Yosl Rakover Talks to God

As the German tanks advance street by street, destroying the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the few remaining fighters, Yosl Rakover, writes out his last words to God, he seals the text in a glass bottle and thrusts it into the rubble before preparing to die. This text surfaces in Europe in the 1950s, is passed from hand to hand, broadcast on Radio Berlin, where it is heard and acclaimed by Thomas Mann as a religious masterpiece, is anthologized, and translated into many languages. But what is hailed as the greatest testament of the entire Holocaust is in fact a short story, written for a Yiddish newspaper by a remarkable young Jew, Zvi Kolitz, in 1946, in Buenos Aires, where he is raising money for the Underground in Palestine in their struggle to establish a State of Israel. The story of what happened to the text, and to Zvi Kolitz in the 50 years since, and their eventual rejoining, forms the second part of the book recounted by Paul Badde, the German journalist who discovered it all.