Poland? Safety? 1936? Do you see anything wrong with this picture?
A few months later, she received a letter. It was from her parents. “Stay where you are, the letter said. “It’s getting worse. Don’t come home. Stay where you are.”
She lived through some exciting years. In 1917, the British began to rule an area in the Middle East known as the Palestine Mandate. By the 1940s, Britain recognized the rights of the Jews and Arabs to their own countries.
In 1948, the United Nations proposed a split of the Palestine Mandate into two independent areas, a Palestinian state and Israel.
This was unanimously rejected by the neighboring Arab states.
Rachel Wrobel lived through those years when Israel declared independence, and through the ensuing war the Palestinian state was subsumed by Jordan to the east and Egypt to the west.
By then, all of Rachel’s relatives had been killed in the Holocaust.
I learned these facts on Saturday afternoons, seated in Rachel Wrobel’s living room. We drank tea, surrounded by photographs of her family — children, grandchildren, great- grandchildren.
We talked about bereavement. My loss was fresh. Hers was decades old.
“How do you live in the world?” I would ask her.
"Prayer,” she would tell me. Every morning, she read the Psalms. They gave her strength to live in the world, to go to the gym, to shop and visit people.
Every Thursday, she fasted. The fast was in memory of her lost relatives.
“They were all educated people. Lawyers. Accountants. Doctors,” she would say. “Why did I live? Why me and not them?”
