Tips for Jewish Living

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The Links of Slavery

By Sabena Stark

It gave me great joy to research and write my Tips article last spring about the orange on the Seder plate tradition. In considering the Jewish month of Nissan 5766/April 2006 and the occurrence of Passover and Yom Hashoah only two weeks apart, I was reminded of an emotion-filled conversation at a workshop I attended many years ago. We were discussing other new Passover traditions, ones that linked the story of the slavery and liberation of the Israelites to our imperative to alleviate oppression in the modern world.

Someone mentioned how important it was to remember the slavery and genocide of people of color in the US only a few hundred years ago. Our traditional retelling of the exodus from Egypt should be updated with this more recent history of shameful actions and institutions in which Jews played a role as perpetrators along with non-Jews. After all, the speaker pointed out, the children of Yocheved and Amram had been freed more than three centuries ago.

Someone else chimed in that the yearly Seder should focus on and remember those who are enslaved and oppressed in today’s world.

But there was something missing from this picture, this timeline of human suffering. What was missing was the memory that we HAD been slaves - not 3,000 years ago. We had been slaves only sixty years ago. And slaves under the worst possible conditions: slaves whose commercial usefulness had been manipulated, indeed often finely calculated, against rates of starvation and the progression of disease, to best serve the needs of the Nazi government and their corporate partners during the nightmare of the Shoah.

Many companies benefited from Jewish and other internees' slave labor: Volkswagen AG, Siemens AG, DaimlerChrysler AG and BMW Group, to name a few. One section of the complex of concentration camps known as Auschwitz-Birkenau was built within easy transport to a synthetic rubber factory owned by chemical giant IG Farben (whose assets were divided into Bayer, Aventis and BASF), then the largest corporation in Europe. The slaves of Auschwitz were "rented out" by the Nazis and finally worked or beaten to death. And when pharmaceutical companies desired human guinea pigs to test their products, an order would be sent to the leadership of the camp for the requisite numbers of young women or young men. And the slaves would be transferred, their ultimate fates unrecorded. All products created in the camps were the harvests of slavery. And just as it had in businesses and farms across the United States, when slavery was the bedrock of our national economy, the work of this forced labor made their masters wealthy.

This Passover let us remember that we were slaves. And in commemoration of Yom Hashoah, let's work for an end to genocide and slavery as if it were for us and for our own families.

L'shalom, to a world of peace and freedom for all.