"I played among corpses": The famous Holocaust survivor reveals his story

Rabbi Yosef Polak, a Bergen-Belsen survivor and rabbi and head of the rabbinical court in Boston, has immigrated to Israel with his wife. Ahead of Rosh Hashanah, he is publishing his memoir "Footprints in Memory: Testimony of a Tender Child" through Yad Vashem, tracing his consciousness as a child who played among corpses in the camp. The book, in Hebrew, addresses the question of God's presence during the Holocaust.

Rabbi Yosef Polak, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and head of the Boston rabbinical court, has immigrated to Israel with his wife in a closing of the circle. Ahead of Rosh Hashanah, he is publishing his memoir "Footprints in Memory: Testimony of a Tender Child" through Yad Vashem, translated into Hebrew. Polak was born in October 1942 in The Hague, occupied Netherlands. As an infant, he was deported with his parents to Westerbork and from there to Bergen-Belsen. His father died in April 1945 of typhus and malnutrition; his mother weighed 23 kilograms. Yosef, under three years old, was separated from his mother and sent with sick children to the Netherlands for adoption. His mother survived, located him, and gave him a tzitzit and a siddur. The two lived in a home for Holocaust survivors in The Hague and emigrated to Montreal. Polak studied at the Lubavitch yeshiva and Concordia University, was ordained as a rabbi in 1967, and served as a rabbi at Ohio University and Boston University. Only at age 50 did he begin writing about his memories. The book traces the awakening consciousness of the toddler who played among corpses in Bergen-Belsen, using partial images, bodily sensations, and memory fragments. The testimony is written in a language that moves between poetry and Talmudic pilpul, centered on the question of where God was during the Holocaust. Dr. Naama Sari-Levi, chief editor at Yad Vashem, notes that the book is exceptional and confronts difficult questions.