The Promise
My husband and I drove through the impossible one-way streets of Tel Aviv to visit my father-in-law. Since my mother-in-law had died, he felt abandoned, and our visits cheered him a bit.
My husband and I drove through the impossible one-way streets of Tel Aviv to visit my father-in-law. Since my mother-in-law had died, he felt abandoned, and our visits cheered him a bit.
That’s how my classmates from Israel remember me. And I like it. It’s like giving me an endearing nickname. Because I loved Yugoslavia.
Israel was born in 1948 and besides roads and houses for immigrants, a new industry sprang up.
I didn’t see it as a young person, but I do see it now that my uncle was a broken man, who lost his life achievements and his place at the age of 42, and never really regained them.
“And the old woman forgot to die” was a memorable sentence in a book by Lisa See. I had a grandmother about whom one could have said that sentence.
My mother pined for the Adriatic Sea. Everything in that sea was so much better than the sea off the coast of Tel Aviv.
The year was 1963, and I was serving in the Israeli air force. I worked as a programmer on that famous huge Philco computer that filled a whole floor.
We live in a rented apartment shared with an obligatory additional person. My mother works, and my grandmother takes care of me. My father is absent from home. He has been on a business trip during this particular December. I am eight years old. Tito is our adored and undisputed Communist leader.
My grandmother had a box filled with buttons, threads, and pieces of fabric.
I have a falling apart album of black-and-white photos. Among the pictures of me as a radiant baby is a small paper print of a photo negative. On it you can see three adults and a little girl. I am the little girl, and I am holding my mom’s hand. Next to her is my father and a person who is unknown to me. My mother has a scarf on her head, and she holds a little hat in her spare hand. I remember the scarf and I remember the hat.
Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.