Step After Step | Rabbi Shea Brisk

Shea Brisk was born into a Rabbanishe family in Romania. He turned Bar Mitzvah and shortly after that, his world turned black. My name is Shea Brisk. Yehoshua Brisk. Born in Lechnitz, Romania. I was Bar Mitzvah in Elul תש”ג. Broke out in תש”ד. They announced that all the Jews should come to the plaza and they loaded us onto the train, on the way to Auschwitz. The prisoners unloading the cars were Dutch Jews, and I had my Tefillin in my hand. He said: You speak Yiddish? I said: Yes. He said: When you go to the head of the line, you see the Yemach-Shemonik there, Mengele? Tell him you’re 16 years old and felderbeit, and you work in the field, farmers. And I did. They sent somebody over to check my arms. I told them I was 16. Eventually, he was transported to a camp called Kaufbeuren, where he worked under grueling conditions to dig deep pits in the ground for rails for the rockets that the Germans were trying to manufacture. The conditions were unbearable, it was freezing cold, and eventually, his toes got frostbitten. I couldn't have good shoes. I wore rags on my feet. And my feet got frozen, I could hardly walk. Eventually the camp was liquidated and all the inmates were loaded into cattle cars and sent to the notorious concentration camp Dachau. Shea could barely walk, even when supported by other people. I started walking and I couldn’t walk. People were holding me. But as the doors to the cattle car were thrust open, a Dutch fellow came over to him and said to him, You need to walk out of the cattle car and onto the platform on your own two feet. If you’re not able to walk, you won’t be given a chance at life. So I walked a couple steps by myself. Then they held me again. Every step was excruciating. Yet step after step after step he fought it and he persevered. It was closer to the end of the war already, so the Germans had a hospital there and they saw I couldn't walk, they put me in the hospital. And there I stayed till liberation. Eventually, with Hashem's Chesed, he survived the war, came to the United States, built a beautiful family, children and grandchildren עוסקים בתורה ובמצוות. The Aibishter helped we survived and we live now and I'm able to tell the story. From three years old, they drilled in us Yiddishkeit. Lern du! Keep learning! Noch amol! Again, again! Noch amol Gemara! Once more the Gemara! Every baby born and every Gemara is a revenge on Hitler. Those steps that he took, step after step after step, were agonizing. They were excruciating. But they were what gave him an incredible life going forward. You know, in our daily struggle with Kedushah, with Shmiras Haeinayim, sometimes we feel we just can't take the next step. It's too much. It's too hard. It's excruciating. We've been trying and we've been trying and we've been trying and we just... we can't go on anymore. We need to understand that step after step after step, building ourselves, slowly, one victory after another victory, can ultimately be the key to beautiful families, to blessed righteous generations, and to a life of eternity.