Seder story

As is our custom, we went to our daughter and her family in Beersheva for the Seder night. They always invite interesting people, often including American immigrants. This time it was a young woman from Baltimore. As often happens people tell stories around the table during the Seder, and this young woman told a particularly touching story with a great deal of feeling.
There were two yeshiva students whose families had been murdered by the Nazis and they were transported to Auschwitz together in 1943. After some time there they were both feeling that they could not go on, when one said to the other, "it will soon be Pesach, I want to make matzo." The other replied "are you crazy, that's impossible, how could you make matzo under these terrible circumstances." But the boy persisted, and so his friend said, "look, I swallowed a piece of gold before we came here and now I have it hidden, I will give this piece of gold if it will help to achieve your wish to make matzo."
So they approached a man named Haim who worked in the kitchen at the camp and asked him if he could get them a bit of flour. "Are you crazy he said, it's like I have a target painted on my back, the Germans are looking for any excuse to kill me." But, when he was offered the piece of gold he said that he would see what he could do. With the gold he bribed one of the German guards and managed to smuggle a small bag of flour into the lager. The boys collected some pure rain water, and secreted the water and the flour, waiting for an opportune moment. When the Germans were burning clothes, they managed to put the flour-water mixture on a metal grate in the fire and soon they had a small piece of matzo.
When the eve of Pesach came they announced to the whole lager that they had some matzo, and of course nobody believed them until they brought it out, and then they and others proceeded to say all the Pesach prayers that they could remember by heart using this matzo. At the end neither of them wanted to eat it, they each deferred to the other because it was only enough for one, until finally one of them gave in and ate it. The Germans, in order to humiliate the Jews, gave out double rations of bread during Pesach, but these yeshiva boys refused to eat bread. They became terribly weak and within a short time both of them perished.
How did she know this story, because Haim was her grandfather! He had survived the camp, and had returned to his town, but all his family were dead. He made an oath that he would never have children because of all the cruelty and horror he had witnessed. He was transported to Sweden with other Jeiwsh refugees and was taken in by a gracious Christian family who nursed him back to health. This family had a daughter and she and Haim became close friends. The family said that they would like him to marry their daughter, on one condition, that he first become a Christian.
That night he had terrible dreams of the camp, and awoke realizing that he could not go through with it. He returned to Germany and in a DP camp there met a Rabbi who was looking for students to join his yeshiva in Baltimore. This was a way to rescue Jewish youths because they needed only a student visa to enter the US, while the other visas were much more difficult to obtain. So he went to Baltimore, and because of the kindness he had also witnessed in the camp he changed his mind and there he got married and had children, and he told this story at every Seder night. Partly as a result of this his granddaughter had made aliyah to Israel and was there to tell us this story.
The consequences of our actions are unpredictable. All that can be asked is that we follow our consciences even under the most terrible of circumstances. Chag Pesach sameach!