had grown up hearing
about.
The mythic boy had become a very
real and prominent man. "It shows us that any gesture, any
mitzvah or good deed, can have an impact," she
says.
On Thursday, the two men hugged and
talked and recited a Hebrew prayer, a blessing that's a
reminder of the importance of celebrating life in the
moment.
"It is a privilege to have lived
long enough to have this moment," Foxman says Goldman told
him.
Goldman's parents and older brother
were killed by the Nazis. Foxman's early years as a "hidden
child," living with secrets and lies, led him into a career of
speaking out publicly against injustice and hatred.
For each man, the memory of dancing
in a Vilna synagogue was a pivotal moment. "I came home and
told my father that I wanted to be Jewish," recalls Foxman.
"It was the beginning of my life as a Jewish
person."
Each man had a memory of a moment
-- a dance in a synagogue -- that symbolized then and
throughout their lives the promise of freedom and faith and
life.
At long last, the boy and the
soldier who carried phantom memories, now know each other as
two grown men who have, against the odds, survived to find
each
other. | 
