This is a true story which occurred in the death camps during the Holocaust. A woman, who was obviously in a weakened and desperate condition, came to a great rabbi from whom many of the camp inmates sought advice. On a daily basis, people would ask him if they should risk their health to keep kosher under such difficult conditions, or what to do about being forced to work on Shabbat. The woman approached the rabbi, and, hardly able to speak, asked him for a knife.
“I realize this suffering is unbearable,” said the rabbi, “and it is hard to see Hashem’s plan in this, and that there seem to be no hope, but you are not permitted to end your life. We must continue to endure, and not give them the satisfaction of seeing us give up.”
“A knife,” the woman insisted. The rabbi explained quietly that suicide was forbidden, even in the death camps. A Nazi officer walked up behind the rabbi and the woman while they were discussing this, and he began to chuckle. “Here is your knife,” he smiled with a look of great satisfaction. The woman took the knife quickly and the rabbi gasped. The Nazi was taking great pleasure in witnessing this woman’s act of desperation.
However, the woman pulled out a nearly invisible bundle she had been carrying. It was a tiny, half-starved baby. She said, “If you cannot live as a Jew, at least you will die as a Jew,” she said to her baby, as she used the knife to circumcise her son. The baby hardly cried, and the woman kissed him gently, and returned to the filthy barracks. The woman and the baby did not survive the death camps, but her courage was immortalized by the rabbi’s tale.