This article is based on an article in The Jewish Daily Forward which was posted online on December 1. I came across the article through a link at Power Line posted yesterday.
Rudy Boschwitz, former Senator from Minnesota, shares the story of how he came to America in 1935 as a five-year-old Jewish boy. His story is an example of how a father took responsibility for the safety of his family and did whatever it took to keep his family safe.
I am quoting extensively from The Jewish Daily Forward article because it is so well written:
"On January 30, 1933, the day Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Eli Boschwitz, a judicial arbiter, came home and told his wife, "We are leaving Germany forever." He had read Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and knew that Jews had no future under the Nazis. Sure enough, within weeks, he and all other Jewish employees of the German court system were summarily dismissed from their jobs."
Eli Boschwitz's decision saved the lives of his immediate family. They left Germany in July 1933. It was two years before their journey led them to England where they received permission to come to America.
Senator Boschwitz continues his story in The Jewish Daily Forward:
"The family of his future wife, Ellen Loewenstein, suffered a similar fate. Her family, German Jews who had Swiss passports, secured visas to Brazil in 1940. On the voyage across the Atlantic, a Nazi submarine intercepted the ship and removed Jewish passengers who bore German passports. Some of Ellen Loewenstein's relatives made it to South Africa; those who could not get out of Europe perished in the Holocaust."
The part of Mrs. Boschwitz's story that amazed me was how far the Nazis were willing to go to hunt down and kill Jews.
Senator Boschwitz served on the President's Commission on the Holocaust and helped arrange for the allocation of land in Washington for the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I have been through that museum--the suffering represented is overwhelming, but the courage shown by the victims of the Holocaust is inspiring.
But Senator Boschwitz truly learned the lessons of his personal history. According to the article in The Jewish Daily Forward:
"In 1991, as the first President Bush's emissary to Ethiopia, he headed an America diplomatic team that sought to arrange for the rescue of Ethiopia's Jews. "It was a major league mitzvah," Boschwitz said."
During the weekend of May 24 and 15, 1991, more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews were transported to Israel on 34 El Al planes.
The article at The Jewish Daily Forward concludes:
"Against all odds, history had come full circle: The child driven from his home and (just barely) rescued from genocide grew up to help rescue other homeless Jews from another disaster. And the path to that miracle began 75 years ago on a Manhattan pier."
Thank God Senator Boschwitz was willing not only to learn the lessons of history, but to put those lessons to work in saving the lives of other people who were in the same situtation he was once in.
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