Letter from my Father Read Online Free

known to me that my aunts Rebecca and Chaya and all her family were undoubtedly killed on the 24th August, 1942. With reference to my daughter, I again repeat my plea as above and just as I participate in the grief of my community, so may God permit us to see the redemption and comfort of the whole community of Israel.

    Greetings

    Szulem

    Note: This is an English translation of my father’s letter. The original, written in modern Hebrew on what are now two fragile, yellowed pages of thin paper held together with sticky tape, is deposited at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. It was posted to my father’s family in Pittsburgh in the United States, and was forwarded to me decades later. A copy of the original follows.

III
    Who will take care of me?
    N o longer did Sabina need to hide little Ester. She and Yaakov took me back to Zbaraz, where they were told that the only survivors of the extensive Kahane and Braun families were the Einlegers, Gita and Welo. I was taken to their house but they were not there. Since Sabina and Yaakov needed to get home, they left me with a woman who lived with my relatives. She was busy at her sewing machine. She took little notice of me and went on working. I felt very alone. To make myself feel better, I picked up and sorted the scraps of material scattered on the floor beneath her machine.
    When the Einlegers finally returned, Gita recognised me as the child of her cousin Szulem, whom she had loved. From then on, she and Welo started taking care of me. I felt awkward. I knew I did not really belong to them. They were not my mother and father. I called them Ciocia and Wujek , Aunty and Uncle in Polish. At first they thought they would send me to a home for Jewish orphans, children without parents. Aunty and Uncle were poor and were both working to make ends meet, so this was a sensible idea. But I did not want to go there. For the first time in many years, I cried and cried and they, out of kindness, decided to keep me with them.
    So now I had found a new home where I rediscovered my real name, Ester.
    I was not in good shape. I was covered from head to toe with sores and scabs. My scalp was alive with lice. I had to have my head shaved to fight the lice and allow my sores toheal. They did, slowly, but the lice were stubborn. My head was shaved twice more.
    Everyone said that I was wild. I ran round the nearby market-place with a little handkerchief tied around my head. I loved the busy market-place. I admired the glistening pats of butter wrapped in lettuce leaves, the live chickens and roosters, the fat colourful vegetables and fruit. The peasants behind the stalls seemed kind. One large Ukrainian woman noticed that my front tooth was loose. While I stood very still, she took a long piece of string, wrapped it around the tooth, yanked it out and handed it to me. My gums bled a bit but I was secretly pleased. Losing baby teeth meant I was becoming more grown-up.
    Aunty and Uncle’s place consisted of two rooms and a tiny kitchen. The main room, in which I also slept, had old brown furniture: a table, some chairs, a sideboard and my narrow bed. One day when I was on my own, I found a razor blade and used it to trim the edges of all the furniture. I did it very carefully and systematically, with no thought of the terrible damage I was doing to the few pieces of furniture that my new family owned. When they came home, Aunty scolded me but Uncle stayed calm, simply speaking firmly to me about how damaging furniture was forbidden. He did not seem to think that what I had done made me bad or mad.
    My uncle was so patient with me. He tried to teach me to read and do sums. I was a very slow learner, with little facility in repeating the sounds he gave me. He just said: The child needs time . Repeat after me: T and O makes TO. I did what I was told. T and A makes TA. I repeated TA . After a while he would ask So what are T and O? But I would already have forgotten. We would start all over again. Then