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Thursday October 11, 2007

Tree that saved a life finds a home in Israel

by etgar lefkovits
jps

He cowered inside the hollow trunk of the tree as the Gestapo officers searched for him just outside.

It was the waning months of the Holocaust, but death was once again closing in on Jakob Silberstein, who weeks earlier had just escaped during a Nazi death march from Auschwitz, and, together with three other camp survivors, found refuge at the home of a Czech woman, Jana Sudova, along the border with Poland.

As his heart pounded, he remained hidden inside the tree for nine hours, which felt like a nightmarish eternity.

He almost expected to be set on fire inside the hollow of the tree, which looked up to the sky but sequestered him from the outside, or to be axed to pieces.

His only hope was that if he was caught, he would be allowed to come out of the tree and be shot, and not be murdered inside the tree.

Weeks earlier, Silberstein realized that the tree — growing in the woman’s backyard — had a hollow trunk when he saw a hare taking cover inside.

With the help of an axe, he widened the entrance to the tree for use as an emergency hiding place in case the Nazis came looking for him, not knowing just how soon he could owe his life to the hiding place.

After hours of searching, the Nazis finally left the site empty-handed, and the Czech woman’s helper told him the Gestapo officer had left the area.

“My body refused to move. It was as if I had become paralyzed,” said Silberman, now 83. “I had to fight myself in order to exit from the tree.”

The three other Jewish escapees who also had been sequestered in the attic of the house had been caught and murdered by the Nazis after making a fruitless attempt to reach the approaching Red Army lines.

After the war ended, Silberstein discovered that the Czech woman knew that he and his friends were Jewish — and were not partisans as they had told her when asking for shelter — and never forgot her kindness.

He would spend years trying to locate the family, in a half dozen trips to Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, finally locating the woman’s daughter, Ana, in 2004.

Jana Sudova was posthumously awarded Yad Vashem’s highest honor last year, and declared a Righteous Among the Nations in a ceremony attended by her daughter, who was three years old at the time of her mother’s heroism.

Jana Sudova died in 1993.

Having located the daughter of the woman who saved him six decades earlier, Silberstein had almost come full circle.

But there was just one more thing for Silberstein to do to: find the tree that had served as his hiding place and bring it to Israel.

With the help of a Czech journalist, he was able to locate the tree, which had changed hands multiple times since the end of World War II.

The current Czech owner of the property had sliced the tree in half and was preparing to use it for furniture when Silberstein turned up at the house with his story and offer to buy the tree.

The dumbfounded owner refused to accept money for the tree trunk, and gave it to Silberstein to fulfill his lifelong dream of bringing it to Israel.

Silberstein was determined the tree should be part of Yad Vashem and worked to acquire the necessary permits. On Monday, Oct. 8, the trunk went on permanent display at Yad Vashem just above the Garden of the Righteous, its strong trunk hovering over the names of those non-Jews who, like Jana Sudova, worked to save lives amid the horrors of the Holocaust.

“This tree, for me, is life,” said Silberstein, whose shaking left arm still bears the concentration camp number branded into his skin.

“I believe in divine shelter,” he said. “I had someone protecting me from above.

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