It is hard to make comparisons between the various churbanos. The destruction of the first Beis Hamikdash was definitely the worst in terms of the quality of what we lost, and we don’t know the exact magnitude in quantity. However, there are several aspects of the most recent churban that are unusual, and worthy of attention.
One of the things never seen before in history was the emphasis placed on killing children. When one nation seeks to uproot another, it concentrates on eliminating the adults, who pose a threat. But the Nazis were not like that. When they took the Jews to the camps, right away they separated the children. They told the parents that they are making “activity camps” for the children. But instead, they would take a few thousand children, cast them into a pit, and blow up the pit.
A Jew who lived in Hungary after the war recounted that he was six years old when the war ended, and his father didn’t let him go out to the street, because there were simply no children. There were survivors in those days, but they were all adults. Hardly any Jewish children survived.
Why? Chazal say: All the midos ceased, but midah k’neged midah did not cease.
In the Holocaust there was a special decree against children, yet children don’t sin. Baseless hatred, idolatry, forbidden relations, bloodshed – all those sins to which the earlier churbanos are attributed – they are sins of adults. So why was there a special decree here against the children?
Midah k’neged midah. Before the Holocaust, myriads of children abandoned Torah observance due to the Haskalah movement. The older population did not sin like this. They did not give up Torah observance en masse. Before the Holocaust, the shuls in Eastern Europe were still full of adults and elderly people who came to daven. But the youth walked away from it all. The situation was so bad that those days, a youth was embarrassed to be seen walking around with a Gemara. My father-in-law says that where he grew up, there was only him and one other yeshivah bachur out of their whole large town, and when they came home for vacation, they were embarrassed to be seen in the street looking like yeshivah bachurim. The sin began with the children, and that is where the churban began.
R. Yehoshua Greenwald of Khust (he wrote the pamphlet “Ein Dim’ah” about the destruction of his kehilah) tells shocking stories from the Holocaust. I don’t know if these stories are readable during the rest of the year, but Tishah b’Av is the time for them. This is one story he recounts:
“I am shocked as I remember the terrible incident connected to the spread of bloody diarrhea among us. Once, when the sickness had already become widespread, we stood in lines on a bridge, where we waited for carriages to arrive. The Nazi commander publicly announced that if one of the prisoners will dirty the bridge on which we stood, he will force him to lick it with his tongue until it will be clean like before.
“He wickedly searched all over to see if he could catch someone ‘disobeying.’ He did not have to wait long, because the plague was already widespread among us. He was quickly able to find people who unwillingly transgressed his evil order. He put his eyes on one of the prisoners who soiled the place where he stood, and ordered him to lick it with his tongue.
“The victim cried and shed tears and begged him for forgiveness because he is weak and very sick,” but the wicked commander paid no heed. The victim lied down in front of him, to fulfill the order, but was so nauseated that he was unable to. The wicked commander beat him with terrible cruelness until the young man died on the spot.”
This story speaks of terrible cruelty. I don’t know if in the history of the Jewish people there was ever a story like this. It is not easy to say this, but if we will look at it from the perspective of midah k’neged midah, what was the sin of that generation? What brought upon them the terrible churban? The Haskalah. It was a generation that soiled themselves with all the filth of secular, non-Jewish society. They took in the literature and the culture of the nations around them. They “licked it up.”
This is what R. Chaim of Brisk wrote:
Until about a hundred years ago, all the Jewish people were holy. They were a unique nation, pure, strong in their faith, strong in their yirah and in keeping all the Torah.... But in recent generations, new authors have arisen. They have broken down the fences of the law and transgressed the boundaries of proper behavior.... The House of Yisrael has been destroyed, and its honor is gone.
