“My own God is the God of love,” said Israeli Zev Kedem, Holocaust survivor and documentary filmmaker, who spoke at Marquette University last week to a crowd of more than 600.
God, said Kedem, teaches us to love — v’ahavta lre’echa c’mocha, love thy neighbor as thyself — and “the habit of loving God unconditionally is the habit of loving other people…. If I can respond to human love, I am close to God.”
Kedem admits that his capacity for love is remarkable. “Most Holocaust survivors have limited capacity for love. Even their own children have many psychological and social problems because of the imprint from the culture of death.”
Since the Holocaust, which ended when Kedem was 11, many have pondered how God could have allowed such horribleness to occur. Kedem acknowledged that as recently as a week or so ago, it occurred to him that God was simply not present during the Holocaust, just as he was absent during other periods of history, he said.
“God was not present during the Holocaust but without God, life was not worth living,” Kedem said. That’s because when God is absent, the conditions of life become ruthlessness and competition, darkness and the absence of love, he said.
In his talk, titled “Schindler’s List: A Survivor Celebrates Life” and sponsored by Marquette Student Government and the Jewish Student Union, Kedem recounted his experiences enduring six concentration camps and other horrors, and the miracle of his survival, partly due to his inclusion in German industrialist Oskar Schindler’s now-famous list.
But his survival didn’t enable him to talk about the Holocaust, he said. “I was silent 50 years until I saw the movie ‘Schindler’s List,’” on which he consulted and in which he appeared. “I was awed by the essential truth of the Holocaust…. That began my ability to speak out about my own experiences. It became a therapy.”
With the local crowd far larger than expected and many people sitting on the floor, Kedem responded by saying, “Wow,” to audience laughter. “If one can call anything a celebration of life, this is it…. One of the dreams was, if only humanity had heard of [the Holocaust], it might not have taken place.”
Kedem expressed hope that by telling his story, it may “act as a trigger how to respond to life when overwhelming evil is on the horizon. The culture of death has reached the shores of America and we have to develop personal and communal strategies of how to respond best,” he said.
Kedem was five years old and vacationing with his family when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. That was the last time they would be together.
After making their way to his grandparents’ home and spending a year in a nearby village, Kedem and his family were rounded up and brought to the Krakow ghetto. He said he hid during deportations and was smuggled into a nearby concentration camp because his mother believed his chances for survival were greater there.
Hiding among the older boys and men in the brush factory, he slept under a bed so as not to be discovered; children younger than 13 caught in the camp were killed.
After talking his way out of being killed by a Nazi soldier, Kedem felt that he “had beaten the culture of death. I was alive and that was all that was relevant…. It provided me with hope that most of the other prisoners didn’t have.”
Though young, Kedem was included in Schindler’s list of Jews to work in his factory in Czechoslovakia. He describes Schindler, who saved about 1,100 Jews, as a “true biblical hero, an imperfect vessel capable of perfect action….”
But a guard at the factory had Kedem and several other boys deported to Auschwitz. From there, he was sent on a death march, and finally was loaded into cattle cars headed for Mauthausen in Austria.
Then, “one day,” recalled Kedem, “I woke up and the gate was open…. You might think this might be a moment of epiphany … but there was … no comparison to what might be imagined a celebration.”
Kedem completed his education and earned a degree in engineering from Oxford University before moving to Israel. After working as coordinating engineer in the restoration of Jerusalem’s Old City, he began his career as a documentary filmmaker. He now lives in California with his family.
“My subsequent life was a celebration of life,” he said.
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