“It’s there, in the closet, on the floor, wrapped in a pillow case.” I stood up from Henele’s bedside where I had been crouching, my upper body extended over the tiny figure lying in the bed. My left ear almost grazed her lips as she whispered directions to me. My legs ached as I made my way to the closet. After all, I am no longer young and spry. With some anxiety, I searched the floor. I found it. I picked up the object and cradled it in my arms. The soft, faded cotton wrap was threadbare and yellowed with age. Gently, I pulled open the seventy-plus-year-old pillowcase. And there it was: the well-worn, self-satisfied handbag. A handbag that accompanied, inspired and indeed, witnessed an entire life lived in a new land. Like an old friend, it was there to remind Henele of all that she had been, seen and would come to know in her life.

No longer of supple, luxurious, medium brown tanned leather, its swivel lock had long ago lost its shine. Battered and stained. It even seemed smaller than descriptions of it from earlier times. It had not swung from Henele’s, or any one of her three daughters’ shoulders, in decades. This sad sack had been retired from active duty by newer bags, some even products of famous designers. Yet, all those newer models had all met the inevitable fate of the charity clothing drive. But not this bag. No. Its place, forever, was to be in Henele’s home: her bedroom closet, to be precise.

Henele was the youngest of eleven children in a blended family of second marriages. The age difference was truly significant. She had been a surprise, menopausal baby.
In the society to which Henele was born, each baby was a blessing from HaShem, no matter when or to whom it was born. As long as HaShem granted a pregnancy, the mother-to-be was not too old. References to Sara, the matriarch of all, were often made with reverence, upon news of pregnancies among older women. The power of HaShem made all things possible.

Fair skinned with strawberry blonde hair and green eyes, chubby little Henele made a fine impression. She was a kind, well- behaved child. A curious and athletic girl, Henele spent many hours strolling, reading and hiding in the sweet scented tiny apple orchard owned by her father and in the dense maze of pines in the forest beyond. She knew the landscape well. Her memory was her compass.

Henele’s father was a pious man, devoted to the performance of mitzvot, good deeds. Under his tutelage, Henele, and all her siblings, received a fundamental education of Halachah, codes of proper behavior, and proper religious observance. Henele’s world was full with religious practice, Judaic studies, domestic chores and babysitting. She could understand Polish but could barely speak it. Her family had some business dealings with Polish people, but not much. This is how life had been for the Jews of Kielce, Poland for hundreds of years. Separate and not equal. The Jews mistrusted their Polish neighbors, with good reason. From time to time violent pogroms would be unleashed upon them by these very neighbors. In 1939, an estimated 25,000 Jews lived in Kielce, about one-third of the total population. Then suddenly the traditional life-style of generations of Jews in Kielce was destroyed forever. It started on September 4, 1939 as Nazi batalions entered the city by foot and by trucks. With anger in their voices, hate in their eyes and guns raised at the ready, the occupation of Kielce began.

Jews were now forced to live in a designated area, the ghetto. Conquering Nazi troops brought Jews from as far away as Vienna, Austria, to be held captive with the local Jews, in the inhumanely crowded ghetto. The result was a community doomed to epidemics of disease and despair: in accordance with the Nazi blueprint.

The forest beckoned Henele’s family. The apple orchard had provided a living for them. It had fed them. If only they could, somehow, escape the ghetto and find their way to the forest. Maybe they could find refuge there until the German locusts leave, until the town was safe again and life could resume its normal rhythm. The year was 1941.

Somehow they did it. Two hundred Jews found their way from Kielce into the forest, near the banks of the river, Silnica. Exposed to all Nature’s whims, under star-filled skies and a generous canopy of foliage, they survived on berries they could find and small creatures they could kill. Until the river waters began to rise and the ground beneath their feet turned muddy. The Nazi locusts realized their presence. It took them nine months to discover their forest lairs. Nine months, an entire cycle for human life: that is how long these two hundred Jews hid in the forest outside of Kielce.

Then it was over. One day the sunrise was accompanied by the noise of discharged bullets, barking dogs, running, pounding feet, yelps of hurt Jews and shouts in German. Henele, instinctively, scooped up her young niece, and ran. Through peripheral vision, she witnessed the deaths of others, including her parents and a few of her siblings as they were shot. She kept running. Even when her niece shrieked, then slumped over, still in her arms. She kept running until she heard only the natural sounds of the forest. Henele laid her niece’s little body down on a patch of soft moss in a clearing in the woods. In shock Henele sat down beside it, her blood stained skirt a constant reminder of this, the worst day of her life. She wept tears, many tears, for all one-hundred-ninety-nine Jews she believed had perished that day, in the forest outside of Kielce, in 1942. After rinsing out her skirt with her tears and the cold water of the Silnica River, Henele headed back to Kielce. With everyone she had known and loved gone, she was ready to turn herself in and accept her apparent fate: to join her people in the world beyond.

