My grandpa Ivor (Yitzchak) Wieder was barely a teenager when he was thrown into the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. He endured starvation, disease, extreme cruelty and immense grief.
Ivor, who passed away last week, carried the weight of his experiences with him for nearly 80 years. He was forever plagued by what he had been through, and by the fact that no one – God or man – had stopped the Nazi atrocities. Yet in his remarkably stoic, business-like manner, he went on to build an incredible life and a legacy of quiet inspiration.
Ivor was born in the early 1930s, though he never knew his exact date of birth. His family lived in the small village of Barsana, in the Maramures region of Transylvania. Growing up as the fourth of five children in a warm, Vizhnitz Hasidic home, Ivor attended Romanian state school in the mornings and cheder in the afternoons. His family was very poor, with no electricity or running water, and village life was marred by relentless Jew hatred.
In March 1944, Nazi forces occupied the region and crammed thousands of Jews into the Berbesti Ghetto. Ivor’s family, violently torn from their homes and their lives, slept in stables.
After a few harrowing weeks, the Ghetto residents were packed like cattle onto trains and taken to Auschwitz. One of Ivor’s most vivid memories was of SS officers, with their guns, truncheons and barking dogs, throwing the cart doors open and shouting “Araus!” (“Get out!”). The stench was suffocating. Within hours of arrival, Ivor’s mother and youngest sister were sent to the gas chambers, their bodies incinerated.
Ivor and Marion Wieder, https://myvoice.org.uk/book/where-was-g-d-in-auschwitz/
Despite being no older then 12 or 13, Ivor was miraculously selected for forced labour – the youngest known boy from the Berbesti Ghetto to make it out of Auschwitz alive. Ivor was stripped, shaved, and tattooed with the number A-3388 – a replacement not just for his name, but his very humanity.
From Auschwitz, Ivor and his older brother Leo endured brutal transfers to other camps: first Fürstengrube, then Mittelbau-Dora, and finally Bergen-Belsen. On these journeys there was no food or water, and in winter temperatures were freezing. Several prisoners died in the carts, and Ivor survived the bitter cold by lying underneath dead bodies.
The savagery in the camps was, to use Ivor’s word, indescribable. He was forced to watch as the Nazis viciously maimed their victims, hanged them, or used them for target practice. Inmates stole bread from one another, sometimes fighting to the death. Ivor saw several commit suicide by throwing themselves onto electric fences, no longer able to bear the hell on earth.
In the final weeks of the war, SS guards began to flee their posts. Food grew even scarcer, disease ran rampant, and death seemed inevitable. Ivor and Leo were emaciated but somehow managed to stay alive long enough to be liberated.
While in the camps, my grandpa didn’t cling to a dream of one day rebuilding the life that had been so viciously taken from him. He wasn’t thinking about teaching the world what had happened or spreading the message of “Never Again.” He didn’t tell himself that life is a gift, even in the most torturous circumstances, nor did he believe that his will to live was the one thing the Nazis could not take away.
The Inauguration Ceremony of Rabbi Yoni Wieder as Chief Rabbi of Ireland at the Dublin Hebrew Synagogue, Rathfarnham Road on the 21st May 2024. Rabbi Wieder became just the eighth Chief Rabbi of Ireland in the 103 years since Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog was inaugurated as the first Chief Rabbi in 1921.
Photo by Taryn Barling
At 13 years old, my grandpa was too young to think in such terms. Even in his later years, he could not identify with other Holocaust survivors who credited their survival to an ideological or purpose-driven mindset.
When asked what kept him going through all the terrors he faced, my grandpa would respond simply that he didn’t know. When I pressed him directly – why hadn’t he jumped onto the electric fences, as others did? – he admitted that he often asked himself the same question but had no good answer.
Yet with nothing more than an innate, stoic drive to keep going, my grandpa pulled through. On the surface, his outlook may not seem as uplifting as others. But to me, his is a story of remarkable resilience, one that speaks to the human capacity to endure unthinkable suffering, sometimes even without having a clear reason to do so.
In the decades following the Holocaust, my grandpa did not talk much about what he went through. “What is there to say?” he would ask. Instead, he focused on the practicalities of forging a new life from next to nothing.
After living in hostels and with foster families for several months, he spent four years at the Gateshead yeshiva, before moving to London to find work. With unyielding determination, Ivor and his brother started a business manufacturing and selling bags and luggage. Despite barely being able to write English, starting without capital, and lacking any formal training, they grew to be highly successful.
In 1959 Ivor married my grandma, Marion (née Freedman), a daughter of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and together they built a vibrant and loving family. Marion died from cancer in 2009, just a few months after their golden wedding anniversary.
Once he retired, my grandpa started talking more openly about his time in the camps. Ivor was a kind man, who almost always had a grin on his face, and liked nothing more than to crack a wry joke. But he was also very tough and cynical, and he did not think there was any meaning to be found in the Holocaust. He wanted the world to know all about the Nazi evils, and for this reason, he made sure to share his story. But he never tried to draw any positive or inspiring messages from what he went through, and he did not frame his survival as part of any grand mission.
Pic: The Fed My Voice Project.
My grandpa would conclude every speech by asking “Where was God in Auschwitz?”. This question haunted him relentlessly, and eventually it became the title of his book.
My grandpa was religious throughout his life. He loved to sing passages from davening, and he was forever quoting teachings of the Gemara or Rashi. He always believed in God and, crucially, in a God who intervenes in human affairs, one who could have stopped the Nazis – yet didn’t. To Ivor, it seemed that God abandoned the Jewish People during the Holocaust. God should have been at Auschwitz, but wasn’t.
Ivor had little patience for people who said things like “God’s ways are mysterious; we can’t understand them”. “That’s not an answer!” he would retort. To his mind, the idea of the Divine ways being beyond human comprehension was at most an abstract belief. It could not explain the unfathomable destruction and cruelty he witnessed, nor ease his lingering grief.
Talking to my grandpa and listening to his reflections over the years, one thing that always struck me was his unflinching honesty. Yet despite the lasting trauma and his oftentimes bleak perspective, Ivor pressed on while in the camps and thrived afterwards. His cynicism and anguish never stopped him forging ahead and building an amazing life and legacy for himself.
My grandpa was loved by so many for his fierce sense of humour, his outspoken manner, and his unique, old-world charm. But above all, he was admired for his unwavering stoicism. His survival and accomplishments are a powerful testament to the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit – the ability to bear inconceivable hardship, to rebuild, even after agonising loss, and to flourish, even while carrying the huge, inescapable burden of the past.
My grandpa has always been an incredible source of inspiration for our family, for those who heard his story, and for so many who knew him. Nothing makes me prouder then being his grandson.
- Yoni Wieder became the eighth chief rabbi of Ireland in May 2024
