“I remember the looks of horror on the faces of the American soldiers when they came in and stared around them.I was afraid when I saw them.
I crept behind a pile of dead bodies and hid there, watching them warily.
“Rabbi Herschel Schachter was the Jewish chaplain of the division. I saw him get out of a jeep and stand there, staring at the corpses.
He has often told this story, how he thought he saw a pair of living eyes looking out from among the dead.
It made his hair stand on end, but slowly and cautiously he made his way around the pile, and then, he clearly remembers coming face-to-face with me, an eight-year-old boy, wide-eyed with terror.
In heavily-accented American Yiddish, he asked me, ‘How old are you, mein kind?’ There were tears in his eyes.
“‘What difference does it make?’ I answered, warily. ‘I’m older than you, anyway.’
“He smiled through his tears and said, ‘Why do you think you’re older than me?’
“And I answered, ‘Because you cry and laugh like a child. I haven’t laughed in a long time, and I don’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?'”
-Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, former Chief Rabbi of Israel, 8-years-old when Buchenwald was liberated.
From his book “Out of the Depths”. One of the most important and riveting books I have ever read.
