I was raised on my grandmother’s stories.
Her name was Nathalie Nadine, because, born in Belgium at the onset of the war, they were not permitted Jewish names. She would have been Nachale.
Her mother, Chana, lived in Poland once. The granddaughter of a rabbi, who ran a shtiebel. It was at his insistence that she and her new husband, Chaim, cross into Belgium to send money back home. They didn’t want to, he had to insist. Just for one year. He promised.
The borders were shut. Everyone on the Polish side would be exterminated. You’ve heard stories of concentration camps. Of Auschwitz. Of Bergen-Belsen. Chelmno was a death camp. The average life expectancy was two hours.
So my grandmother was born in Belgium. 1938. And though her mother could not get back to Poland, though no one left in Belchtow would ever meet the baby, she could write. Postcards – only postcards, because letters were forbidden - back and forth between there the Jewish settlement-turned-open ghetto, until they were all deported. Three years of postcards.
Around the time the Nazis invaded Belgium, my grandmother’s face was bitten half-off by a German Shepherd. There was a Catholic nurse, Maria, who stayed with Nathalie in the operating room, and tended her scars, and insisted that her parents couldn’t hide harboring a baby. Give her to me.
It was a bit of Yocheved situation. Chana would come to the house, sometimes, to visit her baby. To give her a bath. Small things. My grandma didn’t recognize her, didn’t like the visits. Didn’t know who this strange woman was, who spoke a strange language, who disrupted her games and insisted on hugging her. And yet. Every time Chana left, she felt so sad and didn’t know why.
My grandma couldn’t keep a secret to literally save her life. “I’m Jewish,” she told the soldiers at the gate one day. “But I’m not supposed to tell.”
“I am, too,” the first replied. “You cannot go around saying that to people.”
She spent the formative years of her childhood in Maria’s house. Raised as a sister to a brother who was not her brother. With presents. With Christmas. Even after she was reunited with her parents, after everything, she would always consider her time with “Aunt Maria” as the happiest years of her childhood. My grandma went to visit Maria before her death. Hospitalized and nearly blind, she traced her hands across my grandma’s face. Recognized her by the scars from that day. Eventually, years later, Maria would be recognized and honored by the Queen of Belgium.
My grandmother made it to Israel the long way. When her parents didn’t want her to know what was happening, they just switched languages. And so she learned Yiddish, and so she learned Polish, and one day she learned Hebrew - though she didn’t like it. By the time they’d finished trying to keep secrets, she spoke seven languages. My grandfather made it Israel the Chabad way, though we didn’t know it until after he died. His name was Dov Berko, so this makes sense. At some point someone invented a birthday for him. He knew it was near Pesach.
They met in high school, in Petach Tikvah. She was wild and rebellious, the worst student in class. He excelled at academics, with a strong sense of justice. When the school proposed a trip for only its top students, he insisted that it be all of them or none. It was, in this moment, she decided to marry him. He didn’t even know she existed yet.
He was a doctor in the Israeli army. Shot in the eye during training, impairing his vision. So they moved to NY, and had two little girls. He became a pediatric cardiologist, perfecting open-heart surgeries on infants. Every year, on their birthdays, their parents would send my grandpa a postcard. 𝐿𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝑎𝑡 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑𝑛’𝑡 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒.
My grandma was misdiagnosed her entire life. Eating disorders. Arthritis. Crohn’s. She died with two hip and a partial neck replacement, weighing half what I weigh now. It took a long time to get the diagnosis right. Anorexia nervosa, caused by Survivor’s Guilt.
My father took me to her grave once. I left a letter of my own there that my grandfather, years later and in such an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s that he sometimes didn’t recognize my mother’s voice, remembered as mine.
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I was sitting in the kitchen of my studio apartment during the pandemic, when I came across the documentary. It was through the USC Shoah Foundation, directed by Stephen Spielberg. I recognized her amethyst earrings and heavy French accent. Forgot just how soft her voice was.
The woman interviewing her asked about religion – a thing I thought my grandmother – who hid bread before Pesach so she’d have what to eat, and occasionally boiled milk in my mother’s fleishig pots – detested completely.
𝐷𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑎𝑦, my grandma answered in her soft-spoken voice that held years of rebelliousness, 𝐼’𝑚 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐴𝑡 𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡, 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝐼’𝑚 𝑎𝑓𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑎𝑟𝑘, 𝐼’𝑚 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑚𝑦 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝐼’𝑚 𝐽𝑒𝑤𝑖𝑠ℎ.
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My grandmother was much closer to her father, a man who “talks more with his eyes, and with his heart, and his expressions, and said maybe 100 words his whole life.” But she spoke to her mother before she died. Chana had Alzheimer’s too then, and kept calling my grandmother 𝑀𝑟𝑠. But she would fall from French to Yiddish to say, “I must abandon my child.”
My grandmother asked her, in French, “Did you ever get your child back?”
She didn’t answer.
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My grandma – who entered the freeway from the exit ramp because she felt like it, who accidentally flipped off the cops and flirted in French to get out of tickets - was buried just down the row from the Lubavitcher Rebbe. You could walk from his grave to hers holding your breath, and Tomer Yitzchak has witnessed me cry there. But at the bottom of that grave, was something I hadn’t noticed when I left my letter. The last story that she ever told me, and the lesson I’m still learning. It was just four words, in French:
𝐼 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔.
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