My father and I left the SS Washington, the ship we traveled on from Le Havre, France, to New York City to start our new life in the New World. We said goodbye to Lady Liberty and proceeded off the ship. It was the first day of Passover, 1948.
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.
A few years ago, I donated a German passport to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, along with a description explaining the meaning of each entry.
Last night I dreamt of my father. He was not my father as I remembered him. He was another man, and yet my father. His face and clothes were from another time, Another place.
When Sidney and I married in 1965, we decided that if we would have children, we would like to bring them up within the Jewish traditions and religion. We were married in the Liberal Synagogue of Amsterdam.
After I survived the Holocaust in Poland, my mother, father, sister, and I moved to England, where we were generously accepted as we tried to move past the terrible years of World War II. We were among the few lucky ones who survived. So many did not. According to statistics, only about 2 percent of Polish Jews lived through the Holocaust.
When we returned to Holland in 1948 after living in Sweden for two years, we realized that food and goods were still rationed in the Netherlands. You could not just buy the amount you needed or wanted if you did not have the right ration coupons or enough of them.
When you are five and a half years old, at what point do you start crying because you haven’t seen your mother?
Watch videos and read articles about the Holocaust and the conditions that made it possible.
