A Chosen Few by Mark Kurlansky Page A

brother Chaim was a man whom most people immediately liked. All his life and even for years after his death, mentioningthe name Chaim Rottenberg to anyone who knew him would elicit a warm smile and a shake of the head, accompanied by a statement like, “Chaim—he was a personality!” Chaim was not an entrepreneur like Jozef. He was more like a biblical prophet, perhaps an Isaiah, declaring, “Set thy house in order.” Tall and lean, with precise elongated features, his peering eyes made it clear at one glance that nothing would deter this man once he had made up his mind. His mind was usually focused, as in the oldest of Jewish traditions, on the law.
    While Chaim and Jozef were in the labor camp, Recha managed to get them a shipment of matzoh for Passover through the Red Cross. Since there was a general shortage of food, religious and nonreligious Jews alike were grateful for this package. Chaim distributed the matzoh, but before getting a piece, each prisoner had to sign a written statement that he would never eat bread with leavening on Passover.
    Recha was able to get both her brothers and hundreds of other Jews to Switzerland. But in 1944 the Paraguayan scheme collapsed, and the remaining Jews with South American passports were sent to Auschwitz, where only three survived. Among those who did not survive were Recha’s parents.
    After the war, Recha continued her work. The DPs—displaced persons, thousands of homeless Jews in Allied-supervised refugee camps in Germany—needed help. As she traveled to these camps in the charred remains of the Third Reich, Recha tried, although not always successfully, to observe traditional religious practices, which meant that all work activity had to stop on Friday evening until Saturday evening.
    One Friday afternoon in late 1945, she was traveling in Germany and came upon a house for young Orthodox women in Landsberg am Lech. This was the same beautiful Bavarian mountain village where Hitler had been imprisoned in 1923 following the failed putsch; he had passed his time there dictating
Mein Kampf
. The Orthodox women were all survivors who were trying to make contacts to get out of Europe and into Palestine. Among them were a young woman named Rifka Melchior and her younger sister Frankel. In January they had been among two thousand Jewish women forced to march from labor camps in central Germany, away from the Americans and the Russians. Once a day, the Germans had fed them each a piece of bread, but first they had taken the ones that were too weak to go on and shot them by the side of the road. When the women arrived in Czechoslovakia inMay, only two hundred of them were left. Rifka weighed less than seventy-five pounds.
    Recha spent the Sabbath with the survivors in the house at Landsberg am Lech. She later returned on another Sabbath and found that Rifka, who was now working for a Jewish charity, was about to leave for the Jewish holidays. As Rifka started to say goodbye to Recha, Recha informed her that she could not leave. Rifka had to come with her to Brussels instead. “I have work for you in Brussels,” Recha told Rifka, with a smile and a peculiar wink.
    Rifka, whose only dream was to get to Palestine, followed Recha to Belgium anyway. Recha was a woman who had once talked her way across the Swiss border, badgered the Gestapo into releasing twelve Jewish prisoners, then taken them back across to Switzerland. Few people could say no to her. It was a Rottenberg family trait.
    Her brother, Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg, was the work she had in mind for Rifka. Among the strictly Orthodox, arranged marriages are commonplace at about the age of eighteen. Rifka was already twenty-one when she married Chaim under a canopy beneath the stars, as prescribed by law, on the terrace of a hotel set against the background of dark, glittering Lake Geneva and the silhouette of the Swiss Alps. But even in this setting it was hard to feel romantic. Maybe it was hard to feel anything at all. So