Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews

Leonard Baker's biography follows Leo Baeck from his ordination as a rabbi in Germany and his rise, on the strength of his 1905 book The Essence of Judaism, into the most respected voice of Reform Judaism in the country, through the years after 1933 when he became president of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden, the umbrella organization that represented German Jews to the Nazi state until the regime disbanded it around Kristallnacht in November 1938. The book follows Baeck's decision to stay in Germany rather than accept the emigration that was still open to him, choosing instead to remain with his community as its legal protections were stripped away one law at a time.

Baker follows Baeck to his deportation to Theresienstadt in January 1943, where he became honorary head of the camp's Jewish Council, a position of relative protection that let him shield some relatives from further deportation while he continued to lecture prisoners on philosophy and religion. The book confronts directly the choice, later debated by historians including Hannah Arendt, that Baeck made not to tell fellow prisoners what he had learned about the death camps, believing that living under a confirmed sentence would be crueler than living with uncertainty. Baker follows Baeck through liberation and into his final years in London, where he helped found the Leo Baeck Institute to preserve the record of German Jewish history and culture before he died in 1956.

Reading the book means sitting with one of the genuinely hard moral questions the Holocaust produced, what a leader owes people he cannot save, told through a man whose own conduct under the worst possible conditions still divides those who study it. It suits a reader drawn to Holocaust history told through a single consequential life rather than through statistics alone.