Krakow once had 350,000 Jews. As the war progressed, many of those Jews were herded into the ghetto, and then many of them—most of them—were herded out of the ghetto.
We stood on one street corner. In the middle of the Krakow ghetto, they have a square, and in that square they show you where the Jews were all gathered. And they have to commemorate that; they have individual chairs sitting there, facing in the direction the Jews were taken. Then there’s one chair facing the other direction, because some Jews didn’t go that way.
Then we’re on a block, looking at an apartment building, and Rabbi Yossi Cohen says, “Look at that apartment. The last two remaining Jews in all of Krakow, a city that was Jewish for over 700 years, back from way before the Rema. For over 700 years, this city had thousands of Jews. In the middle of the war, there were the last two Jews, Moshe and Mendel Brachfeld.”
Moshe and Mendel Brachfeld were two brothers who somehow survived it all. They were hiding in an apartment. A few days before Pesach, there was a bakery. We literally saw the bakery, like across the street. It says it was a bakery. Somehow they got some flour and some water, and they made themselves some matzot (unleavened bread). They sat up there in their apartment making a Pesach Seder (ritual meal). It was the last Pesach Seder of the Jewish community of Krakow.
The two brothers, Moshe and Mendel—Mendel was the older one—Moshe says to his brother, “It says it’s supposed to be the time of our freedom. This is our freedom. Look at us. This is our freedom.”
His brother says to him—Mendel puts his arm around his brother and says, “Let me tell you. We say in Hashkivenu, that’s in Arvit (evening service) every night, we say that Hashem should put us in Cherut Olam. The Jewish people have freedom forever. How can you say we have freedom forever? We’ve gone through so much.”
He says, “The answer is that freedom doesn’t necessarily have to do with what’s happening around you. Freedom has to do with your actions, your words, and your thoughts. If your actions are actions of free people, your words are words of free people, and your thoughts are thoughts of free people, then you are free.”
They made their Seder with as much celebration as they could. A few days later, the Nazis came bursting through the door of their apartment, and they were both caught. The Nazis naturally were going to take the two of them to be killed, but this Nazi who found them decided that he was very proud of the fact that he had the last two Jews. “There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in this city, and I have the last two Jews.” So he paraded these brothers around and never killed them. They survived the war.
Right after telling the story, the man, the tour guide, showed us a picture of these two brothers, these two young men after the war. Then he showed us another picture of the two of them with so many of their children. Then he showed us pictures from maybe 40, 50 years after the war: these two men, one with a long beard, one clean-shaven, these two brothers dancing at the wedding of one of their grandchildren. And he said, “These are two brothers who were in this apartment right here. They had nothing, a little bit of matzah or whatever they called matzah. And all they had was the Jewish stubbornness. We keep going. We keep surviving. We keep thriving. We keep marching. We keep talking, thinking, and acting, no matter what happens around us.”
So this is such a fine line. There’s a way to be stubborn that could literally destroy you. But then there’s a way to be stubborn that’s so necessary to be everything you need to be, because you don’t have to go through Nazi Germany or Cossacks or Crusades or Inquisitions or difficult times in order to experience punch after punch in life.
And Hashem said, “I’m going to make my chosen nation have a stubbornness that could be used very wrongly, like to create a negative, but also have a stubbornness that could be used very rightly in order to endure through thousands of years.”
So if you find yourself being a stubborn person, being emotionally stubborn is the most wonderful quality in the world because you keep getting punched and you keep going. But when you’re mentally stubborn, it is such a negative quality because you keep being told and you’re still not listening. And when that’s the stubbornness, it’s dangerous. But when you have the stamina to persevere, there’s no greater stubbornness than that.