My Beloved Mother

It’s a dreary day, rain turning into sleet as I write. Despite the weather, I am feeling peaceful and strong. Today I am honoring my mother’s memory on her birthday, March 12.

She was a Holocaust survivor, came here at 12 years of age, all alone, lucky to get out. In Germany, 1939, her father put her on a children’s train/transport to France. (Her mother had already died when she was 4 years old of pneumonia.) In France she spent 11 months in a children’s home before boarding a boat from Marseille to New York. She lived with distant relatives she had never met in Mount Vernon, N.Y.  She didn’t speak a word of English, nor they German. She scrubbed floors and peeled potatoes and did lots of odd jobs for these relatives during wartime. They were poor and needed help.

My mother managed to go to Hunter College and earn her BA in 1950, which many women did not do in those days. She became a nursery schoolteacher. She married my father and had two daughters who each have two daughters. 

The memory of her lives so strongly in me today. She was a warm and caring person, and a truly loving and compassionate mother. But she was also broken by her early trauma. Her father and her many aunts and uncles, unable to flee Germany, were sent to Concentration Camps and were killed. She worked hard to forge a positive life, but the Holocaust often loomed in the background.

My mother’s legacy continues as we welcomed my older daughter’s baby, Noah, a year ago. There are two more babies expected in a few months from now, great-grand descendants of my beloved mother.