Jenti’s Purse

My sister-in-law Jenti smiled as she showed it to me. “I have no idea how I found the fabric,” she told me. She’d been very fortunate to have acquired a needle, but there was no thread. So she had carefully pulled out some strings from her blanket, one of her few possessions. She shook her head.

“Can you imagine?” She pointed to the bag, which measured about 15 inches in length and five inches in width. “Everything I owned, all my possessions — and not only mine, but everything my sister Miriam owned as well — everything was in this bag. And even then, the bag wasn’t half full.”

I’d been Jenti’s sister-in-law for 60 years, yet I’d never seen this bag. We had a close relationship, but there were many things about Jenti I didn’t know. This visit was unusual. I’d come from New York with Michael Scwartz, a videographer who’d come to interview Jenti for Passage to Sweden, a documentary about the events that took place in Scandinavia during World War II.

Gently, carefully, Jenti removed the few items from the bag and placed them on her dining room table. There was a neatly folded German Deutschmark. “That was the only money I had when we left Germany,” she said. “Of course, I held onto it, perhaps I would need it at some point. It gave me assurance that I would continue to live.”