Sometimes I dedicate divrei Torah on the blog [an offering from today] and record shiurim in honor of my great grandmother Maras Esther Bas R' Shmuel.
Who was she?
We called her "Nani" [pronounced Noh-nee, short for grandmother in Hungarian]. She was the only grandparent I knew. She passed away 30 years and a month ago. She was left a young widow when her husband died of a sudden heart attack with one child and worked hard to keep herself and her daughter going. She then hid from the Nazis during the Holocaust with her daughter, son in law [my grandparents] and granddaughter [my mother]. Her son in law's brother [my Uncle Mishka - see bottom] was sick in the hospital so she would routinely risk her life, running under bombshells, in order to bring him food.
She remarried after the war and that husband died relatively young as well. Her only daughter passed away after many years of illness at about the age of 40. The list of tragedies she suffered goes on and on. Yet - you would never have known. Always with a smile on her beautiful face and a pleasant and sweet demeanor. There is no one - no one - I miss as much and as intensely as my dear, beloved great grandmother. My consolation is that she is now with Hashem delighting in her eternal reward, enjoying the fruits earned for maintaining her faith in the face of such unimaginable sorrow and for the Torah and mitzvos of her two dozen plus [and counting] descendants [and of course for her many mitzvos and mesirus nefesh].
The message I have for all of you is that if you are fortunate enough to have grandparents - don't take them for granted. They don't last forever and once gone are irreplaceable. It makes me so incredibly sad to think about what I no longer have and will never ever have again. So call and visit often, tell them you love them and gain from their wisdom and insight.
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My Uncle Mishka. I remember him from my childhood. A friendly, seemingly jolly man who would give me money. [I have a weakness for people who give me money - שונא מתנות יחיה aside...]. What I wasn't aware of as a child was that he and his wife, my Aunt Helca [lots of Hungarian names on my mother's side of the family....], had lost their only three daughters in the death camps. They were told to send the girls to their grandparents because the Nazis wouldn't harm the old people. Of course it was the old people that the Nazis ימ"ש went after first [because they couldn't work]. Three girls - taken away never to be seem again. Aunt Helca, whom I knew as a fragile, extremely sad and sullen old woman, worked hard and with Hashem's grace survived Aushwitz. Uncle Mishka spent his time ill in the hospital, pretending not to be Jewish. They were reunited after the war and moved to Montreal, Canada [where my mother grew up as well] where they spent the rest of their lives. They doubtlessly never had a truly happy day again.
They are both in shomayim, finally reunited with the souls of their holy martyred daughters, brutally murdered for the "sin" of being Jewish.
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When we make family smachot, nobody - not ONE soul - from my mother's side comes. Not because we are in a fight with anyone but because the Nazis wiped just about all of them out. The ONLY child who survived the war in my mother's family was .... my mother. הודו לה' כי טוב כי לעולם חסדו!!
My grandfather left Europe shortly before the war with his family. But not before losing his first wife at a VERY young age with two young boys and marrying his niece - my grandmother. Had he done what most Jews did - stay put and hope that this was just another passing Anti-Semitic phase, I would probably not be writing this. הודו לה' כי טוב!!! From his four sons - about a dozen grandchildren. From those grandchildren? Too many to count. I have a cousin in Bnei Brak [who is very very very ill - הרב אברהם יוסף בן חנה] who alone has ten children and dozens of grandchildren [at the rate of about one born every two weeks...]. Another song of thanks to Hashem.
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Oh how I yearn for the old days when so many holy survivors inhabited our earth. We have so much to gain from them, even by just looking at them - and at the numbers on their arms. Oh do they have visas.
A different era, a different type of human being.
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