Eighty-six years after Jewish books were burned in Germany, Christians Standing with Israel (CSI) to contribute to the rewriting of Jewish holy scriptures: Together with our Israeli partner Keren Hayesod, we presented the Jewish community in Halle (Saale) with a new Torah scroll, made possible by numerous donations. It was a symbol against antisemitism and a gesture of solidarity and friendship with the Jewish community. During the presentation, there was a moving encounter with Holocaust survivor Viktor. Our colleague Anemone Rüger has written down his story.
By Anemone Rüger
It is October 9, 2024, in Halle, the fifth anniversary of the attempted attack on the synagogue. The first part of the commemoration is over. It is lunchtime. I review the program for the ceremonial presentation of the new Torah scroll this afternoon. Among those who, together with the Israeli scribe, will be allowed to add the final letters to the holy text, a certain Viktor Tsessarskiy, 90 years old, is announced.
Ninety years – that sounds like a story, I think to myself, and I set off to find Viktor. Sure enough, a good hour before the event begins, he and his wife Tatiana are already sitting patiently in a corner of the synagogue. Viktor has a story – and not just any story. Our conversation, which lasts until the end of the break, ends with an emotional embrace and marks the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
“Dad was a violinist in the Minsk Philharmonic; Mom was an actress at the Yiddish Theater,” begins Viktor’s life story in the Belarusian capital, where an estimated 80,000 Jews lived during the interwar period. Natan Salomonowitsch, named after his grandfather Salomon, was born in Austria. When he was five, his parents moved with him from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Russian Empire, settling in Odessa, where Natan later met Viktor’s mother, Chaya. In Minsk, Belarus, where the young family settled, Natan played first violin in the orchestra. He often conducted as well, especially when the orchestra went on tour.
“I had just turned seven when the war started,” Viktor recounts. “The orchestra was immediately evacuated to the Urals. But Dad saw no reason to panic. ‘Hitler will never make it this far!’ was his conviction. So he and another colleague stayed behind.” Only when the bombs were already falling did Viktor’s family also try to flee in a panic. “We joined the endless stream of refugees on foot along the road to Mogilev—Dad, Mom with my little sister Bellochka, who was only nine months old, and me holding Mom’s hand,” Viktor says. “We had hardly anything with us. Dad carried our only suitcase.”
But the fleeing families didn't get far. After a few days, they were stopped by the advancing Wehrmacht. All the men were ordered to register. "And Papa, being the obedient Austrian he was, went," Viktor remarks with a bitter smile. "For him, obeying an official order was out of the question. We never saw him again. They probably shot all the men on the spot. But we didn't know that at first. So we went looking for him. There was a prisoner-of-war camp nearby, Trostinets. A terrible place. We thought he might be there. Mama managed to get some buckwheat and cooked him some porridge. At the gate, they took everything from us. And we didn't find Papa either."
Into the ghetto
With heavy hearts, the family began their journey back to Minsk. "On foot, of course," Viktor adds. "In July, notices were posted everywhere: all Jews had to relocate to the Minsk Ghetto. So did we: Mama, my little sister, and I; along with Mama's two sisters and their children. Next door was a special ghetto called the 'Hamburg Ghetto.' Jews from Germany and Austria were sent there. The adults had to do hard forced labor. There was nothing to eat, nothing to wear. And it slowly got cold. We traded everything we still had for something edible; we were always searching through the garbage for something..."
The children in the ghettos quickly became the family's breadwinners – they were the most likely to be able to sneak under the barbed wire fence unnoticed and beg for something in the outside world. "That's how I was sent to my dad's colleague at the philharmonic," Viktor continues. "He was Russian, so he wasn't in danger. He gave me some potato peelings, and my mom made a kind of potato pancake out of them."
Every morning, the prisoners left the ghetto in columns for work; in the evening, they returned exhausted. This is how the winter of 1941 passed. Spring was already approaching when one day Chaja's column didn't return. Not a single one of them. "Mama's sisters sent me to Papa's colleagues with a note telling me not to come back. And that was it. I never saw any of them again. They all perished there—my father, my mother, my aunts Chasja and Etja with their children. I never learned what happened to my sister Bella; she certainly couldn't have survived without Mama."
