My hero mother
My mom, Edith Grosman, nee Friedman, passed away on July 31, 2020, at the age of 96. She told me once that she had gone to a fortune teller as a young woman and was told she’d live to 94. Once she had reached that feared milestone, each additional day was a bonus.
At the age of 18, my mother, along with about a thousand other Jewish girls from her hometown of Humenne in Slovakia, were snatched from their homes, crammed into filthy cattle cars and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. When SS boots kicked them out of the cars and onto the platform (“ramp” in camp lingo), she had to pass the all-important first selection at the hands of the Angel of Death himself, the elegant and pleasant looking SS-Hauptsturmsfuhrer, Dr. Josef Mengele. To the left — gas chambers and crematoria. To the right — slave labor. Mengele looked at her and pointed to the right
She spent a full 3 years in Auschwitz, the Factory of Death, as Czech writer Erich Kulka titled his novel about the camp. She started on the infamous death march with thousands of other walking skeletons in January 1945 as Red Army artillery fire boomed just behind the horizon but was able to slip away from the lurching, limping column of the walking dead, along with her friend Elsa. They spent many nights in barns, occasionally handed a glass of milk and a slice of bread by kind local farmers. The trains barely ran, and it took the starving and weakened girls a couple of months to get home. She arrived in her home town of Humenne in May 1945.
In the meantime, my father, born and raised in Humenne but in a more well-to-do and less religious family, and thus out of Mom’s social circle prior to the war, had also arrived back in town. His family had been killed in a freak allied bombing raid but because Dad was hiding in the mountains fighting with the partisans alongside the Red Army, he had no idea about the bombing. He was devastated to come home and find the house empty. My grandmother offered him room and board and so it came to be that they all went to the train station together to celebrate Mom’s homecoming.
My parents started dating almost immediately. A few months later, sensing that opportunities were non-existent and the anti-Semitism still high (you could still find people who would tell you to your face that Hitler should have finished the job), they traveled 450 miles west to Prague, where they settled and forged their careers. Father as a successful writer and screenplay writer, mom as a biologist. While their marriage was extremely happy, they both suffered serious after-effects from their war years. Mom had bone TB and her left kneecap had to be removed. Father’s affliction was psychological in nature — we’d call it PTSD today there was no name back then for his fear and trauma. Around the time they were married, the Communist Party staged a coup d’etat, and Czechoslovakia became firmly entrenched in the Soviet sphere of influence, behind the Iron Curtain. Later, during my school years, no mention was made in our textbooks about the violence that accompanied the “Victorious February”, as the Commies called it: the suspected murder of the Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, the reprisals, the show trials. “The proletariat had won and justifiably snatched power from the imperialist reactionaries who wanted to sell our labor and our soul to the depraved west” – that was the official version.
Mom enrolled as a part-time student at Charles University in Prague, majoring in Biology. Since she had to hold down a full- time job, it took her about ten years to complete her master’s degree. My dad was even more proud of her achievement than she was. He saw it as a triumph of “his” will…the late afternoon shouting matches when mother refused to go to lectures and dad literally had to push her out of the house, the periods of extreme nausea and vomiting before every major exam, the moaning and the wailing “I can’t do this!” But dad never lost sight of the goal, which was for my mom to complete her education. Delayed by almost twenty years by Hitler and Stalin— but finally completed.
Life in Prague was certainly many degrees better than life in Fascist Slovakia in the war years, not to mention the camp years but it wasn’t all peaches and cream. Basic staples were hard to come by. Getting decent meat meant standing in line from 5 in the morning and hoping some meat would be left on the counter once you got into the store. Consumer goods were almost non-existent. We had no fridge, no TV and certainly no car. Freedom of assembly was tightly controlled although my parents did have scores of friends that came for visits all the time. No travel abroad, no free press and in the early 50’s a constant threat of false imprisonment. Things got better in the late 60’s, culminating in the so-called Prague Spring, which was eventually crushed by Soviet tanks.
My parents and I emigrated to Israel. Mom picked up Hebrew relatively quickly and got an excellent job at Tel Aviv University. Once again, adversity that would have derailed most people for years was simply understood as a part and parcel of our fate, the fate of the Jews.
After my father’s death in Israel in 1981, mom once again weighed anchor and moved to Toronto where I had gotten a job as a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto. And yet again, she learned another new language (English), got herself a good job with the Canadian Red Cross with whom she stayed until her retirement. In her sixties and seventies she babysat my kids and the neighbors’ kids, she cooked and knitted and sewed and traveled. She bought herself a condo in Israel and would escape the cold Canadian winters to spend time in Netanyia, Israel, where her siblings lived.
But her most important job began when she was in her eighties. Along with a Rabbi she had befriended, Rabbi Lori Cohen, she would travel across the province of Ontario and lecture about the Holocaust to kids of all ages from first to 12th Grade, sometimes a few times a week well into her nineties. She videotaped an interview for the Shoah series by Spielberg and did countless radio and TV shows. She traveled to Auschwitz with tours a number of times. She repeated to whoever was willing to listen that there was only one reason God had allowed her to survive the camp: to become a voice for the 6 million voiceless, the 6 million murdered souls of whom her beautiful sister Lea was one.
Mom did not understand the concept of looking back, of regret. Always forward, always upward, always on, always learn, always read, add to your knowledge and teach that knowledge to the world. She used her iPad until just a few weeks before she passed. She was a tower of strength. A dynamo that never stopped demanding the very best of herself, her family and others: the toughest person I have ever known. Tough on herself, tough on me, tough on others. Her standards were high, and you had better move off your fanny and keep up with her or else you’d never hear the end of it. She was a true fighter against injustice and tyranny till her last breath.
But alas, even the most powerful engine will eventually grind to a halt and mom’s did in the early morning hours on Friday, July 31, 2020 — about three weeks after her 96th birthday. She has left behind a an incredible legacy: myself, my two daughters and my two grandsons and my granddaughter…all of us heirs to this “eshet chail”, this one of a kind, incredible fighter, a true General who led her troops through the battles, breaches and frays that form and inform all our lives. May she rest in peace and may her memory be forever a blessing. Baruch Dayan Emet
Wow, what a beautiful and inspiring telling. So many stories like this but not everyone has the ability to recount it so well. It makes me sad that it seems these days the spirit of perseverance, hard work, and as you say always looking forward, not back, is being lost and even despised. In my story At the Gates of Hell and of Heaven, I recount visiting Dachau at the age of 10. It is an experience forever burned into my brain and heart. It's a tragedy that our youth are being taught the opposite of what I learned in that terrible place and what your parents, and my parents, also taught me. All if which you describe so well here. Thank you for writing this. I wish every young person could read it and learn what it means.
Thank you for this tribute for your mother. It must be hard to put into words how she was and what she meant to you and others. After reading this eloquent piece I feel that you described the very essence of her. I wish people all around the world could really know and understand those people like your mother. The traumas they went through didn't break them, only made them stronger and made them persevere all the more. If only people could truly understand the destruction behind the Nazis and the communist ways. History seems to be repeating itself at a time when I truly thought we would never forget and always remember. I will pass the story on to family and friends because we all need this reminder of how fragile life and liberty are and how we need to protect them. Thank you for sharing her with us.