Mid-1940s, in the shadow of the concentration camps:
During one of the darkest points of the war, a young eleven-year-old boy noticed clusters of people lying on the barracks floor. Deprived of all nutrition — physical, emotional, and spiritual — they no longer had the strength to move. They simply lay there, mouths half-open, waiting for something. Anything.
He, too, was starving. But watching others sink even deeper into such unbearable suffering pained him more than his own hunger.
He had no idea how to get them what they needed. There was no water, no cups, no vessels — nothing. But something inside him pushed, almost demanded, that he try. These were his fellow Yidden. He didn’t know the “how,” but he knew he could not stand by.
Stepping just outside the camp’s boundary into the thin strip of nearby forest, he spotted it — a tiny puddle of rainwater. A treasure.
Hidden beneath his prisoner’s uniform, he kept a small pair of tzitzis tucked close to him. He gently lifted them out and dipped the fringes into the puddle, letting the threads absorb every bit of moisture they could hold.
Then he ran back.
One by one, he approached each collapsed inmate and squeezed out a drop — and if they were lucky, two — into their waiting mouths. He repeated the journey again and again, back and forth, until every person received several precious droplets of life.
A few who received this scant “hydration” even managed, weakly, to sit up. Others’ eyes flickered with a spark of renewed strength.
But, as he later explained, more than the physical nourishment was the knowledge that someone — someone with nothing himself — still cared enough to risk everything for them. The awareness that they were not alone, that another neshamah was going all out for their wellbeing, gave them something far more potent than water: emotional and spiritual sustenance.
“I will never forget that moment,” he later said. “Not because of the exertion, and not because of the danger. What stayed with me was the miracle I saw with my own eyes — how a few drops of water, carried on the threads of a simple pair of tzitzis, could lift souls that were moments from surrender. In a place designed to crush every last spark of hope, those droplets ignited something the Nazis could never extinguish.”
“It wasn’t the water that revived them,” he said quietly. “Water alone could never have restored starved bodies. It was the chessed. It was the certainty that someone still cared — that a fellow Yid was willing to give all he had, even when ‘all he had’ was a single drop.”
