Never forget

This evening I had a conversation with someone who just found out this year she's a Holocaust survivor. The 85-year-old neighbor of my friends J and A (with whom I have dinner every Sunday), E grew up in Romania, and survived the war by remarkable pluck and luck, fleeing with her mother from the approaching Germans towards the Ukraine, hiding out in an abandoned cottage, and then fleeing back, when the Germans were set back at Stalingrad. The whole sojourn was made possible by selling, piece by piece, the family silver she had thrown into a pillowcase when they fled - all that was left of the family's wealth when the Soviets invaded in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact. (They also took away her brother and father, who were never heard from again.) The most amazing part of her story was how she got across the border back to Romania with papers she had earlier demanded from a German officer, telling him in unaccented German that she and her mother had been chased from Romania by the Soviets; the paper she got in fact said Kein Grenzübertritt (no border crossing); the Romanian guard at the border could read no German but saw the stamp of the Reich and let them through. They laid low and survived the war - not many other family members did - and eventually made it to Italy and ultimately to the US, where she found a job within a week and worked without interruption for the next 26 years (in her sixth or seventh language). It wasn't until half a year ago, when a volunteer from an organization which visits old Jewish people in the city came by, that she learned she's technically a Holocaust survivor, eligible for various sorts of care.

"Who decided where you would go and when?" my friend A asked about the terrifying overland journeys to Ukraine and back, by road and rail, back and forth and always ready to vanish from sight, always aware they might not survive to the morrow. "Someone," she said, pointing upward - though she's been asking herself why he picked her to survive.