March 21, 2021 - Aish.com

Bubby closed the door to her home on Joste Strasse before rushing to the Hauptbahnhof train station in Berlin, not knowing when she and my mother would return. Their second-floor, comfortably furnished apartment had a fireplace in every room. It was graced with Meissen figurines, crystal wine goblets, an antique brass filigree clock they wound up once a week, a huge silver menorah with two lions, cups for oil on opposite ends, and eight smaller cups on the bottom. They never saw any of these things again.

May 9, 2020, Aish.com

I didn’t know them when they were hungry and feared for their lives during the Holocaust. Their two and half years in hiding, surviving on carrots and the occasional onion skin were nine years behind them by the time I was born. At the war’s end, my mother and grandmother emerged from a dreary attic in Belgium jaundiced, their teeth in shambles. Their new life in America restored their health. Like Scarlett O’Hara, they vowed to never be hungry again. They raised my sister and me to be self-sufficient, frugal, resourceful, always ready for the unexpected, qualities that prepared us for some of the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.