The choking guilt would incapacitate me for hours at a time. G-d is in charge, they’d all tell me, and while my mind knew they were right, my heart countered with But what if…, and it always had the final say.
By age ten, my mother worked odd jobs to earn a coin a week to buy fish and flour for Shabbos. Their poverty was beyond imagination — their rat-infested hut had nothing in it, not even beds — and at 17 my mother was married off to a man from Spain 15 years her senior. His abuse brought the family’s desperation to the next level, and so one dark night a few years later, my mother and her three children, her sister, brother-in-law, and parents sneaked across the border and made their way to Eretz Yisrael in search of a fresh start.
At the same time but worlds away, my father grew up sheltered in the comfort of a warm, close and well-to-do family on the outskirts of Cluj (Klausenberg), in Transylvania. He’d reminisce about traveling with his father to daven with the Satmar Rebbe, and about his family’s unique Melaveh Malkah meals that could only exist in a vanished world: eight children around the table, each awaiting their turn with excitement, as Zeidy would play his violin and sing each one a song composed just for them. Years later in Auschwitz, my father’s brother would sing him these songs to remind him of home.
Just before the end of the war, my 13-year-old father was thrown into a gas chamber. There he sat for four hours, sure that each breath was his last as he waited for the gas that he knew would asphyxiate him to death.
Eventually the door opened and the guard announced, “You’re the first ones ever to get out of here alive.”
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