PLEASE POST REVIEWS OF MY BOOKS
I feel it’s important to tell and retell my life stories because I trust that life lessons and insights I learned will help others deal with life more effectively. I also urge other people my age and younger to write down their life stories—their insights, their nuggets of wisdom—to pass them forward. (I can send you a format to present an insight easily.)
People like me who write books want to do more than get them into print; they do no good sitting on a shelf. We want to get our books read, and I’m asking for your help.
If you have read or looked at my books on Amazon.com, please post a review on Amazon because that promotes readership even with people we don’t know. And a friendly comment elsewhere will also help, such as on my website, heppnerbooks.com ,or my Heppnerbooks business page on Facebook. Your support is greatly appreciated.
COUNT THE OMER WITH ME
This year, the counting of the Omer starts about three weeks from now, on March 28, the evening after the first day of Passover. Each day, the count notes the progression of the 49 days between Passover (Pesach) and the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot). Doing the count each year is one of the 513 commandments (really, life-giving suggestions) in the Torah. Christian practice parallels the Jewish one by counting the 50 days after Easter to arrive at the Pentecost.
Kabbalists made this Omer count into a spiritual practice, helping the practitioner fit the Tree of Life (our spiritual being) into the day and the week of the count. To aid and guide this spiritual practice, I’m offering you my book, “The Omer and the Kabbalah, 49 Blessings Leading to the Giving of the Torah.”
This book opens your Sefirot, the Jewish take on the chakras. You’ll be surprised how following this book will open new vistas for you into your life and your world. “The Omer and the Kabbalah,” is available from Amazon as a print-book for $9.95. See: https://www.amazon.com/Omer-Kabbalah-Forty-Nine-Blessings-Leading/dp/1734895306/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=max amichai heppner&qid=1587037737&sr=8-5
You can view this book on this website’s WORKS section.
Dutch Jewry and the Nazis
Sample from a Guide for Teachers of the Holocaust,
covering two companion books,
a father-and-son set of reminiscences about escaping the Nazis.
Some 155,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands (Holland) at the time Nazi Germans invaded and began to implement their anti-Jewish rule. Of these, some 27,000 Jews resisted deportation by going into hiding. In about 18,000 cases, they they were discovered and deported anyway, as in the case of Anne Frank, who wrote the well-known Diary of a Young Girl while in hiding. Around 9,000 others hid successfully—like the Heppners and the Graumanns, the central families appearing in the two companion books.
The survival of these two families was no walk in the park. First, they eluded the Nazis in Germany by fleeing to Holland in the early 1930’s (like Anne Frank’s family). When, in 1942, the Nazis started deporting Jews from Holland to extermination camps, they again escaped, this time from the virtual ghetto the Nazis had established in Amsterdam.
During the flight, one member of the Graumann family died, and two more members of the group died from aftereffects after they were liberated in 1944. The three other survivors ended up sick and traumatized; they recovered by emigrating to the United States and beginning a new life there.
THERE ALWAYS IS A WAY OUT
A sample from “The Submergers, a story of escape and hiding during the Holocaust.”
You can get the whole book from amazon.com:
It was 1939. We started to enjoy the journey from Switzerland back to the Netherlands when the train was stopped at the border between Belgium and the Netherlands. They announced that war was imminent and the train wouldn’t proceed because Holland had sealed its borders. Passengers started to fret about being stuck in Belgium forever.
Instead of joining in the negativity, I looked out the window. I saw that police had parked their vehicles at the head of the train, but from our wagon, nothing was in place to block foot traffic across the border.
Irene and I picked up our suitcases, we grabbed Maxie’s hand, and we stepped across the imaginary line separating Vise, Belgium, from Maastricht, Holland. A train that had been stopped on the other side was waiting there. We climbed aboard, and soon it turned around and brought us safely back to our home in Amsterdam.
STUBBORN SHEEP
(A sample from the newly revised book, “I Live in a Chickenhouse,
a son’s story of escape and hiding from the Nazis.” Available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Live-Chickenhouse-escape-Lessons-Holocaust-ebook/dp/B08KTPW76G/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=max+heppner&qid=1602623280&sr=8-2
Nel and I are recovering from being kicked by some miserable sheep.
That thing started out looking like fun. The sheep had pulled up the pegs to which they were chained, and they had run off to the Aartses next door, where the grass looked greener.
Nel and I volunteered to get them home. We circled behind them and then let go with a real whoopee, like cowboys. The sheep responded by trotting off fast with the pegs on their chains going clickety-clack after them. Stubborn as they were, they ran in the wrong direction.
“We’d better pull them back by their chains before they get too far,” I said. I ran off after the first one, caught up, and meant to stop it by stomping my foot on the peg. The sheep didn’t stop and I fell on my nose.
Nel did better, grabbed a chain, and held on tight. Both sheep stopped then, so I got up and grabbed the other chain, and we started pulling. “Go, sheep, go-o-o-o,” we yelled.
Go they did—in circles. We held on tight as we spun around like tops till the sheep had enough—and stopped absolutely dead.
“Haul them in,” Nel said. So we went hand over hand along their chains till we had them by the collar strap. But no matter how we yanked on the strap or kicked the stupid sheep, they wouldn’t move, and they kicked us back hard.
