The Unforgotten Prayer
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“What is this prayer?”
He did not expect interest from me.
“This prayer – the Kaddish – honors our God. It’s a mourning ritual. It is our way to accompany the souls that are separated from us in this world. It is praise for our God for giving us life, which we now return to him.”
He looked into me.
“Tradition calls for the presence of at least ten men to say the Kaddish. A minyan.”
I looked at his dead students then back into his eyes. He did not have his minyan. Horror inexplicably pervaded my soul. I couldn’t move. He saw my paralysis, and to my astonishment he smiled reassuringly as though to say that he understood, that it wasn’t my fault. Tragic circumstances that day.
“A special case,” he said as he looked at the dead bodies around him, “Today must be an exception.”
His gentle look sent guilt through my soul, though I know this was not his intent.
“I will say the prayer, alone, for all of my students.”
“Yes,” I murmured. “Today is a special case. . . .”
My inability to understand or to grasp what was happening must have been visible on my face. My soldiers heard him and froze. He looked at me almost as he would a good friend. He was silently encouraging me to permit the prayer.
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About the Book
This is my story - my life from the horrors of war and slaughter to the travails of change and atonement. For much of my life I lived in fear that my past would catch up to me. I hid my beliefs and prejudices and walked among the gentle, unsuspecting people of a small American town. I am, or was, an embodiment of madness, atrocity, cruelty and horror.
I had to remind myself how to behave, react and interact with those around me. I could not pick my friends, neighbors or the people I would like to associate with. I could not express my desires and thoughts. I could not do what I wanted to do. I was locked inside a mad world without the ability to make any contribution, as I used to do - during the war and before it.
Friends and neighbors? I shunned them. Social groups and religious organizations? I shunned them as well. Often I thought it better to turn myself in or die one way or another - just to get everything over with.
That changed one day - a miraculous day when a young child came into my life and helped me back into life, reappraisal, and a quest for atonement.
That young child was Jewish.
And I am a former SS officer.
About the Author
Danny Rittman, a software engineer with broad interests, felt compelled to express the thoughts and feelings regarding the Holocaust that he developed growing up in the home of a survivor of Dachau and Auschwitz. The result is this novel on the importance of spiritual beliefs in personal change and in the unfolding of time as well. Timeless spiritual beliefs, when properly understood, can lead to remarkable achievement in the best of us and breathtaking change in even the worst of us.