In his article in the Torah section of the Hamodia [Hebrew] newspaper (Parashas Kedoshim 5784), Harav Moshe Yaakov Kanner, shlita, author of Sifsei Melech on the Rambam, describes a chilling story that he heard from Harav Yitzchak Elazar Meizlish, shlita of Yerushalayim:
Many years ago, Rav Meizlish related, I had the chance to visit a dear Yid in Yerushalayim, Reb Eliyahu Herman, z”l. He was a tailor, but his profession was just a veneer for his truly noble interior being.
Reb Eliyahu was a young man when he was expelled from his home in Hungary during the Holocaust. Along with many other Jews, he was exiled to a different planet, Auschwitz. Somehow, he was able to smuggle his tefillin there, and to don them with mesirus nefesh. Each day, he arose very early, before going out to their slave labor, and he put on the tefillin quickly and recited Krias Shema, before the human beasts, the Nazis, ym”s, discovered him.
The danger was immense, and he was risking his life to do this. It was clear that if he would be caught, he’d be killed on the spot. But he knew the secret of the tefillin, he knew that this was the way to connect to HaKadosh Baruch Hu with an unbreakable bond, and therefore, he was not ready under any circumstances to forego this daily spiritual oxygen that revived his soul.
He had just a few minutes each morning to put on the tefillin, and there was no time for anyone else to don the tefillin. It simply wasn’t feasible under the circumstances.
One day, Reb Eliyahu had an idea: If his friends would hold onto him while he put on the tefillin, they would have a spark of that connection to HaKadosh Baruch Hu, and if those holding him would hold onto others – they would also be influenced by the kedushah... And that’s how it happened that in the valley of death, there was a chain of people holding onto the sanctity of tefillin...
This went on for many months. Reb Eliyahu put on tefillin each day, and his friends connected to this mitzvah by holding onto him, with mesirus nefesh.
The war was nearing an end. The Allies were closing in on the Nazis on all sides, but the beasts’ desire for murder did not ebb. They sent the broken, weak Jews on death marches into Germany.
One dark night in Iyar 5705, as they passed through a thick forest, Reb Eliyahu and a few friends decided to escape and hide in the forest. They were able to leave the marching formation without the guards noticing, and with strength they didn’t dream they had, they fled into the thick cover of the trees. When they rested a bit, they looked for something to eat.
As they were hunting for something to eat, one of them suddenly noticed a German army vehicle parked a distance away, and he drew his friends’ attention to it. Their fear paralyzed them, and they hurried to hide behind the thick tree trunks. After hours of hiding, and seeing that the car was not moving, one of them crept up to the vehicle. When he got there, he breathed a sigh of relief, and motioned for his friends to come closer...There was one dead German soldier there, in the seat.
Inside the car, Reb Eliyahu and his friends found some fruits, and a few new sets of a German army uniform. Despite their repulsion at putting on these murderers’ uniforms, they decided to change out of their rags and into the clean uniforms. Reb Eliyahu slipped his carefully guarded tefillin into the pocket of his new shirt.
Suddenly, they heard voices from the edge of the forest. The men froze, and the voices drew closer. They heard vehicles moving. Their eyes lit up when they saw that they were American army vehicles who were liberating the area.
And suddenly, they were spotted – a group of men wearing German army uniforms, by the American soldiers. Three soldiers stopped and aimed their weapons at them. “Who are you?” they asked for identities. “Where are your documents?” Of course, the prisoners had no documents, and the soldiers threatened to shoot them. Reb Eliyahu and his friends cried: “We are Jews! We found these uniforms and changed out of our prison garb into them!” But it was to no avail and they were a step away from being shot. Reb Eliyahu recovered and remembered the tefillin and took them out for the soldiers to see. One of them was a Jew and he asked in Yiddish: “Du bist a Yid?” And then he continued: “Do you know how to daven? Do you know how to recite Shema Yisrael?”
Eliyahu burst out crying. With his last vestiges of strength, with the tefillin in his hands, he cried aloud: “Shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad!” His cry moved the soldier to the depths of his soul, and he fell onto Reb Eliyahu’s shoulder and began to cry with him.
And there, at the edge of the forest, at the height of battle between the liberating army and the army of murderers, their cries rose to the heavens, crowned with the holy tefillin, the witness to the eternality of Am Yisrael. And that’s how the whole group was saved in the merit of the mitzvah of tefillin.
After Rav Meizlish heard the story from the tailor, he asked him to allow him to put on those tefillin. Reb Eliyahu was glad to give him the tefillin to put on. With his heart overflowing, the Rav went to one of the dressing rooms in Reb Eliyahu’s shop, put on the tefillin, said Krias Shema and communed with his Creator with the tefillin through which Shem Shamayim was sanctified in the valley of death, in Auschwitz.
“Reb Eliyahu gave me those tefillin to put on,” Rav Meizlish wrote. “I merited to put on tefillin that were a symbol of the kedushah of Am Yisrael in the death camps. The tefillin, which were an object of Kiddush Hashem in the world, the tefillin astonished the malachim, as they saw the mesirus nefesh of a young bochur endangering himself each day to put them on. The tefillin that a whole group of holy bocurhim in the valley of death used to tie themselves with a strong bond to their Father in Heaven, and which saved the Yid and his whole group from near certain death.”
‘V’Atem Hadveikim’
