As an active leader of the camp council at Freilassing, you serve the camp well. However, camp conditions are still awful; you feel you must do as much as you can to improve them. When Dr. Zalman Grunberg calls together camp representatives from nearly all the camps, except Bergen-Belsen and a few small ones, at St. Ottilien, a hospital camp just north of Munich, you join him. Together with the other representatives, you compose a declaration, demanding that the Allied armies improve camp conditions, give preference to Jewish refugees who endured a special horror under the Nazis, and permit Jews to make aliyah to Palestine.
A press conference is called. You and the other representatives read the proclamation aloud in the Munich beer hall which had been the early headquarters of Hitler's Brownshirts. You sense an extra thrill at being able to speak about the Jewish future in this room where the death of the Jewish people was so avidly plotted during the years before Hitler came to power. As you and the others hold the Torah high, you sing aloud: Am Yisrael Chai, The People Israel Lives.
You have never been prouder than at this moment. A terrible price has been extracted from your people, but you have survived. Never again will you and others allow such a tragedy to happen. You spend the rest of your life helping Jewish refugees become proud and strong defenders of the Jewish future. It is a task to which you gladly dedicate your life.
END