Sublime

she survived Auschwitz by disobeying his order to join the line with the elderly, the grey and the weak, and instead slipping into a line with younger people. She avoided the gas chambers a second time by trading food for hair dye so she wouldn’t be murdered for looking too old.

The father of Jacob Wein, who played Benjamin, gave me a book of Jewish legends in which I found the story of the “unknown just.” In every generation, so the legend goes, there are born among the Jews thirty-six men who God has chosen to bear the burden of the world’s suffering, and to whom he has granted the privilege of martyrdom. These men are i

Mordeh’aï Kaplan

One Bielski partisan, Oppenheim, a man in his forties, was a talented locksmith. He came to the forest with his son from Novogródek ghetto.

For Shimen, the “community” is a set of concentric circles beginning with his (dead) family, extending to Gerer Hasidim, and extending further to others committed to the Jewish way of life; the farther out the circle, the less weight it earns in Shimen’s calculus.