One of the Righteous Is Laid to Rest, and Now His Challenge Is Ours

On the first night of Passover, the children around the seder table ask the age-old question, “Why is this night different?” The question is central to the seder and to the life of free men and women everywhere. So sacred is the question that even the person who is alone at the Passover table must speak it aloud, for the Talmud teaches that the voices of free men and free women must be articulated.

Those who suppress the question are those who learn to follow orders.

Those who do not question are those who adjust--to anything, to any system, to any order, to any master. The adjusters are the moral chameleons, the subservient accommodators who accept muteness as their natural lot. Silence is tantamount to consent.

On the day before Passover this year, a Christian man who would not be mute was laid to rest at a cemetery in San Francisco. He was born Hermann Fritz Graebe, but many knew him as the Moses of Rovno for his role in helping hundreds of Jews to escape captivity in Nazi Germany.

Graebe was brought up with his mother’s repeated question, “And Fritz, what would you do?” That existential question carried within it the seeds of his healthy conscience, freeing him from paralyzing obedience to authorities.

His mother’s question was Fritz Graebe’s answer to the question put to him repeatedly in later years: “Why?” Why did he, a German Christian, endanger his life and those of his wife, Elizabeth, and son, Fred; why did he, an engineer, risk his position, security, safety, to hide the hunted from predators, to shelter, feed, smuggle Jews into freedom; why did he exhaust his health and wealth to shield a vilified people; why did he risk, and then suffer, vilification himself by coming forward as the only German citizen to testify at Nuremberg?

Why? Because Graebe anticipated the question that every child is bound to ask: “And what, Father, did you do in those days?” Young Fred’s question would be an echo of his grandmother’s: “And what, Fritz, would you do?”

The question penetrates the outer layers to touch the inner nerve of our moral identity. It is the first question that God asked Adam: “Where are you?” All of our lives are directed to answer that inquiry. Hermann Graebe answered it unambiguously, with his entire being. He would not be an adjusted man. He would not accept the brittle rationalizations:

“It is too late.”

“It is too far away.”

“There is nothing to be done.”

“I am only one man, alone.”

There is an alternative to passive complicity with evil. There is always something to be done, something to be tried, something to be said.

As revealed in Douglas Huneke’s recent book, “The Moses of Rovno,” this was no fearless superman. Graebe knew fear. He also knew, as the philosopher Woodbridge noted, that “there are times when a man ought to be more afraid of living than of dying.” Graebe was afraid of living without being able to offer a moral response to the question: “Where are you?”

And so he became a “hiding place” in the very meaning that the prophet Isaiah declared: “Man shall be as a hiding place from the wind and a covering from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadows of a great rock in a weary land.” In Hermann Graebe hundreds of Jewish men, women and children found shelter from the tempest.

Years later, here in California, we met, and he provided an answer to a question that gnawed at me: How do I transmit to my children the terrible truth of what happened without crushing their trust, their hope, their self-regard? How do I teach my children the audacious claim that God created us all in his image, that the human being is but a little lower than the angels, when their minds are seared by the hard, cold evidence of twisted and tormented souls?

Far more bitter than the bitter herbs, the maror , of the seder is the embitterment of the Holocaust generation. Asked how he felt during that era, Itzhak Zuckerman, second-in-command of the Jewish combat organization in the Warsaw Ghetto, responded, “If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.” Graebe provided an antidote: a mixture of charoset (wine, nuts, apples) to sweeten the maror.

Graebe taught me to keep faithfully a “double memory--a memory of the best and the worst,” as Camus called it. His humanly holy heroism made it possible for me and my children to balance Eichmann’s banality of evil with the extraordinary ordinariness of goodness. He made credible the resurrection of a vocabulary fallen into disuse--altruism, righteousness, kindness, caring, humaneness. He made credible faith--Kierkegaard’s “the passion for the possible.” He made credible a father’s wish: Let no stone be laid on the hearts of our children.

We Jews are particularly mandated to offer a double witness to the world--to the evil that men are capable of inflicting and to the good with which men can heal. In unearthing the crimes of villainy, we must not bury the virtues of humanity.

Every year, across the millennia, we sit at the seder table and relive the Passover. We remember the villainy of the Pharaoh, but we also must be certain to remember the compassion of the Egyptian midwives Shiprah and Puah who saved the Hebrew children from the Pharaoh’s edict of infanticide. When we ask the Passover question we must remember those who answered with goodness.

Hermann Fritz Graebe was a good man, and stands among the 36 righteous for whose sake the world is sustained.

May the memory of the righteous be a blessing.