Revelry in the age of horror: A New Year’s meditation           

Hold the champagne, at least for a moment. As we mark the beginning of a new year, let us also think of all those the world over who are not in a celebratory mood, whose mindset is one of trepidation, anguish and pain rather than joy.

I write as the son of two survivors of the Holocaust for whom the onset of 1943, 1944, and 1945 bore no resemblance to the festivities that took place thousands of miles away from them in the safety and comfort of New York City or, for that matter, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, or Washington, DC or even Australia. While New Yorkers were hugging one another in Times Square or toasting each other at fancy restaurants, millions of European Jews, including my grandparents, my brother, and all of my parents’ siblings, had already been or soon would be murdered.

January 1, 1943. My mother, then Hadassah, or Ada, Bimko Prejzerowicz, is in the ghetto of Sosnowiec in southern Poland together with her parents, her husband, Josef, their five-year-old son Benjamin, and her parents. Sosnowiec is in a part of Poland that had been annexed to the German Reich in 1939 and renamed Sosnowitz. My mother, a 31-year-old dental surgeon who had studied medicine in Nancy, France, had a dental practice in her parents’ home which was located within the ghetto.

My father, Josef Rosensaft, meanwhile, is in the ghetto of nearby Będzin – renamed Bendsburg by the Germans – together with his father, his wife, Bandla and her daughter from a previous marriage, Micia. By this time, the deportations of Jews to the Nazi German death camps had become routine and the gas chambers at places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Belzec were operating in full force. In sharp contrast, The New York Times reported on that day that “400,000 revellers” had filled Times Square the night before and that the Broadway theatres “reported extraordinary business.”

Even so, Times reporter Meyer Berger wrote, “There was a note of sluggishness, an absence of real gaiety. The restless thousands lacked zest. War somehow laid its hand on the celebration and tended to mute it.” Still, “Soldiers and their women locked in embrace at street corners and in store doorways and held the pose for minutes with the crowd applauding.”

On January 1, 1943, in the Będzin and Sosnowiec ghettos, my parents must have wondered whether anyone, anywhere, cared about them. I wonder today whether any of the revellers in Times Square that New Year’s Eve spent even a moment, even the blink of an eye, thinking of the Jews in the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe. And yet, the Nazi German persecution, oppression, and large-scale killings of Jews were no secret. Only a few months earlier, on June 30, 1942, The New York Times had reported that, according to officials of the World Jewish Congress in London, “The Germans have massacred more than 1,000,000 Jews since the war began in carrying out Adolf Hitler’s proclaimed policy of exterminating the people.”

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January 1, 1944. My parents are both in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. My mother’s parents, her husband, and Benjamin had been gassed upon their arrival there on the night of August 3-4, 1943. My mother is one of 27,053 prisoners in the women’s camp of Birkenau. She had been assigned to work in that camp’s infirmary, where she was able to save the lives of countless women by performing rudimentary surgeries, bandaging them up as best she could, and sending them back to their barracks ahead of selections for the gas chambers by SS doctors.

Six months earlier, when my father, his wife, and Micia had been deported to Birkenau, my father escaped by diving out of the train window into the Vistula River, was hit by three German bullets, and was able to return to the Będzin Ghetto where he was reunited with his father. My father subsequently learned that Brandla and Micia were murdered in one of the Birkenau gas chambers.

After my grandfather died of natural causes in my father’s arms, my father escaped the liquidation of the Będzin Ghetto by making his way to the ghetto of Zawiercie, some 35 kilometres from Będzin, and he was taken from there to Birkenau at the end of August. The same Meyer Berger reported on the New York Times front page on January 1, 1944, that “The crowds were gayer, greater, than they were last New Year’s Eve. . . . Where Times Square had been dimmed out a year ago, the streets last night were aglow with almost pre-war brightness. Where theatres, shops and restaurants shrank away from the building line in comparative gloom a year ago, they radiated brilliance with the approach of 1944.”

On January 1, 1944, at Birkenau, my parents must have wondered whether anyone, anywhere, cared about them. Only a few weeks earlier, on November 25, 1943, readers of The New York Times learned about “the methods by which the Germans in Poland are carrying out the slaughter of Jews,” including “accounts of trainloads of adults and children taken to great crematoriums at Oswiencim [sic – a misspelling of Oswiecim, the Polish name for Auschwitz], near Cracow.” I wonder today whether anyone in the crowds in Times Square that New Year’s Eve spent even a moment, even the blink of an eye, thinking of the “Jewish adults and children” whose lifeless bodies had already been incinerated in the “great crematoriums at Oswiecim” and the Jews imprisoned there who were still awaiting their fate.

