There are people who do not believe in the Holocaust. Well, get a firsthand moving story

"israel toren - today"

When I first heard his story, I was fascinated, not because he was one of the survivors of the Holocaust whose sorrow is disappearing, his story was heard from a Hollywood movie, he saw his father murdered before his eyes, grew up as a Christian and his fascinating journey brought That same country, where he met one of the most important figures in his life.

But we should not be ahead of time. Let's start from the beginning.

Brings Cholent ( צ'ולנט) home every Saturday (shabat)

"I was born in 1935 in Warsaw, the capital of Poland." He opens his story (if you ask me, whose appearance and strong voice do not mention his age and the hardships he suffered). My father yaakov (yank) and my mother toiibe (tosha) from Huberman house. my father was born in Lvov, Ukraine, and because he helped the Poles fight Russia during the First World War, he excelled in battles and received many awards, he received a prize for excellence and was allowed to settle in Warsaw. That he was appointed commander of the police station of one of Warsaw's neighborhoods.

What do you remember from your parents?

"My father was a tall man with blond hair, and my mother was much shorter and had curly black hair, my mother had a first marriage and my father had two, and he had two other children who were my half-siblings. . "

Israel grew up in a traditional home where the Sabbath was observed.

"I have two strong memories of my childhood, one of which is when I go to the shochet with the rooster every Saturday night, so that he slaughters the chicken for the Sabbath meal, the second is how every Saturday morning after prayers I carry the pot of cholent, Which was heated in the Jewish mafia oven. "

The Nazis are coming

"When the Nazis occupied Poland, they fired my father from his position as police chief, and we abandoned Warsaw and went to live in our family's home in the town of Miedzeszyn, 12 kilometers from Warsaw, and after a short period the Nazis nationalized our house and took us to the ghetto. I remember that at the time my father sold Christian cults in order to survive. "

"The house to which the Torens had fled"

How old were you when the war broke out?

"I was five years old, but I understood that this was an emergency and that one had to be careful, but then something happened that made me aware of the dangers that lie ahead of me as a Jew.

"My mother, Hashem, will be a part of the battle against the Nazis, and she served as a courier who sent messages from our ghetto to the Warsaw ghetto and vice versa.

"My father tried to bribe high Polish officers he knew to find out more about where she was being held, but without success.

"This fact caused my father to sharpen the procedures with me clearly, to explain to me who was against whom, to teach me to escape the danger, from the Germans, from the gathering and from Polish collaborators."

I will never forgive the Ponobka family!

The days were particularly difficult for the Jews in the ghetto, and rebellion was about to break out. The father of Israel, who feared for the future, decided to save the child.

"He took me out of the ghetto to a Polish family who were good friends of ours, gave them a lot of money and jewelry and asked them to look after me, and gave them my documents and repeated many warnings and instructions to do everything to keep me safe and secure.

"When he said goodbye to me, he told me again and again to beware of the Germans and that I should not forget that I am a Jew ...

"And then, a few days later, when the ghetto uprising broke out, the family threw me into the street, I will never forget and I will not forgive that cursed family - the Ponobka family who threw me into the cold, the hunger and the death that lurked in the streets!"

Israel left their house and his feet led him back to the ghetto. For two days he wandered around the area, taking care not to come too close and looking for food to put in his mouth. At night he slept at the door of shops, a place relatively safe from the cold and the wind.

Two days later the revolt was liquidated.

Horror plays

"The Germans took the hundreds of Jews out of the ghetto and led them in a convoy to the area next to the train station in the center of the town.

Did you see Dad?

"Yes, I stood aside and hid - even though I was only six and a half years old, his warnings made me realize that this was not a children's game and that I had to keep myself in. The war developed the sharp instincts of a child twice my age."

"My father told me to march to the left ... and then they took them to the forest and shot them to death ... I saw them shooting at my father."

The pain in Israel's voice did not break even 65 years later. I suggest that he stop and drink something, but he refuses. "Today I can also tell you things , I have not told my children all these years, and I kept them for myself, like many Poles shamelessly came to the murdered bodies of the martyrs, some of them cut off the fingers of the women to steal the rings and some of their ears To steal the earrings. "

Then an unknown woman approached.

