“How can I say ‘Let all who are hungry come and eat’? It is too difficult. I am only human.”
It is the morning before the Passover Seder in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Hundreds of exhausted prisoners, among them children and the elderly, crowd into the meager barracks, starving, as a typhus epidemic rages.
One couple, Jupp and Erna Weiss, speak quietly.
Jupp holds a position in the camp: “Elder of the Jews.”
Though they themselves are weak and weary, his wife urges him that on this night, the eve of the Seder, he must go out:
“You must speak tonight in all the barracks.”
“But what can I say?” he protests. “When eighty percent of the prisoners are ill and there is hardly any bread. We have no emergency rations left, nothing more to give the sick and the exhausted. There are no more supplies.”
“All the more reason that you must speak! And the line you quote from the Haggadah must guide your words.”
Erna’s quiet words persuaded Jupp and gave him strength, as they had done many times during their long ordeal together in the camps.
***
Jupp Weiss never forgot that Seder night. It left such a deep impression that only weeks after his liberation, he sat down and wrote his memories of that evening. The account also became a kind of memorial for his wife, who did not survive. Just three pages.
Too little has been written about Jupp Weiss, the man who became a leader among the Jews during his imprisonment, first in Westerbork and later in Bergen-Belsen. Only in recent years has his name begun to appear in the Hebrew press, following the decision to award him the “Jewish Rescuer Citation” by B’nai B’rith and the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust.
Yet these few pages offer a remarkable testimony to the complex and singular figure that Jupp Weiss was: a devoted and beloved family man, an exceptional organizer with a keen historical awareness, and a person who, with extraordinary courage, responsibility, and strength of spirit, not only survived the war but cared for his community, bringing relief to the bodies, minds, and spirits of thousands around him.
His memories of that Seder night, written so soon after liberation, read like a moment frozen in time, a single day out of thousands, in which he was torn under the weight of the responsibility placed upon him.
“You know that I spoke to the public on every holiday and festival,” he reminds his wife, for they marked all the holidays together whenever possible, even under the harsh conditions of the camp. “We organized small gatherings in the barracks,” he writes. “Do you remember the children’s celebrations we arranged on Hanukkah and Purim? How they uplifted the spirits of both young and old? Remember how, on the first night of Hanukkah, we lit candles at the same time in all the barracks, in every infirmary ward, in the home for the elderly and the children’s home, everyone together.”
Weiss took pride in the way they observed the holidays for several reasons: not only to preserve Jewish identity and sustain a sense of spirit under such dire physical conditions and constant threat of death, but also because of the unity these shared celebrations created:
“These activities,” he continues, “were not limited to the Orthodox alone. Jews of all backgrounds took part, and this is an achievement not to be underestimated, an achievement realized in one of the most infamous concentration camps in Germany! An achievement that testifies to the strength and will to live of the Jews, belonging to 45 different nationalities, crowded together here in the barracks in inhuman conditions.”
On that final Seder night in Bergen-Belsen, he visited every barrack in the camp, repeating his speech in each one:
“Indeed, it is a paradox to quote the words from the Haggadah: ‘Let all who are hungry come and eat with us,’ for here the opposite is true. We are all hungry. We, the leadership, cannot give you anything more; our nutritional situation is beyond despair. Hold on for these last few minutes, because they are truly the final minutes. Even if we do not read newspapers and do not listen to the radio, we feel it!!! We belong to that minority of European Jews who may survive this genocide. We must hold on, because we will be called upon to take part in the rebirth of the Jewish People. We have seen many nations disappear from the world, but for us, after this war, in which so many have fallen, the sun will rise again.”
He feared speaking these words and did not know how they would be received. But from the responses, he understood that everyone, deep down, felt the same:
“The answer I received from the listeners at the end of my words was a resounding ‘Omein!’ among the Ashkenazim and ‘Amen!’ among the Sephardim.”
And then he reached the emotional climax of the evening, the children’s barrack:
“After repeating my speech ten times, I arrived at the children’s home, where they were waiting for me to begin the Seder. I was deeply surprised, and even now, as I write these words, I am filled with pride. Despite everything, these Jewish people managed to create for the children a beautifully set table, benches arranged on both sides and even behind the lower bunks of the triple-tier beds.”
