Klara Caro Diary Excerpt

Haggadah Section: -- Exodus Story

We inmates who strictly observed Passover, got three matzot a day this meant still more starvation than usual. On this eve of the first Seder, we were assembled in our room, occupied by five persons. As chairs were not available, people were sitting on the floor, perhaps twenty or thirty men and women. The seder plate consisted of a carrot, a little bit of not eatable green, a bone, and salt water; tears you could have enough there. The rabbi, my late husband, celebrated the seder, reading the haggadah, and a chasen [cantor] from Prague with a wonderful voice (the Czech Jews were especially gifted in art and music) changed the well-known songs. It belonged to the satanic tricks of the Nazis, that on Jewish holidays they invented special cruel punishments. So all of a sudden, the lights went out and we were surrounded by complete darkness. But the rabbi went on saying the haggadah by heart, as good as he could, and the chasen went on singing the beautiful songs, [in] Hebrew Yiddish…till the sun rose at the horizon. Never “L’shanah ha-ba’ah b’Yerushalayim” [Hebrew for next year in Jerusalem] has been said with more fervor, never the dream of independence and freedom for our people thought of in more hope. Living in bondage and slavery and danger like forefathers in Egypt, these Jews held…up their spirit, their faith in the help of Almighty. I do not how few of them survived and lived to see the redemption and the rebirth of our people. But and grandchildren and their child must know this story, that they may be proud of the heroism of their ancestors and be proud to be a Jew.

This account of Passover seder in Theresienstadt was written by Klara Caro, an active member of the Jewish feminist movement in Germany before the Nazis came to power. She was also the wife of Rabbi Isidor Caro of Cologne. The Nazis deported the Caros to Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1942…..She wrote these words to teach us about the event of the time, to memorialize the victims, and to show hope in the midst of hell…. Her story illustrates what Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi meant when he wrote about Passover: “Here the memory of the nation is annually renews and replenished, and the collective hope sustained.

Source:  
Marion Kaplan

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