Rivka. The name of my grandmother. A Holocaust survivor, a partisan, and a rebuilder of worlds.
After her first husband and four of her children were murdered by the Nazis, she joined the partisans until the end of the war. After being shockingly reunited with one surviving child, she began again, marrying in a DP camp to the man who was my biological grandfather. Together they moved to South America where my mother was born and then to New York where her husband died of Hodgkin’s.
With two children needing to be raised, she married again and started over with the man I knew as my grandfather – a new life on a farm in New Jersey.
I remember her as someone who cried often but also laughed fully. Whose hair was done beautifully, stiff with Aqua Net but whose arms were always open for grandchildren and whose house always smelled of chicken soup.
My daughter is named for her, the name she took in South America and how she was called by many: Riva. My daughter was very sick when she was born and I couldn’t think of a more fitting name for her than that of the woman who had survived so much.
She used to say: az me muz, muz me, which translates to “when you have to, you have to” whenever anyone asked her how she survived.
My daughter now wears the locket I never saw my grandmother without. May G-d give all of us the peace our grandparents never knew, may we never forget the lessons they paid in blood, and may all the children of Israel finally know peace.
