I thought I knew Reb Meyer Birnbaum ztz”l who passed away last Friday in his 95th year. But I didn’t know him at all.
Nearly 20 years ago Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz who had been a longtime neighbor of Reb Meyer’s and often traveled with him on his morning drive to the Kosel for the neitz minyan when visiting Eretz Yisrael had the idea of a book based on stories he had heard from Reb Meyer over the years. Reb Meyer would dictate his life story onto tapes and I would transform those tapes into a book.
Rabbi Zlotowitz envisioned the book centering on Reb Meyer’s experiences during World War II as a frum soldier and officer — theNormandy landing liberatingBuchenwald and then remaining in the DP camps for nearly a year after he was entitled to return stateside and be discharged.
Reb Meyer initially resisted the idea of a first-person memoir. But Rabbis Zlotowitz and Nosson Scherman persuaded him that by talking about what he had witnessed and the great people he had known he would be removing the focus from himself whereas a third-person book would suggest that he was someone of inherent distinction.
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