Holocaust writer tells parents: Teach the joys of Judaism

In a corner of a sunny Marin campground dotted with hundreds of nylon tents, a small group of Jewish campers chanted beneath a blue and white canopy, "Mah tovu ohalehcha Ya'akov" ("How beautiful are your tents, children of Jacob"). Their preschool-aged children dashed around the grassy area giggling and playing.

While members of the Jewish Congregation of San Geronimo Valley celebrated Shabbat at their annual camp-out in Olema, they also remembered the Holocaust.

As part of the camp-out's education program, visiting Connecticut author Vivien Orbach-Smith spoke about her father Larry Orbach's Holocaust memoir, "Soaring Underground: A Young Fugitive's Life in Nazi Berlin." She talked with campers about how she came to coauthor the book, which has received superb reviews and was named a "Book of Special Note" in the Kirkus Reviews.

Although as a child of survivors she was haunted by recurring nightmares of Auschwitz, she thought that as an adult she would be able to handle coauthoring her father's tale of his adolescence in Hitler's Germany.

But as they began the project, "My first impulse was to cover my eyes and run," she said. "The tattooed arm of the protagonist was the one that had rocked my cradle. How would I deal with what had been done to my daddy, and what my daddy had done?"

Still, for several reasons, she decided to face the task of producing this coming-of-age story set against the background of an apocalypse.

One reason is that Orbach-Smith is a mother. When she had her three children, her thoughts of the Holocaust began to focus increasingly on the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis.

"I began to see my child, your children, on those lines" where parents were separated from their children in the death camps.

"For the sake of the children, this episode had to be documented," she said.

Unlike many other Holocaust memoirs, this one emphasizes Orbach's life before he was betrayed and sent to Auschwitz. Although history books discuss the Holocaust in unfathomable statistics, Orbach-Smith reminded her audience, "This isn't just a number -- not just a death, but a life."

The story of Larry Orbach opens with him as a patriotic 10-year-old in Berlin in 1934, winner of a genealogical research contest. He eagerly anticipates his prize, which is to recite a poem at his school's graduation: "Fight, bleed, propagate; win or die,/be a German to your marrow." But the head of his school takes the honor away because Orbach is a Jew and awards it instead to an "Aryan" child.

When he is a young teen, Orbach's formerly prosperous Berlin family is ordered by the government to take in Jewish mental patients as boarders. Their life together makes for some hilarious and touching stories, but ends tragically with patients being taken away one by one by the Gestapo. Ultimately, Orbach's father is taken, too. The family waits hopefully for his return, but is jolted into reality when a Nazi appears two months later at their door with an urn containing the father's ashes, which the official refuses to hand over without being paid.

Orbach and his mother escape from their apartment just as the Gestapo comes for them, and he sees his mother to safety in the Berlin home of some resistance supporters. But because nearly all other men his age are in the army, he decides to live on the streets so as not to draw attention to his mother.

His stories of the Berlin underground are alternately terrifying, funny, and Fellini-esque, all told in a smoother narrative style that pulls the reader irresistibly into a strange world. At times he and his friends find refuge in the local brothel, and at others they are lucky enough to survive on favors from the lonely girlfriends or wives of Nazi officers off at the war front.

There are also scenes of pool-hustling, card-sharking and narrow escapes through sheer bravado or tenacity. In his preface, Orbach, who now lives in New Jersey, writes: "To improve my chances of survival, and my mother's, I did many things I would never have done in the circumstances in which I had been born and brought up. I am neither proud nor ashamed of them. I reveal them here because they illustrate, I think, what may be normal behavior in a world gone mad."

In the end, he becomes one of thousands of skeletal figures liberated from Buchenwald by American troops. Despite all his suffering, however, Orbach remains astonishingly optimistic. He writes: "I can say that hatred and vengeance have not motivated my life. Rather, it was the blossoming of my identity, commitment, and practice as a Jew, my wholehearted participation in Jewish life in America and in Israel, that was the legacy I took from those dark years from which God delivered me."

And this, it seems, is the legacy his daughter seeks to perpetuate. She told the congregants gathered at the camp-out, "This book affirms life, not death," and said her father as an adolescent in Nazi Berlin was "a spirit who, even in the darkness, attempted to soar."

She cautioned against allowing one's Jewish identity to become too attached to the Holocaust.

"The best way to keep Judaism alive in a positive, joyous, life-affirming way is what this congregation does," she said, gesturing to the celebratory camp-out and the children surrounding her.

Parents who wish to teach their children about the Holocaust "should balance it with the joy of being Jewish, with the rituals and wondrous history of being Jewish."