World War II

World War II is not presented as a continuous battlefield history but as a force remembered through family stories, ritual, and the postwar community built by survivors. Its contrasting legacies in Zeidy and Bubby—one who survived military service, the other whose family was almost entirely destroyed—make the war an intimate inheritance for the narrator and a defining part of Satmar identity.

Historical Background and Community Formation

The author’s note traces the name Satmar to Satu Mare, a city on the border of Hungary and Romania. During World War II, Hungarian Jewish lawyer and journalist Rudolf Kasztner rescued the rabbi from that city from certain death. The rabbi later emigrated to America, gathered a following of survivors, and named his Hasidic sect after his hometown. Other surviving rabbis likewise named their sects after the places they had left, preserving the memory of communities wiped out in the Holocaust.

In the author’s account, Hasidic Jews in America returned to a heritage that had nearly disappeared, adopting traditional dress and Yiddish. Many rejected the creation of the State of Israel, interpreting the genocide as punishment for assimilation and Zionism. Rebuilding the community also meant having children to replace those who had been killed and to increase its numbers. The note presents that growth as a lasting answer to the destruction of European Jewish life.

Zeidy’s Wartime Story

Zeidy rarely speaks about the war, but once a year, at Passover, he recounts his time in the Hungarian army. The annual telling places his experience within a night devoted to recalling persecution. As the narrator understands it, his purpose is to connect the ancient story of liberation from Egypt with the more recent persecution of Jews, and to warn that present freedom may not last.

His account begins with the incongruity of being assigned to cook for an army when he could barely warm his own soup. He prepared three meals a day and kept a kosher kitchen in secret. When he could not manage the cooking, he asked the kitchen maids to cook while he did their cleaning. Prayer was rare, and safe places to pray were rarer. On Passover, with no flour for matzo, the soldiers ate half a potato each, dipped in saltwater. Zeidy’s survival came at a cost: his beard and payot were cut off. He knows he was fortunate to have escaped with his life.

Bubby’s Loss and Survival

The wartime story Zeidy tells is not the only family history at the seder. Bubby lost her relatives, who were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz while she labored in the factories of Bergen-Belsen. Near death from typhus when liberation came, she survived, but rarely speaks about what she lost.

She remembers them through a yahrzeit candle for each relative, from baby Mindel to fourteen-year-old Chaim. The narrator also keeps black-and-white photographs of Bubby’s family wrapped in a paper towel in a top drawer, taking them out only when she feels able to look. The faces make the deaths difficult to comprehend; the photographs turn an immense historical catastrophe into particular people, including a two-year-old child. Bubby’s silence and the narrator’s private acts of looking carry different parts of the same family memory.

Inherited Memory and Its Tensions

The seder exposes a contrast between public commemoration and private endurance. While Zeidy tells his wartime story, Bubby has heard it many times; later, she will serve the meal, wait for the men to finish the ceremony, and clean up. The narrator wonders whether Bubby can remember captivity without being able to celebrate freedom from its bitterness. The ritual gives the war a place in the present, but it does not make grief finishable.

The narrator also encounters the war through competing accounts of what followed it. Bubby condemns Zionists, describing Jewish refugees turned away from Israel and children separated from their families; the narrator is taught to see Hasidim as the only true Jews. These convictions shape how the family understands survival and communal responsibility, while the prohibition on travel to Israel makes the narrator’s inherited connection to that land feel both powerful and withheld.

The war’s legacy appears in the family’s insistence on replacing the dead with new generations, but survival does not guarantee an untroubled future. The narrator reflects that Zeidy lived through the war so he could bring children into the world, yet suffering continued among his descendants. Her account places that anguish beside Bubby’s memory that, in her childhood, even a scrap of food was cause for gratitude because the family still had one another. World War II thus persists not only as remembered persecution but as a measure against which later hardship, religious duty, and the possibility of freedom are understood.