"She walked toward the train station and told her not to advance to the area, because the Germans were killing people there, she asked if I was a Jew and when I said yes, she said, 'If you are not a Jew, come with me.' She told me that her husband was a Polish soldier who had been killed when the Nazis invaded Poland, and only a long time later I learned that her husband was a Jew.I noticed a small boy and an elderly woman at the entrance to the house, but I did not exchange a word because she She took me immediately to the attic, where she made it clear to me that I must not go down under any circumstances and that she would take care of my food.

"And indeed, the precious woman who saved me, Sophia Hochinski, made sure to bring me food and water every evening for the next day, when the food was usually made from cooked potato peelings and horse bones.

"I lived for about a year in this attic and lived alone in the attic, trying to keep myself occupied, I lost my loneliness and boredom and longing for my parents, but I did not dare leave. After about a year she informed me that we were moving to Warsaw, and when I finally got out of the attic, the house was empty, and I asked her where the grandmother and the boy were, and she said it was her mother and son.

"In Warsaw Sophia gave me an identity card on the pretext that I was her son and that my documents were lost, and what helped it was the fact that before I was baptized in the church, I was named Alexander Hutchinsky - the name of her dead son."

"The baptism certificate for Sophia's son"

People know your true identity?

"To this day I doubt whether they knew and turned a blind eye, or whether they really thought I was her son.

What's more, in 1944 Sophia married a Pole named Stanislav Pashkeit and she introduced him to me as her biological son. The subject of my Jewish identity did not come up at all."

"I knew what it meant to be a church and it was a foreign religion to me as a Jew, but I played the game because I realized that my fate and Sophia's fate depended on it.

"Sofia and Stanislav"

The war is over!

Even though he was registered as a Pole, Israel too "earned" a visit to the labor camps.

"In September 1944 they took us with other Poles to a labor camp called Bilena, where we stayed until the beginning of 1945. In that camp I was beaten up one time, and to this day I suffer a slight limp from being beaten with a shovel by a German soldier. One winter we saw that the Germans were fleeing, the Russians had conquered the area and the war was over. "

Israel went to school for the first time in his life. His adoptive mother chose not to reveal his true identity to the school children, but soon they understood it alone ...

"I was 10 at the time, but they put me in first grade so that I could complete the gaps in reading, writing, and mathematics, I learned the material in a short period of time and was soon promoted to fifth grade, where I was so prominent that teachers sent weak students to my home So that I would study with them after graduation, so some of the school staff guessed I was a Jew "...

"Sofia's home in Warsaw"

The kidnapping

Then one day everything changed.

"I went out of the house on my way to school, and downstairs I ran into an officer in the Polish army and a respectable woman who sat in a military vehicle next to him and within a minute I found myself in the car and found out that they were Poalei Agudat Israel activists, I brought them to Lodz, where I stayed in an orphanage for orphaned Jewish children like myself, and I did not find myself and when I broke up after two or three weeks, I escaped from the place and went up to the place where I was born. On the train on my way back to Warsaw, to Sophia's house and her husband. "

"Israel Toren in an orphanage"

How did you have money for the train?

"I just sneaked in. During the trip, the conductor approached me and asked to see the ticket, and I pointed to a woman sitting at the end of the car and told him, 'This is my mother, the ticket.'" Immediately afterward, I fled to the other side of the train and spent most of the trip in the bathroom. They were very happy to have me back, and this was the first time that Stanislaw discovered that I was actually a Jew.

"But the Jewish activists did not give up on me, and a few days later Sarah Lederman appeared at the door of the house together with a young man named Jacob Springer and they sat down to talk to Sophia and Stanislaw and explained how important it was for me to return to the Jewish people. She asked me if I would like to continue living with her as a Christian, but I told her that with a heavy heart I had to give up in order to return to the Jewish people.

