By: Rafael Medoff

Jews around the world are gathering today to recite the traditional Tisha B’Av lamentations focusing on the destruction of the ancient temple in Jerusalem. Some communities add a lamentation that refers to a more recent tragedy–the refusal of the Allies to bomb the Auschwitz death camp, or the railways leading to it, in 1944. It reads, in part:

“Eicha—how is it—that while the world’s transport lines were destroyed by the fury of the war, [the Allies] did nothing about the lines transporting the Jews to the [Auschwitz slaughter house] ? They [the Allies] claimed it was because of a lack of airplanes. But the answer was that the Allies were not concerned about the fate of the Jews.”

What makes this additional lamentation (‘kina’ in Hebrew) especially poignant is that it was written by a rabbi who was himself the first person to appeal to the Roosevelt administration to order the bombing of Auschwitz and the railway lines leading there.

The author, Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl (1903-1957), grew up in Slovakia and became a prominent figure in the famous Nitra Yeshiva.

When the Germans began deporting Slovakia’s Jews to Auschwitz in the spring of 1942, Rabbi Weissmandl and his cousin, Mrs. Gisi Fleischmann, established an underground rescue organization known as the Prakova Skupina, or Working Group. They smuggled hundreds of Jewish children across the border into Hungary and bribed Nazi officials to hold off on deportations.

After receiving detailed information about Auschwitz from two escapees in April 1944, Rabbi Weissmandl wrote an appeal that was sent to U.S. and British diplomats and the Vatican. Roosevelt administration officials rejected the request on the grounds that it would require diverting American planes from battle zones elsewhere in Europe—but in fact, U.S. bombers were already flying directly over Auschwitz in preparation for the bombing of German oil factories less than five miles from the gas chambers. They were also bombing railways throughout Europe—but not the ones leading to Auschwitz.

Rabbi Weissmandl was captured by the Germans in August 1944 and placed on a train bound for Auschwitz, but he managed to cut a hole in the cattle car with an emery thread he had hidden in a crust of bread. After the war, he immigrated to the United States, where he established a new Nitra Yeshiva, in Mount Kisco, NY. It was there, around 1955, that Rabbi Weissmandl composed his Tisha B’Av lamentation, which he titled “Kinat Min HaMeitzar” or “From the Depths.”

It’s a difficult and thought-provoking outcry, bitterly appropriate for Tisha B’Av, the day we pause to consider the depths to which human beings can sink–not only the murderers, but the bystanders as well.