The Passover plate was composed largely of cabbage and scraps of other vegetables (often “horse turnips”—a kind of kohlrabi, usually rotten). These were shaped and arranged as needed by those responsible for the children, Hennie and Yehoshua Birnbaum, together with their daughters. They, too, were later awarded the “Jewish Rescuer Citation,” and their children remain in close contact with the Weiss family to this day.
The Birnbaums conducted the Seder according to tradition, “with all the explanations and answers to the children’s questions,” Weiss writes with admiration. At the end of the first part of the Seder, “dishes” (as he puts it, in quotation marks) were distributed, and the second part was no less festive:
“The songs were sung by the children, and never have I heard them as beautiful as they were that night from the mouths of these children. At the end, we all sang together: ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’”
He concludes his account of the evening with a return to the stark reality awaiting him in his role in the camp:
“Deeply moved, we left the children’s home in order to return to reality. I accompanied my wife and son to their barracks. Afterwards, I went to the office to prepare, together with my colleague, the daily list of the camp’s dead. Today, 596 prisoners died here, about 500 of them Jews.”
***
Josef “Jupp” Weiss was born in 1893 in the village of Flamersheim, near Cologne, Germany, the eighth of nine siblings. His father was a cattle merchant who was deeply involved in the Jewish community, which maintained good relations with the surrounding population. The children attended a local school run by the Catholic Church, but at age 14, while his older brothers were already working in the cattle trade, his mother sent him to apprentice with her brothers, owners of the large department store “Michel & Co.” in Cologne.
During World War I, Jupp served as a soldier in the German army. After the war, he returned to Cologne and rose to head the human resources department of the prestigious department store. A bright future lay before him: not yet 30 years old, he was already a rising figure in his field, managing a workforce of around a thousand employees. He married opera singer Erna Falk of Krefeld, and they had two sons, Wolfgang (Shalom) and Klaus-Albert (Aharon). Alongside his success in business, Weiss became an engaged reader and thinker in the humanities, as well as a socially active Zionist.
With the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany in the early 1930s, Weiss and his family fled to the Netherlands, and their property was confiscated. Their eldest son joined a Zionist training program (Hachshara) and later went underground; contact with him was eventually lost. After Kristallnacht, Weiss became involved in smuggling many refugees out of Germany to the Netherlands and onward to other destinations, including members of his extended family. His younger son, Aharon (Klaus), later recalled: “Our home became a transit station for fleeing relatives, but when we ourselves wanted to leave, it was already too late.”
After the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, the family was forced to leave the coastal region and relocate to the city of Hilversum, where they were assigned to a “Jewish house” shared with another family. Once again, everything Weiss had built, the home he had purchased and the factory he had established, was confiscated. In the Netherlands, Weiss continued his involvement in communal life and the Zionist movement until 1942, when he, Erna, and their son Klaus were sent to the Westerbork camp. Considered to have significant political-Zionist connections, they were for a time spared deportation to the East. There, the couple became responsible for a barrack of youth from Germany and were active in the camp’s cultural life.
Their gracious manner, command of multiple languages, humane approach, and Weiss’s organizational and leadership skills made them exceptional figures during their years in Westerbork and later in Bergen-Belsen. Weiss also held an official role, overseeing the internal administration of the Jewish prisoners, dealing with the many problems, conflicts, and complexities brought on by hunger, disease, harsh conditions, and the constant threat of deportation, while also representing them before the German authorities.
Throughout this period, as part of his duties, he meticulously recorded the deaths among the camp’s prisoners, noting even the exact time of death. A few days before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British, as a typhus epidemic swept through the camp, the Nazis decided to evacuate thousands of prisoners on three trains, hoping to use them as “bargaining chips.” One of these was the so-called “lost train,” on which Jupp, Erna, and Klaus were transported. Jupp had likely contracted typhus and spent most of the journey unconscious. Before that, however, he managed to take with him secret files containing hundreds of documents that he and his team had copied, duplicated, and hidden in advance, knowing the Nazis would destroy anything left behind.
