Subject: Re: HOLOCAUST news



April 20


ISRAEL:

Woman finds family lost since Holocaust


RAMAT GAN, Israel -- In the years before World War II swept across Europe,
a pair of lively little cousins lived just one street apart in Warsaw,
Poland. A year apart in age, both were named Esther, after the grandmother
they shared.

On Monday, as Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, the two --
81-year-old Esther Fruchter, of Los Angeles, and her 82-year-old cousin,
Esther Nissenbaum, who lives outside Tel Aviv -- were reunited for the
first time in more than 65 years. They had each found out a day earlier
that the other was alive.

Fruchter, visiting Israel with a group of Holocaust survivors from
Southern California, made the chance discovery when Nissenbaum's daughter
Rivka Leibowitz saw the busload of elderly visitors arrive at Yad Vashem,
Israel's Holocaust memorial museum. She asked, as she always does when she
encounters such groups, "Anyone here from Warsaw?"

Within moments, she and Fruchter had discovered their blood tie. They
shrieked and fell into each other's arms. Fruchter's immediate family --
parents, brother and three sisters -- all died in the Treblinka camp, and
she had not known that anyone from her extended family in Poland had
survived.

It was then Fruchter learned that her childhood companion was still alive,
though partly incapacitated by a stroke.

Less than 24 hours later, Fruchter -- a tiny, indomitable figure dressed
in bright red -- slowly made her way across a weedy yard outside a simple
concrete home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. She reached the porch
where Esther Nissenbaum waited in her wheelchair, swaddled in a blue
blanket.

"Shalom, Esther," said Fruchter, her voice ringing out clear and strong.
"Shalom," said Nissenbaum, hers catching on a sob.

Reunions like this have been a feature of Israeli life for more than half
a century. Yad Vashem and other organizations have amassed exhaustive
records to help Europe's calamity-scattered Jews to find one another.
Every year, by diligent research or sheer luck, some of these
long-separated survivors come together again.

But even those who were young at the outset of the Holocaust are now old
and frail. Inexorably, as the years pass, such reunions are becoming
rarer.

Clasping hands, the two Esthers lapsed into the Yiddish of their
childhood.

"Do you know who I am?" Fruchter asked.

Her cousin gazed at her, momentarily disoriented. "I don't recognize you,"
she replied haltingly. "But you somehow seem familiar to me."

Nissenbaum's daughters recalled that before her stroke, their mother had
told them childhood stories of her mischievous cousin and playmate. The
two little Esthers would giggle so much when they were together that they
were sometimes ejected from a class or some solemn occasion.

Fruchter wept when she heard the names of Nissenbaum's children, who were
gathered around on the porch -- all of them old family names, those of
vanished aunts and uncles. As she listed the names of the dead, one of the
younger generation would pipe up, "That's me."

The day's emotion took a toll. "It's exciting," Fruchter said. "But it's
painful, painful."

Nissenbaum looked teary and confused at times but broke at last into a
brilliant smile.

"I feel wonderful -- never in my life have I felt so good," she said.
"This is family."

Hanging over the cousins' reunion was the bittersweet knowledge that they
might never manage to meet again.

"We'll write, and we'll call," said Fruchter. "At least now I know I have
family in this world."

(source: Los Angeles Times)