The Ultimate Gift

                                                              The Ultimate Gift

“See you in America,” her father said in what must have been the most tearful goodbye ever.  She was his only child - skinny, timid, afraid.  “See you in America,” he said again, and with that final hug he put her on a children’s train to Alsace, France.  This one painful, heartbreaking decision would change many lives for generations to come. 

The eleven-year-old girl went to live temporarily at a children’s home in France.  Her dominant memory of this place was getting her head shaved almost immediately upon her arrival since lice was rampant.  She lived among other children in a similar situation, children in limbo, without parents, without security, without a clear future path.  After about a year, she came to America, a girl who had lost her mother at age 4, the girl who had hugged her father goodbye at that far away train station.  “See you in America,” her father had promised. 

She went to live with distant relatives in Mount Vernon, New York who did not speak a word of German.  She peeled and boiled their potatoes, helped prepare their evening meals, and mopped their floors.  It was wartime, and the Mount Vernon relatives were poor.  The skinny girl was a hardship for them, another mouth to feed.

Her father wrote numerous letters to her, and she saved and savored them, keeping them in a special satchel.  But then the letters stopped.  For years, she dreamt he had come to America, had amnesia somewhere, would be reunited with her.  He never came.

She went to high school, saved babysitting money, and eventually moved into a residence for girls in Manhattan.  She attended Hunter College and earned her bachelors degree, an admirable accomplishment for any woman in 1950.  She became an early childhood teacher and married.

Her father’s fateful decision in 1939, to say goodbye, to send her off to another land, to send her to her future without him, before he could go, was the ultimate gift. This one singular decision gave her her life.  It gave her two daughters who each had two daughters.  That courageous man’s decision resulted in Ariel who is a newly practicing lawyer in New York City, and Chelsea who is on her way to becoming a psychologist.  They are his legacy, and the recipients of his ultimate gift.

That courageous man was my grandfather.