Those close to him understood how important this documentation was and continued the work even during the harrowing journey. Whenever the train stopped to bury the dead, they carefully recorded the exact burial locations along with the names of the deceased. We first encountered the remarkable figure of Jupp Weiss while working on an article about the “lost train,” in which he was mentioned. This led to contact with his granddaughter, Atara Zachor-Dayan, daughter of Aharon (Klaus), who in recent years has devoted herself to preserving and researching the extensive archive left by her grandfather. Zachor-Dayan shared that her grandfather’s account of the Passover Seder in Bergen-Belsen is read aloud at every family Seder, as it is among other branches of the family, particularly among the descendants of Weiss’s siblings now living around the world.
In 2013, a biographical study of Jupp Weiss by historian Hans-Dieter Arntz was published in Germany. Following its publication, a street in Flamersheim, the village where Weiss was born, was named in his honor, and members of the family traveled there for the moving dedication ceremony.
***
On the night of their liberation by the Russians, his beloved wife Erna fell ill with typhus. She did not recover and died nine days later. “Her funeral took place at 12 o’clock,” he wrote in a letter to his family a few weeks afterward, “and on that day I rose for the first time and walked three steps behind the stretcher. For me, it was a terrible tragedy. I attended 974 funerals in Bergen-Belsen and accompanied them as far as I was permitted, but my dearest mamischen, I could not accompany to her grave, because I was still ill and unable to walk.”
Weiss recovered.
Just two days after his wife’s death, while still bedridden, Jupp decided to write about that final Seder night in Bergen-Belsen. Years later, his son Klaus, who had been with him at the time, described the circumstances and meaning of the writing in a letter to a cousin in the United States:
“I grant you permission to publish my father’s short account… It takes us all back to those dark and cruel days, days I remember well and that will never fade. It is part of me, whether I want it to be or not. It is my history, just as it is the history of our people. And so my father’s small account, written just two days after my mother’s death, also belongs to the people; it is, in effect, ‘public property,’ as you wrote. The original manuscript, written by my father in pencil, is an extremely precious part of my archive. I remember him clearly writing it, lying in bed, recovering from a severe case of typhus. It was his farewell to his wife, especially because he could not take part in her funeral. I did… The account was meant to be a memorial in her honor.”
That same summer, Jupp and Klaus learned that the eldest son, Shalom (Wolfgang), had also survived. They were reunited in an emotional meeting, and all three immigrated to Israel. Both sons fought in the War of Independence. Weiss settled in Jerusalem, remarried a Bergen-Belsen survivor, and continued to give testimony to official bodies whenever called upon, while assisting fellow survivors as much as he could.
***
When Weiss passed away in 1976, many Bergen-Belsen survivors came to pay their final respects. He was buried in Jerusalem beside his first wife, whose remains had been brought to Israel in the 1950s.
“Everyone who returned from Bergen-Belsen remembered Jupp Weiss,” eulogized Eliezer Desberg, a Bergen-Belsen survivor who had been Weiss’s close associate. “He was exceptional in his unshakable calm. He was a man of dignity in a place devoid of dignity, reassuring in moments of fear, projecting leadership and unquestioned authority without effort. His role as Elder of the Jews never distanced him from his fellow prisoners; he remained courteous, independent, upright, honorable, and fair. In all he did, he shared in the suffering of others and sought to ease it. […] He was brave and resolute without being reckless. He dared to demand improvements and relief efforts, despite constant refusal.
“As we walked behind his coffin, […] I thought of all those times Jupp Weiss had walked alongside a fellow prisoner on their final journey. He walked with dignity and pride, head slightly bowed. In those days, he would accompany the dead as far as the gate leading to the crematorium, where the Kaddish was whispered. I remembered the countless roll calls in the dusty parade square, in pouring rain, freezing winds, or scorching sun, where the prisoners stood in rows of five while the SS counted us like a pickpocket counting his coins […] With his calm expression, Jupp would walk behind the officer, notebook in hand, like a servant behind his master, yet never truly subservient. He always preserved his dignity and was never submissive. He walked with confidence, kept his distance, did not respond to crude remarks, and never smiled at malicious jokes. He was subjugated, but never broken, never bowed.”
