Continuing the translation of this awesome shiur from the Rav.

You can see Part 2 HERE.

[Skipping a discussion of how many holocaust survivors are still alive, the Rav says there are 120,000 still alive, and someone who was five years old at the time of the holocaust is now 85.]

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[Haman] was a Caananite slave, he wanted to become a Jew, to convert and immerse, as is required.

He went to the mikvah to immerse – I saw Haman immersing, I was shocked.

They said, no, he wants to be a Jew.

A Caananite slave – he wants to keep Shabbat, he is obliged to keep Shabbat. It’s written “to see whether Mordechai’s words would prevail”[1], because he would tell them that he was a Jew.

The Chatam Sofer recounts that he said, I’m a Jew! I myself am a Jew!

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Hitler – it was said that he was a Jew.

We don’t know, there are investigations into this. He had a brother, Edward, who said I know that the Savta, [her] son, [i.e. Hitler’s father] was called Heidler.

‘Hitler’ comes from the word ‘Heidler’. Whoever wrote it down made a mistake, instead of writing ‘Heidler’ he wrote ‘Hitler’. There is no name like this, ‘Hitler’.

At that time, his father was called ‘Heidler’, so he should have written ‘the son of Heidler’, but wrote ‘Hitler’. All this is written there, in the books. When it’s bein hazmanim, it’s possible to read this, [or on] Tisha B’Av, to know what happened, how everything developed.

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He [Hitler] didn’t succeed in any exam, he always got a 4, 4, 4.

The Jews were getting 100, they were getting 10/10 – and he got a 4. He went out of his mind. Those Jews!! I am going to destroy them, gomarnu, I can’t stand them! I will just become the Chancellor, and the first thing, I will annihilate the Jews!

He used to paint pictures – no-one wanted to buy his pictures. He decided he would be a painter. They didn’t accept him at the university. In the university in Vienna, they didn’t accept him, they only accepted the Jews.

All the Jews got 100, and 10/10. He went out of his mind.

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So now, Avraham Elimelech of Karlin arrived [to Eretz Yisrael].

He spoke Yiddish, he said aris ga’an, nisht gipoal, not the songs, stop singing!

Black clouds, I see black clouds. All of Europe is going to be finished, they are going to destroy the whole of Europe. The whole of Poland – no trace will remain, of Poland.

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Now, there are 120,000 [holocaust survivors in the world].

These are Jews who were five years old, then.

Yisrael Meir Lau was seven years old, so today he’s 87. He was four [when he first entered the camp], seven, when he was already leaving Buchenwald. At nine, he got to Israel, with a gun. There’s a book.[2]

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The English saw the gun, they were shocked. Are you coming to kill everyone?!

It was a gun without bullets, but the Arabs [perhaps, this should be ‘English’] are organised people, they aren’t crazy. They saw him with a gun, they took the gun away from him. A child of nine years old, he has a gun – what, are you a terrorist?!

A child of nine – he was photographed with the gun, like that, he was pictured.

He went around with that gun for two years, he went through all the camps [for displaced people, after the war]. France – everyone let him pass with the gun. The English said no, by us, there is no such thing as this. We are organised people, we are normal people, give us the gun.

They took the gun away as soon as he alighted from the boat.

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And then they asked him, a bunch of hevrei from Israel, where is your abba and ima?

He said, they got burnt.

What do you mean, ‘burnt’?! Are you crazy?!

He said, everyone got burnt. Don’t you know, that all the Jews got burnt?!

Are you dreaming?! Are you crazy?! We need to section you.

That’s how he described it, in the book. How the journalists came to interview the people on the boats, they came from the Shoah, all of them were ‘remnants’ / refugees….

He was sick with typhus, he couldn’t stand up in the queue to get his registration.

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[The mother of Yisrael Lau told his older brother]

Look after Luli.

Srulik was ‘Luli’. So, when the mother went to Auschwitz, she said, Tolly, look after Luli!

He was older than him by three years, he was four years old, and [the older brother] was seven years old, and he looked after him throughout the whole Shoah. He guarded him, everything.

They were together in Buchenwald. In the end, he [the brother of Yisrael Lau] became the Israeli Consul in America, and then, a car came and ran him over. He was standing there at the pedestrian crossing, at the junction there, an auto came up on the pavement and ran him over. He was laid out for three weeks, unconscious.

He said, now, I’m going to write a book, about everything that happened in the Shoah. All this happened, because I didn’t say what happened to me, and my brother.

His brother became the Chief Rabbi, and he became the Israeli Consul, and he was also the deputy of Moshe Dayan.

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[Skipping some, about how Moshe Dayan kept Shabbat, in the end, and married a religious woman called Devorah.]

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So now, the Rav Lau is 87, and just now, a woman died who was 110, so then, she was 30 years old.

She went through the whole Shoah.

The Rebbe of Belz said that whoever went through the Shoah, they can revive the dead.

But instead of ‘reviving the dead’, they went and became chilonim. If they would have kept going [as observant Jews] for another five minutes, they would have brought the Moshiach.

The Beit Yisrael said now, it’s the opportunity to bring Moshiach!

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The Klausenberger Rebbe, when he saw the Americans [who liberated the death camps], he fainted.

Why did you faint?

[He said] I thought that Moshiach [would be liberating the camps]. This is Moshiach? This is America, this isn’t Moshiach.

So, he fainted. All day long, he couldn’t recover himself, he didn’t come out of the hut. He just cried.

I was sure that after such a Shoah, Moshiach would come, that I would see angels, that I would see tzaddikim, that I would see people with shtreimels, coming. All of a sudden, I see black American [soldiers], non-Jewish Americans, who don’t know anything about anything [about Jewish redemption].

He straight away fainted.

For 30 days, the Klausenberger was in bed, sick. He said:

I wasn’t waiting for this, why was I holding on?!

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FOOTNOTES:

TBC

[1] Megillat Esther 3:4. The full passage reads: “[T]hey told Haman to see if Mordechai’s words would prevail; for he had told them that he was a Jew.”

[2] The Rav says the book is called in Hebrew Al tishlach yadecha al ha na’ar. I can’t find that book with that title, but Naftali Lau-Levie did write a book called ‘Balaam’s Prophecy’, in English, and Yisrael Meir Lau’s book in English is called ‘Out of the Depths’. On the cover of that last book, you can clearly see the tip of the rifle he carried behind Yisrael Lau’s back.

PS: I included the original picture included in the Shivivei Or newsletter, of R Lau with his rifle slung behind his back. The red arrow is pointing to the rifle’s strap over his left shoulder.