"By the way, Sophia died of cancer in 1956 and according to the testimony of her neighbors to my daughter, before she died, she cried many times and said that she wanted to meet me again, how sad I was not to see her again and show her the family I had established because of her dedication. I do not regret that step for a moment, it was the right thing. "

"Yankele adopts me"

Israel was taken to another Jewish orphanage in the city of Bitov, and because of the fear of acclimatization, it was taken as a personal project by the same Jacob Springer. "It was one of the best periods of my life, and Springer took care of me like a son, and I felt that I was finally in my father's hands ... He was only 16 years old and I was 11 years old, but he treated me, washed me, fed and watered me, It was all my world and all that I needed in the terrible years of the war, and by the way, all the dozens of children in the camp felt the same feeling, as if each of them was the only son of Yankele. "

"Yisrael Turan (in the circle on the right) and Yaakov Springer (in a circle on the left) in the orphanage"

A year later, when the Communist regime tightened its grip on Poland, the camp was quickly moved to Bratislava, from there to Austria (where several cold-blooded children were murdered by local anti-Israel residents) and from there to Munich. In Munich, they were given three options: to emigrate to Israel, to the United States, or to France, and Jacob Springer chose to emigrate to France. But Israel, blinded by the promises of bananas and chocolate, could not be found in Israel.

He immigrated to Eretz Israel and was sent to study at the Ponevezh Yeshiva, where he was transferred to the Pressburg Yeshiva in Jerusalem and eventually moved to the religious kibbutz Sha'alvim.

An amazing meeting in Kfar Chabad

In 1953, Ya'akov was sent by the Poalei Agudat Israel to catch up with ads in the ultra-Orthodox concentrations of the time, including Kfar Chabad. Then, in the center of the village, he saw something that made his heart skip a beat. "In the center of the village I see a shop with a sign with the name" Jacob Springer. "As long as my soul entered me, I met Jacob, and we fell into one another's arms and there was no limit to our happiness."

The two continued to stay in touch and Israel came to Kfar Chabad every Saturday evening to learn and speak to Jacob, and since then he had moved to Kibbutz Sha'ar Hanegev, where he was forced to abandon religion, Feeling of Springer, he cut off contact with him.

Thirty-one years later, in 1991, Tzilla Sinai, one of Toren's four children, accompanied children from the school she taught to the "Chumash Party" in Kfar Chabad, and since childhood she has heard in the home over and over again about the "Chassid Springer from Kfar Chabad" Asked passersby where Springer's store was, arrived there and identified itself as the home of Israel Toren. The angel-faced man who identified himself as Jacob Springer burst into tears of excitement when she told him who she was and asked her to renew contact with her father. Since then the two have returned to meet regularly and Israel would come to visit Ya'akov at least once every two weeks.

"I used to feel that I had a father, a brother and a friend who understood me ... Yaakov always tried to keep me from performing mitzvot, perhaps because he feared I would sever ties with him again ... Chanukah candles, matzot, four species, etc. I turned him into a rabbi of our family and he made sure to come to Sderot every time one of my grandsons celebrated a bar mitzvah at the local Chabad house of Rabbi Moshe Ze'ev Pizem. Only after he died three years ago did I learn that every time he would leave Kfar Chabad at 4:30 AM and get hitchhiking "...

"Israel and Tova Toren"

The real revenge on Hitler

In the past year, a decade after he retired after completing 48 years of work in the Shaar Hanegev Regional Council, and after establishing a wonderful family of eight children, 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, Israel vacated his past.

"I decided that I wanted to understand my past better and hired a private investigator who worked with private investigators in Poland and Eastern Europe, and that every month I received more and more fascinating data about my family. I received my birth certificate, old pictures of the house where I was born and circumcised, and also a certificate of my circumcision written by the mohel ... Along with these I received many data and documents of Sophia Hochinsky, who adopted me and a picture of herself and her husband Stanislaw, who even found a grave My father's father, who died and was buried in Warsaw in 1939, and one of my grandchildren who immigrated to Poland recently, was able to light a candle and say a prayer, "he said.

Every such picture or document shocks Israel and strips him of layers he has tried to hide for years. "On the one hand, I am happy to discover my past, but on the other hand it is painful and painful, but the bottom line is that I stand up every morning and know that I beat Hitler, I immigrated to Israel, established a magnificent Jewish family and all my children lived in Eretz Israel.