At that time, where I was, you didn’t have even a hundred young people under the age of thirty who put on tefillin. Older people still maintained the old ideas but young people did not. You had a tiferes bachurim of about fifty men – that’s all. It was a few balebatim who wanted to stay frum; the rest were throwing it all away.
In a city like Pinsk, there were 40,000 Jews in Pinsk – in 1928 there were 40,000 Jews. And you didn’t have even ten boys who went to yeshivos outside of Pinsk. There were no yeshivos in Pinsk. Slabodka, Lomza, Telz, Radin, Mir, didn’t have ten bachurim from a town of 40,000 boys. I have a letter written by a Pinsker Jew to the Jewish newspaper where he describes that. The world turned upside down.
And that’s why our nation ignored the intended lessons. Instead of learning the lesson that Hashem intended them to learn, they learned just the opposite. And therefore one of the great lessons for which the Holocaust was intended went lost. At best, it’s treated with silence. Instead of sitting and studying the terrible makkah, Hakadosh Baruch Hu and the gentiles are blamed.
