A lot has been said and written about the miraculous salvation of Mir Yeshivah during the Holocaust years. I heard the account from my Rebbeim, who learned in Mir at the time. The whole yeshivah was saved through great miracles. I heard from R. Chaim Shmuelevitz that if a bachur did not stay together with the whole yeshivah, if, for instance, he went home, he remained there and met his end. But the whole yeshivah was saved.
R. Yitzchak Dov Soloveitchik, Rosh Yeshivas Brisk, recounted that he, too, was there with them. They all received visas to Japan, and were accorded “tourist” status, on which basis the whole yeshivah bought train tickets to travel through the Soviet Union in their way to Japan. He recounts:
“When we got to Moscow, there were tourist buses waiting for us. They took us to the fanciest hotel in Moscow. Since we couldn’t eat the hotel food, because it was not kosher, they brought us oranges – a rare delicacy that we had never seen or tasted. They brought every kind of fruit. The next day, they brought buses to take us to the zoo.
“I personally did not go. I was afraid. But many bachurim went. On their way, they saw thousands of people standing in line, waiting to receive a little bread.”
Astonishing! The whole Jewish people is going up in flames In Poland and Germany, and anyone who managed to escape to Russia was standing in line for hours to get a slice of bread. And here, four hundred yeshivah boys are staying at the fanciest hotel in Moscow, dining on fine fruits, going to the zoo... It is like an oasis in the middle of Gehinom.
They were borne on eagles’ wings from Mir to Vilna and through the Soviet Union until they arrived in Japan, and from there to America and Eretz Yisrael.
It is not easy to say this, but my feeling is as follows: secularization and Haskalah was ravaging the Jewish world, penetrating all homes and all yeshivos. But Mir was a place were Haskalah was not to be found. I heard from my father that in that period, out of all the thousands who learned in Mir, only a handful ceased keeping Torah and mitzvos.
Mir Yeshivah, which fortressed itself off within the destruction of the Haskalah, which closed its doors to the stormy winds of its time, is the same yeshivah that was protected by an invisible fortress within the destruction of the Holocaust.
