Freida Sima’s kitchen was open to all who passed through the Bronx, and not a visitor left without enjoying an apple latke or at least a piece of rye bread, a pickle, and a slice of the long salami hanging behind the kitchen door.
But at the same time each of the older family members had his or head in another place – Europe. Not a day went by that Freida Sima, Abie, and Benny didn’t think of their parents, brothers, and sisters. Where were they? Had they managed to stay together? What of the little children? How did they all survive? Did they all survive? Had anyone new been born?
By the spring of 1944 the Red Army had advanced toward Transnistria, liberating it from the Romanians by the end of the summer. Romania unconditionally surrendered to the Soviets. Yet not one word was heard from the Scharf-Eisenberg family in Europe.
One morning early in the autumn of 1944, Freida Sima heard a knock at the door. Abie stood there with a grief-stricken look in his eyes. “He walked in and ‘took me around,’ ” my grandmother recalled, using her expression for giving a hug.
“Then,” she continued, “he told me to take off my apron and go with him. We both went to Tzeendl [Benny’s childhood nickname] and Abie told him to close the butcher store. ‘The parents are gone; so is Marium,’ he told us. So the three of us cut kriya for each other and sat shiva for an hour for the family, and that was that.”
Early that morning Abie had received an airmail letter from one of the Transnistrian orphans who had been allowed to leave for Palestine. Little Mendel was a Scharf cousin who, before leaving Transnistria, had been given a somber list along with Abie’s address in America, where he was told to send it once he reached Palestine.
The list contained the yahrzeit dates of Freida Sima’s mother, Devorah (27 Adar); her father, Nachman (28 Adar); and her sister Marium (9 Nissan). All had died in 1942.
The family in America had yet to learn the fate of Sheindl’s Shaja, who had disappeared at the beginning of the war, and Leibush and Frieda’s little girls, Malka and Rivka, who were also gone.
As devastating as the news was about Devorah, Nachman, and Marium, the family now concentrated on those who survived: on finding them, on learning from them what had happened to everyone during the war, and on getting them to America.
But all of that is another story, to be told next month.
(This installment of the Freida Sima series is dedicated to the memory of Chana Kraus, Freida Sima’s mother-in-law, whose yahrzeit is 21 Nissan, which this year fell on April 29; and to the memory of Avraham Leib ben Shimon Chaim Halevi –Dr. Arthur L. Schwartz – the author’s father-in-law, who passed away last month on 22 Nissan, April 30).