As she approached the town, she saw a former neighbor, an older Pole, who recognized her. At risk to his own life the elderly man called out to her, “Hey you! Go back to the forest! There is nothing for you here! You will be killed. No chance! Go back! Try to save yourself!” Without thinking, she did just as he said. She turned around and headed back to the forest. For two months, Henele lived alone in the forest. She hid among the trees, searched for berries to eat and slept warily when exhaustion overcame her. Then, after about two months, living alone amongst the trees she had loved so much in her childhood, so, so long ago, Henele walked back to Kielce and turned herself in to the first Gestapo officer she saw. Still “chubby”, by the standards of her circumstance, Henele was then transferred by train to Auschwitz. It was 1943 and she was seventeen.

Sometime during the next year and a half of well documented yet, still unfathomable sadism, cruelty and depravity in Auschwitz, Henele recognized a man from Kielce, who had lived in her neighborhood. She had not really known him as he was a married father of four and fifteen years her senior. Isadore knew, with certainty, that his family was gone. In that specific inexplicable world, mere familiarity substituted for “love”, or, at least, “hope.” The two agreed to marry should they both survive this fetid world in which they were trapped.

And so it came to pass. Henele and Srulka (Isadore) both survived. In late 1945 they married. They returned, as a couple, to Kielce. They knew no other place. And all places in their world, seemed to have suffered the same horrors. At least Kielce was under Russian control. The Russians seemed to keep order and a tenuous peace, in the town.

The orchard that had been owned by Henele’s father was completely destroyed and the deed of ownership thereof could not be found in the local municipal department of records. But Henele, the sole survivor of her family was remembered and permitted to sell her father’s house, the one in which she grew up and learned about love and commitment to family. With the proceeds of the sale, Henele bought leather boots, a leather handbag and fabric enough for Srulka, a master tailor, to make a wool coat for his teen-aged bride.

A type of “luck” accompanied Henele all her life. On July 4, 1946, a now, infamous, post-war pogrom occurred in Kielce. It happened on the street where the newlyweds had planned to live their life. The number of Jewish dead counted that night ranges from forty to seventy, according to differing reports. Henele and Srulka had left for the weekend. Henele, upon learning of the fate of her Jewish neighbors and seeing the aftermath, turned to her husband and said, “I am leaving here, with or without you.”

They left Poland the next day on July 5, 1946. It was a day of independence for Henele. They left Poland forever. The next couple of years were spent in a Displaced Persons Camp in Eggenfelden, Germany. The family now included two little girls, their daughters, Rosa and Rochelle.

“Hurry up or we’ll miss the ship,” Srulka pleaded with his wife.
“I’m coming,” she replied. A quick look around the apartment, the front yard, the sky. Seated in the taxi, she looked down at her fine, medium brown colored handbag of supple leather, with its shiny brass closure. She noticed it was open. It was January 2, 1950, her older daughter’s third birthday. With tears in her eyes, she firmly snapped her handbag shut. That beautiful, supple, leather handbag resting respectfully on her lap was full. It was full of all Henele’s memories that had been her life in Europe. Yet it was so stylish, to Henele. It also held all her hopes and dreams for a new and good life in America.

Indeed, that handbag, that special conduit of continuity in Henele’s life, kept company with Henele all the years of her life in America. It was a valued member of the household. It has been introduced to Henele’s five grandchildren and eighteen, of her twenty-two, great grandchildren. Wide-eyed and awestruck is how they stared at this special purse. It is in much the same way they stared at their amazing great grandmother.

I watched as Henele reached out to pat the weathered bag with a weathered hand. This old friend who was always loyal and never talked back. In that brief moment I saw my entire life full of experiences I shared with this dear woman: shopping trips, outings to the beach and, especially, holiday meals. Laughter, tears and, most significantly, wisdom, that’s what Henele shared with me. My second mother, that is who she was. With not a word spoken, I slowly, gently rewrapped the once supple, all-knowing, handbag and placed it back on the floor in Henele’s closet, where it lived. I returned to Henele’s bedside and held her hand. I paused to look and memorize Henele’s form in the receding light of day almost done. I whispered, “Layla Tov, Henele. I’ll see you in the morning!” As I was closing the door, I noticed a tear in the corner of Henele’s right eye.

There is so much to try to understand. Yet it remains an enigma of irrationality. This chapter of humanity gone awry in the midst of the twentieth century is best summed up in the exchange noted by the Italian Jewish author and Auschwitz inmate, Primo Levi. He was about to eat an icicle he had broken off from a window ledge. It was snatched away by a German guard. “Why?” Levi asked him. “ There is no ‘Why’ here,” replied his German captor.

I do know this: Henele always saw her life after the Shoah, as a gift. Each minute of every day was appreciated as such. The best revenge on Hitler and his Nazism was to lead a Jewish, G-d centered life with grandchildren and great grandchildren in America or in Eretz Yisrael. This, she did. And so she had a taste of bittersweet revenge.
We are all the better for it.

A LIFE WELL LED.