***

January 1, 1945. My mother is at the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany. She had been brought there from Birkenau in early November 1944. In Belsen, she and a group of other women inmates had been placed in charge of 49 Dutch Jewish children whose parents had been sent away to other camps. This core group of children soon expanded into a Kinderheim, a children’s home, in the camp where my mother and the other women kept 149 Jewish children alive throughout a bitterly cold winter despite severe malnutrition, an utter absence of hygiene, and a raging typhus epidemic.

My father was at Langensalza, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Thuringia. He had been deported from Auschwitz on December 2, 1944, after being tortured for months in that camp’s notorious Block 11. For my parents, liberation was still months away. Meanwhile, the NYPD estimated that 750,000 had gathered in Times Square at midnight the night before to ring in the new year. According to the lead article that day in The New York Times, “As if anxious to speed the departing memory of another year of war, New York’s millions saw 1944 out last night with few backward looks and welcomed 1945 hopefully but warily, joyously but not uproariously. On the surface, at least, holiday merrymaking this New Year’s Eve approached pre-war dimensions – the crowds were large, there was plenty of money and it was freely spent at movies, theatres, night clubs, hotels, bars and restaurants, and ‘Let’s have a good time’ was clearly written in the faces of the hurrying throngs.”

On January 1, 1945, at Bergen-Belsen and Langensalza, my parents must have wondered whether anyone, anywhere, cared about them. And yet only a few weeks earlier, on November 26, 1944, the front page of The New York Times had featured a report by the U.S. War Refugees Board that “It is a fact beyond denial that the Germans have deliberately and systematically murdered millions of innocent civilians – Jews and non-Jews alike – all over Europe.”

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I wonder today whether any of the 750,000 merrymakers in Times Square that New Year’s Eve spent even a moment, even the blink of an eye, thinking of my mother, my father, or any of the other European Jews who remained, to use Winston Churchill’s phrase, “under the Nazi yoke.”

I am not suggesting that the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square should have been cancelled while Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question” was being implemented on the other side of the Atlantic. I know full well that people need emotional outlets to remain sane. Rejoicing on New Year’s Eve, or on Purim, for that matter, provides a much-needed release. That was as true then as it is now.

However, this does not justify, cannot justify, a callousness to the plight of others. We break a glass at Jewish weddings as a symbolic remembrance of the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem. Along the same lines, we must — or at least, we should —  taper our enthusiasm at occasions such as New Year’s Eve when we know that human beings elsewhere are persecuted, oppressed, or otherwise in excruciating distress. Nothing of the sort appears to have been in the consciousness of the hundreds of thousands of revellers who gathered in Times Square during the World War II years.

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And so, as we enter 2026, let us hold the champagne long enough for us, here and now, not to be oblivious to the horrors and tragedies occurring outside of our own cocoons. In Australia, the survivors of the murderous rampage at Bondi Beach on November 14 have yet to come to terms with their agonies. In Israel, the families and friends of the victims of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist savagery, including the hostages killed in Gaza, continue to mourn while trying to rebuild their shattered lives. In Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians mourn their own dead as well and face an uncertain future amidst the rubble of what had once been their homes. In Darfur, a true genocide continues apace, without anyone seeming to notice or care. Immigrants to the United States live in constant fear. Jewish kids at universities and colleges across the globe know that violence-inciting calls by reckless politicians and even some of their own professors to “globalise the intifada” are putting their safety and even their lives at risk.

“Enough with these forms of antisemitic violence!” Pope Leo XIV declared after the Bondi Beach killings. “We must eliminate hatred from our hearts.”

Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel taught us that ”Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor—never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten.”

Pope Leo is right, of course. So was Elie Wiesel. But in order for us as individuals and as a global society to even begin to eliminate both hatred and indifference from our hearts, we must not just acknowledge but endeavour to feel the pain and suffering of all those who, like ourselves, are created in a divine image and are experiencing indescribable infernos. Perhaps this is the one new year’s resolution that could unite us.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School, and General Counsel Emeritus of the World Jewish Congress. He is the author, most recently, of Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).