Into the home
For a time, Viktor found refuge with a Russian family of musicians. But then the neighbors threatened to betray his rescuers. Viktor had to disappear. He diligently memorized his innocuous spiel so he could be admitted to the local orphanage. With the German occupying forces, death lurked everywhere.
Viktor managed to avoid arousing suspicion. But this didn't give him a home. There was never enough to eat. As the war progressed, every undamaged square meter was needed. A Wehrmacht hospital was set up in one of the orphanages. At Christmas, the children sang "O Christmas Tree" to those who had orphaned them. Viktor, along with the other children, learned to survive, to beg, to "repair" appliances from the garbage dump and trade them for a piece of bread, and to steal a few pierogi here and there at the market. Twice he became deathly ill.
In the spring of 1944, Chaja's brother Ajsik returned from the front and found Viktor, who had been hovering between life and death for months with tuberculosis, apathetic and emaciated in a hospital. Uncle Ajsik went home and wept, Viktor later learned. Now Viktor had a family again. "But they didn't have it easy with me," Viktor admits. "I kept running away. By then, I was used to living on the streets and fending for myself. Later, my uncle Aron, Mama's other brother, who had also been at the front, took me in in Moscow. His family had survived in exile. Things went better then. I owe Uncle Aron and Aunt Nechama an immense debt of gratitude."
To Germany
Viktor married and worked for many years at a research institute for non-ferrous metals. His two sons, three grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren live in Moscow. In the early 1990s, Viktor and his wife Tatiana came to Germany as refugees. "My friends said at the time, 'What are you doing there, Viktor?! What do you want in this country?' But I was simply curious. I wanted to know what life was like there. And I liked Halle from the very beginning."
Only at the very beginning was there a difficult sense of déjà vu. The authorities had secured the initial reception center in Dessau with barbed wire. "And in front of it, a guard in uniform! He stood there stiff as a board, his hands clasped behind his back, just like back then in Minsk. That gave me a fright. But then I realized that perfectly normal, nice people lived all around me. I liked Halle immediately."
Arrived in Halle
A few weeks later. Finally, the elevator stops on the top floor. Viktor meets me at the elevator door. Tatiana has been baking: piroshki filled with cabbage and egg, and incredibly delicious little poppy seed rolls. "No margarine—everything baked with butter," Tatiana emphasizes. Viktor's great love comes from a Russian Orthodox family of priests. Several of Tatiana's relatives paid for their religious service with their lives in one of Stalin's Gulags.
The marigolds are still blooming profusely on the balcony. If the November fog weren't so thick, you could see the whole city from here. Viktor has housed his CD collection in an electrically lit corner. He loves music. But the centerpiece of his music room is a black-and-white photograph. "That's my family," Viktor explains. "Dad, Mom, and their siblings with their families. Many died. I had nothing left after the ghetto and the orphanages. But Uncle Aron still had a family photo. He gave it to me."
A television screen is also integrated into Viktor's museum. There are quite a few Yiddish songs on YouTube, where he sings with his friend Alexander Goldberg from the Jewish community in Halle, Viktor says. "Look for 'Papirosen,'" Tajana recommends. Papirosen—the ghetto song in which a hungry orphan boy begs passersby to buy some cigarettes from him. "Yes, here you see what our life in the ghetto was like." Viktor says only this one sentence, and I hardly dare to look up. I already have to compose myself. Viktor sings like one of the greats. Like the cantor Estrongo Nachama, whom my grandfather used to secretly try to tune in to on RIAS Berlin on Friday evenings through the crackling radio during the GDR era.
Viktor turned 90 a few months ago. And a few weeks ago, he received his naturalization certificate – after almost a quarter of a century of living in Halle. "Now I'm a proper German citizen," Viktor says proudly. "Viktor" means "the victorious one." It is his belated victory over Hitler.
You can learn more about the Torah scroll project and the handover of the scroll to the synagogue in Halle in this video on YouTube.
This article first appeared in our newspaper "Israelaktuell," issue 139. You can order the newspaper here . We would also be happy to send you several copies for distribution.
