Echoes of Memory

How My Father’s Force of Spirit Willed Us to Live: His Puzzling Dream and Bravery

Dear reader, did you see my father’s eyes darting fire? It is here in this book, a photograph of him with a mustache. He was the one who saved us. He turned desperation into defiance. He carried us over the inescapable and he did it from a distance. His will to live drove us. My mother listened to his words, and I sensed him in my spirit. He actually willed us to live. His eyes never regained that mellow look, not until the war was over. He was polite with people, passing as my mother’s caring friend. He never gave himself away in any manner, except that his eyes burned.

Tags:

How I Fooled the Gestapo

I am very blond and blue-eyed, and the Nazi soldiers love my looks. Of course they don’t know I am Jewish.

Tags:

An Alternate View of the Sad Longing

When, at the age of five-and-a-half, I was left to survive by my own wits, I was well-equipped with some essential information. I knew by heart many prayers of the rosary. I had a new identity—a Catholic child whose parents had been taken to Siberia. My real mother was to be referred to as my aunt and my father as her friend.

Tags:

Mukačevo: My Hometown

I imagine that my grandchildren’s generation, and certainly that of my great-grandchildren, will not be able to picture a life without even the simplest of the luxuries we have now. I am certain that when people I meet hear that I was raised in Mukačevo, they imagine it to be a shtetl, with little huts or little houses, without running water or electricity, and with mud-filled streets, with people pushing carts or horses pulling small or large carriages. Mukačevo doesn’t look like this now, nor did it look like this in the 1930s.

Tags:

A Trip

We planned a three-day trip, A father, two friends, and I.

Tags:

All I Really Need to Know I Learned from My Mother

Single-parent families were the second-most common family structure in 2016 in the US, with just over 20 million children living with a single mother or father. Today the term “single-parent families” has a negative connotation, implying that one parent abandoned the family. The sad truth is that the missing parents are mostly the fathers who abandoned the mother of their children.

Tags:

Things I Should Not Have Done

I guess we all have things we would rather have done or not done, said or not said, things we are proud of or not so proud of in our lives. I am going to tell about a time I am not too proud of. This happened when I was 13 or 14 years old. I hope that by telling about it, I will clear my conscience once and for all of that stain that still haunts me almost 70 years later.

Tags:

They Called Me by My Name!

Before my mother and I immigrated to the United States, she had told me precious little about the town in Poland where she was born. Even the name of the town was somewhat of a mystery.

Tags:

Torte of Many Memories

I am not good at changing tires, ice skating, or mending socks. What I am good at is baking, especially my signature dish, which is a walnut torte. Since I was a young girl, I was helping my mother with the torte: chopping the walnuts, watching how she mixed the eggs with sugar until they became almost white, and marveling at the egg whites when they became white and frothy and almost doubled in size. Then we would mix everything together, bake it, and after an hour, a beautiful, wonderfully smelling cake would come out from the oven. I felt a great closeness with my mother at that moment and appreciated that she introduced me to a wonderful world of baking.

Tags:

My Unforgettable Theatrical Experience

On the night of December 15, 2015, the Theater J, at the Jewish Community Center of Washington, was filled to capacity. As a sign of the times, for security reasons, everyone attending this play had to be screened to enter.

Tags:

This Section