determined that no obstacles will stand in our way. We appeal to you and to the people of Israel to strengthen our hand. We shall not leave Poland until we reinforce our movement there. All of us are tired; so am I. I shall not go to Israel so fast. We will emigrate there when Poland has kibbutzim, aliyah and a full-blown Zionist movement. Only then will we live in the kibbutzim with peace of mind. If we do not receive the requisite assistance, then a grievous sin will have been committed. Calmness — the most beautiful virtue of our Jew- DR. SAMUEL PISAR ish girls who fell in the Holocaust. They were the nerve center of our movement, who brought word of our efforts to the people. Never shall we forget them, and their memories will serve as an everlasting symbol from generation to generation. It was no accident that the other speakers today did not detail their war experiences. Surely they have much to share with you. But we came here to describe our problems, not to boast about them. We proclaim to you that we are still alive, that we will emigrate to Israel at all costs, and that we are united with you. GROWING UP IN THE BIALYSTOK GHETTO (Editor’s note: Samuel Pisar was born in Bialystok, the son of David and Helen Pisar. When he was deported by the Nazis for liquidation, together with his entire family, he was thirteen years old. All his relatives were annihilated by the Nazi murderers. Young Samuel endured unspeakable horrors at their hands, in Ausch- witz and in other death factories. In the spring of 1945, he was liberated from his nightmare by the American Army, near Munich. After the war, as a boy of sixteen, Samuel felt lonely visiting Germany and France. Shortly thereafter he migrated to Australia to be with his two maternal uncles, Nachman and Eliezer Suchowolski. When he was twenty-three, Samuel left Australia for the United States. In America he graduated from Harvard Univer- sity as a lawyer with great distinction and later received a doctorate. He specialized in the juridical problems of world trade, particularly between East and West. Now Dr. Pisar is a renowned international lawyer with offices in Paris, Washington and other cities. He was awarded American citizenship by special act of Congress and is a member of the American Bar Associ- ation. He served as a consultant to the U.S. State Department, as well as to President Kennedy. He also was an adviser to President Nixon’s special commission on international trade; in addition, he helped guide the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress. Pisar also participated in important international conferences in Moscow and Kiev. While in the Soviet Union, he visited the mass Jewish graves in Babi Yar, together with the famous banker David Rockefeller and former Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Sam Pisar did not forget his Bialystoker origins. In 1980, he published Of Blood and Hope, in which he de- scribed life as a young Jewish boy and how he escaped Nazi extermination.) The following excerpts are from OF BLOOD AND HOPE by Samuel Pisar. Copyright (c) 1979 by Samuel The Bialystoker Memorial Book Pisar. English-language Version Copyright (c) 1980 by Auctor Publishing, B.V. Quoted by permission of Lit- tle, Brown and Company: On my thirteenth birthday I was bar mitzvahed in a shabby little synagogue, just inside the barbed wire of the Bia- lystok ghetto, in full sight of the Nazi sentries who were marching back and forth with their fingers on the triggers of submachine guns. I was not animated by any great religious fervor, and at home my parents observed the High Holidays more out of respect to their parents than out of deep faith. But reading the Bible in my captivity brought home to me truths that seemed timeless. The ascetic-looking rabbi talked to me about the eternal persecution of Jews by the pharaohs, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Romans, the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian czars, and now Hitler’s Reich. I felt close to those families which through the ages had to cele- brate the bar mitzvahs of their sons clandestinely, not know- ing what the future might bring. I understood their eternal quest for freedom and knowledge, and how the timeless bonds of suffering that tied them together had forged the identity of a people. I felt privileged, perhaps because the per- secution was now at its highest point, to belong to that people for better or for worse. When I stepped away from the scrolls of the Torah to make my ritual speech the words came naturally: pointing through the window of the synagogue at the tall fence outside, I said: ‘As always let us turn to pray toward Jerusalem, but today our Wailing Wall is right here.” * * * Finally, the ghetto was razed. Incredibly, many young Jews, both men and women, tried to resist the military assault, killing a handful of Nazis. Unarmed their resistance was as heroic as it was futile. All were mowed down. One, Malmed, threw a bottle of sulfuric acid into the face of an SS officer, blinding him forever. I saw Malmed’s hanged body that night in the middle of Commerce Street, the main ghetto artery. 145