That hurt, so we gave up, but we were too embarrassed to show up at home without the sheep. We let the sheep go, and they went on peacefully grazing on the Aartses’ meadow. Pretty soon the sun went down, and the sheep ran off on their own to go to their stalls.
We went running after them, doing our best to whoop and holler to make it seem we were chasing them in.
Nobody was fooled, however, and we still got a ribbing. Then Harry got serious. “I know you kids were trying hard,” he said. “Let me show you how you move a sheep with ease”.
Father went with us. Harry stepped behind a sheep. Quickly he grabbed a hind leg, started walking, and the sheep meekly hopped beside him on its other three legs.
“Simple as pie,” Harry said.
“Good lesson,” Father said. That evening he made me a cartoon with a poem that said, “Don’t let any sheep bedevil you.”
Don’t let any sheep bedevil you
CHICKEN SOUP
An excerpt from “I Live in a Chickenhouse” a son’s story of escape and hiding from the Nazis
by Max Amichai Heppner
A new group of baby chicks has just hatched. I saw a few peck their way out of their shells. It is fun to hold a newly hatched chick in the palm of your hand—carefully, so you don’t crush it. It feels like a soft little ball of fluff.
Now the new chicks are pecking around the yard, just like the old hens. When they start laying next winter, Harry will kill the old hens—just as he did last year. He wrings their necks or chops off their heads. We keep one or two for chicken soup, but we sell the rest on the black market.
The black market is where you sell things secretly. If the Nazis know you have food to sell, they steal it or they just take it and only pay very little money. So, Harry says, the best thing to do with extra food is to sell it “black.”
When Harry chops the head off his chickens, they often flap their wings afterwards. I once saw a headless chicken flap its wings so hard that it flew right over our haystack.
That got me to wondering what it is like to be killed. When Nazis kill people, do they also chop off their heads? Harry says he chops the heads so fast, the chickens don’t even feel it. Would that be true for people as well? Would people with their heads chopped off flap their arms like chickens do with their wings?
You can purchase and read the entire adventure in the book, using this URL:
https://www.amazon.com/Live-Chickenhouse-escape-Lessons-Holocaust-ebook/dp/B08KTPW76G/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=max+heppner&qid=1602623280&sr=8-2 (Reduced price: $16.95.).
A VISION FROM THE PAST
I recently got a message from Congregation Shaarey Tikva of Beachwood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. The contact reminded me of my days in its Sunday school back in the late 1940’s. I was taught my Bar Mitzvah presentation by its, then, rabbi, Enoch Kronheim, and I remember him fondly.
I dedicated my book, "A Vision of Love for Christians and Jews" to him, because he opened my eyes to a loving look at the world. Here is quotes from that book:
Lovingly, Rabbi Enoch Kronheim taught me my Bar Mitzvah parsha, Lech Lecha, from the many books of Jewish lore that lined his bookshelves. I became Bar Mitzvah on the wings of the Rabbi’s generosity. I hardly understood any Torah, but in the process of trying, I came to understand something more personal and revealing.
I got it, that the only reason the Nazis put so much effort into trying to kill me was that I belonged to a group of people with a special way of relating to God. I realized that the Nazis hated hallowed Jewish texts and burned them when they could. They despised prayer, abhorred the feasts of the Jewish calendar, and ridiculed Jewish foods and customs.
If that was so, I thought, by God, I am going to practice these very things they hate. I wanted to clearly show they hadn’t stopped me.
Max Amichai Heppner proudly presents “The Submergers” to his audience.
From the writings my father left behind, I felt strongly that he wanted to tell the outside world how he dodged the Nazis, both in Germany and the Netherlands. I had the start of his autobiography, which he began before his death. I completed it by sifting through notes he wrote in German, Dutch, and English, using the backs of envelopes, tissue paper, diaries, and letters to his relatives.
Here is a sample: SIMPLE HYGIENE
Life on a simple farm in Brabant challenged me—lack of a bathroom, for example. There was just a single kind-of latrine on the place, wedged between the living quarters and the stable. Excrement fell into a pit below, where it mingled with manure from the stable. When the pit filled, Harry would spread it on the fields as fertilizer.
There also was no tub or washbasin on the farm, and the Janssens washed themselves from a dishpan. Before they went to church, the chil- dren lined up in the kitchen, pushed back their sleeves, and Dina would scrub the exposed skin. The children then pulled their sleeves straight, neatly hiding the demarcation between cleaned and unwashed skin.
We submergers had to use the same dishpan. If the wash water was too cold, we would heat it on our pot-bellied stove. We stood near the stove to keep warm, with our feet on a little crate to avoid the cold brick floor.
Maxie didn’t like this whole-body scrub. “I’m not sick,” he objected. “The other children don’t have to strip and wash except when the doctor comes.”
“Don’t wash,” I said, “and you’ll have people saying, ‘Here comes stinky Max.’”
“But Father,” Maxie came back, “the Janssen children don’t smell bad, and Tante Dina doesn’t make them wash all over.”
That made me think, Possibly we city folks are just plain wrong to assume that if you don’t wash, you stink! The Janssens wore sensible clothing, seldom sweated, and did laundry frequently, and I concluded that body odor was absorbed by clean apparel. Still, I made Max wash, whether he liked it or not.
Here’s where you can order the whole book: https://www.amazon.com/Submergers-fathers-escape-Lessons-Holocaust/dp/1734895314/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=max+heppner&qid=1602623280&sr=8-1. Cost: $15.95.