When I was younger - maybe 7 or 8 - and first got into some mischief for being a 'wise guy' in class, I assumed I had naturally inherited such behavior from my father, who had gotten into similar trouble at that age. As I got a bit older, I realized my Babi - my mother's mother - who was then a spry 73 or so, deserved at least as much credit for my rebellious streak.
Considering many of the trials, tribulations and tragedies she had to endure in her lifetime, her fierce independence to the very end - her utter refusal to let life kick her when she was down - is probably the thing that most fascinates and amazes me about her to this day. It's what I'll miss the most about her. I figured I'd reflect on it since she passed away a few weeks before her 97th birthday this past Friday.
My Babi was a Holocaust survivor but her independent streak seems to have existed long before the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, when she was almost 30, and newly wed (getting married in your late 20s in that time period was alone a statement of her independance). In fact, it's likely the reason she survived an ordeal that saw so many of her family members perish.
Growing up in the town of
Sátoraljaújhely in Northeast Hungary, Babi didn't see her father from 1914, the outbreak of WWI, when she was just an infant, until 1919, when the war ended. Her family was religiously defined as 'Status quo' which was some Hungarian Jewish equivalent of modern orthodox in America today. In a surviving picture we have that was taken in 1928 or 1929, her father is wearing a simple hat and her two older brothers and dapperly dressed, with their heads uncovered. She attended 'Gymnasia', the local non-sectarian Jewish school, through just 4th grade, as was standard for girls at that time.
Her first husband, who died in Budapest in late 1944 and is buried in a mass grave in the Dohein temple, wasn't a particularly religious man. He certainly didn't put on tefillin (phylacteries) on a regular basis - an act which is considered a daily staple of an orthodox Jewish lifestyle. If not for the war, she never would have ended up with my zeidy (grandfather in yiddish), who was from a hasidic family (he stopped wearing hasidic garb after the war but remained deeply religious). Though they grew up in the same small town in Hungary, their paths most certainly would have never crossed.
Babi's father passed away of natural causes in March 1944. She travelled from Budapest, where she lived with her husband, whom she had been married to for a couple of years at most, to sit shiva in Sátoraljaújhely at her parents house. In the middle of the shiva, her husband called her and told her to leave at once as word had spread that the Nazis had invaded Hungary. So she attempted to board the next train to Budapest. As she arrived at the train station in Sátoraljaújhely, the local anti-semitic authorities were separating out the Jewish passengers, forcing them to remain in the town until they could be deported to Auschwitz. Babi was unaware of this but saw a long line by the main entrance to the station and in her typical independent mindset, snuck in through a back entrance to the station and onto the train out of the city. When she returned to her neighborhood in Budapest later that day, her friends couldn't believe she had made it back from the countryside unscathed.
Babi didn't much like discussing most of her war experiences - she believed in living in the present and harping on it could send her into a deep depression (my mom says Babi once stayed in bed for 3 days straight after she brought her to see a play her class was doing about the Eichman trial). The stories she did have were mostly disjointed - a snippet here, and anecdote there. We know Raul Wallenberg pulled her off a transit at some point and saved her, as he did for many of Budapest's Jews. Above all, Babi would not be defined as a victim despite her harrowing war stories. We never thought of her as a victim - someone that strong never could be one.
Even in her later years when she had Alzheimer's and rarely recognized her grandchildren, she was always quick with a joke or a sly remark. On my last visit to her in May, she quipped to Simone that she was very
chinosh (skinny in Hungarian). Then she turned her glance to me and a quipped, "him not so much."
One other story I'm reminded of is from when I was 14. I decided to stay in camp for a 2nd month and skip my family's vacation so my friend Jonah Lowenfeld joined in my place. Babi felt this young man was very rude - at one point she slapped him after he tried to pour wine for my father without 'permission'. That was my Babi though; if she thought you were wrong, she said so. There was no pretense with her.
Looking at pictures on Saturday night with my Mom and brother Hillel, there Babi was at every one of our graduations, always smiling and just happy to be there to witness such a momentous occasion. She always mentioned with pride that my mother always brought home straight A's - this was still an incredible point of pride decades later. Our graduations were the perfect confluence of events as Babi truly valued family and education above all else precisely because of the personal independence those two things offer. With a strong education, she believed life's doors were opened up for you. With a strong family to support you through thick and thin, you could go out and be yourself to the world every day without worrying too much about being judged. In know Babi never did.
Pictures of Babi from this May
