Memoirs of a Child of Survivors
By Rebecca Liebermann Nissel
Gefen Publishing House: Jerusalem and New York, (2006)
ISBN: 965-229-374-1
|
|
We Are Still Here Memoirs of a Child of Survivors By Rebecca Liebermann Nissel Gefen Publishing House: Jerusalem and New York, (2006) ISBN: 965-229-374-1 |
Reviewed by Israel Drazin - September 21, 2010
This heart-warming post-holocaust book describes by means of a host of interesting vignettes, each a moving short story, that despite enormous pain and irreplaceable losses, life can continue; that despite Hitler's diabolical plan and his satanic successes, "We are Still Here."
Rebecca's father suffered through several concentration camp experiences, and needed months of rehabilitation in a nursing home after his release. Hiding out saved her mother during the war. The two were born in Hungary but came to Vienna, Austria, before the war, and returned to it after the war, for this was their home. They felt that despite the anti-Semites who were still in Vienna, "We are Still Here."
Once, when her father was walking the Vienna streets after the war, a lady, if one could call her that, came from the opposite direction with her dog, and told her dad that the Jew should get off the sidewalk so that she and her dog can use it unimpeded. Her dad replied, despite what you think and despite what you tried to do, "We are Still Here."
When the French came and released the Jews from the concentration camp, Rebecca's father stepped forward because he could sing well, and sang La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, and the French soldiers wept.
Ironically, while Hitler tried to stamp out Jewish practices, when Rebecca's father visited his father's grave, and the family went up to the gravesite, her father stood several feet away, because he was a cohen, a priest, and observant priests do not approach a grave. And, so, at the scene of devastation, Hitler was proved wrong again. Jewish practices continued.
Rebecca remembers that as a child attending the holiday service at the synagogue, she was told during the Yizkor memorial service that all the children should leave the synagogue. This was the practice at the time and now as well. Why should they leave? And why was her mother crying after the service? Rebecca imagined that her dead grandparents came to the synagogue during the Yizkor and her mother cried because they had to leave immediately thereafter. But why, she wondered, didn't her grandparents come at other times during the year? Why could they come for her school affairs, so that she could have grandparents with her at that time as the other children had? Her grandfather did appear, or so it seemed, at his granddaughter's wedding, when he held Rebecca's father's hand.
