I am the namesake of a great-aunt murdered by the Nazis, as were her husband and two of her adult children. Most sacred to me is her surviving daughter’s story, in part because I loved and admired her, in part because I grew up believing that my mother had a role in her rescue.
Born in 1912 in Riga, Latvia, Adele Rewitsch survived two ghettos (the so-named Large Riga and Small Riga ones), three labor camps, and finally, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She’d been there just three weeks when British troops arrived on the afternoon of April 15, 1945. Said the eighty-four-year-old Adele in her Shoah testimony, smiling at the memory, “It was the most beautiful joy a person could feel.”
She was thirty-three years old and weighed sixty-five pounds. She was tiny, five feet one inch, yet as a prisoner she’d worked in munitions factories making barbed wire, had chopped wood, dug peat; at Kaiserwald had moved stones from one side of the road and back—cruel and pointless invented work overseen by German women I fervently hope were eventually sentenced to worse fates. Then Bergen-Belsen, where, for an extra so-called meal, and hardly able to lift the shovel, she volunteered to dig graves for the “mountain of corpses—the most horrible sight of all the time of the war.” That first measly ration of bread she allowed herself to eat. The second she sneaked back to her barracks for “her group.”
Adele’s surviving brother, Eugene, a doctor, had immigrated to the United States in 1937. Anti-Semitism, ironically, had served a purpose: his homeland, Latvia, claiming not to recognize his French medical degree, wouldn’t grant him an internship. After serving in the Latvian army (mistakenly in the ski patrol; couldn’t ski), after coming to America and marrying, his wife wrote to dozens of American hospitals, in search of internships. Finally, one said yes, come. Or more likely, “Oui, venez,” because it was a hospital run by an order of French nuns, Saint Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Remembering that city as his last known home before communication ceased, a very ill Adele sent a letter from Bergen-Belsen to her brother at Saint Peter’s in “New Brunswick, New Brunswick.” At the bottom of the envelope, in German, she noted that he’d been working there as an intern in 1941. It reached him, forwarded to the U.S. Army, finally arriving in Missoula, Montana, where he was stationed.
But a long six months had passed, and the war was over. Not knowing if she’d survived, and because “it was a letter that could not be understood” according to Adele, he, a psychiatrist, was inconsolable. “Help me,” she’d written. “I’m so sick. I dreamed about strawberries. Maybe you can get me some strawberries.” Eugene’s daughter, Judy, born in 1940, told me that her mother, fearing her husband would spend the rest of his life reading it, eventually destroyed the letter, so late to reach him, his only sister’s fate unknown.
From Adele’s Shoah testimony: After “two or three” months in the makeshift Belsen infirmary, unmoored and refusing “like a crazy woman” to be repatriated to Russia (Latvia was under Russian rule, but the transport would have taken her to Russia proper), she was “like a little cadaver,” brought by the Red Cross to Sweden to recuperate. There she was quarantined, housed, fed, clothed. (“The Jewish people of Sweden! There are no words for them!”) Among the amenities—paper napkins! Toilet paper! Shoes! Coats! Kronor!—survivors received paper, pencils, and stamps, encouraging them to get in touch with whomever they remembered in a safe place.
Somewhere in America was the older brother she’d already tried to reach, but where now? She wrote to her uncle—my grandfather—and though addressed only “Louis Masur, Tailor, Lowell, Boston,” the letter reached him. Written in German, it described her plight and her location. Could someone help? Did they know the whereabouts of her brother?
Only my mother was home when the blue airmail letter arrived. She didn’t know German but she knew who it was from and what it must mean: Adele was alive! She ran—a mission she never described in any other way except “I ran”—to the synagogue to ask the German-speaking custodian to translate. Her cousin had survived! She was in Sweden, alive and safe. My mother called Eugene and another cousin, now safe in New York, and from there no doubt ran straight to Western Union. Everyone contacted sent telegrams. Your letter received! We will get you out!
And they did.
Adele obtained a visa in December 1945, which had to be used within three months. Just short of that expiration date, she found passage: from Göteborg to Liverpool (where three hundred war brides and their children boarded—quite the circus!) to Halifax, then America.
On April 8, 1946, after rough seas the whole way, the SS Drottningholm arrived in New York Harbor. It would be most narratively fulfilling to report that the Statue of Liberty loomed large in Adele’s memory, that Lady Liberty had a role in the family story. It did not. But the sight that did make it into the narrative, which she reported to me herself, fifty years later, over lunch, was that her beloved brother had been granted a twenty-four-hour furlough by the U.S. Army, and was there to meet her.
Her brother-doctor Eugene worried that New York, where she’d been living with her cousin, would be too hot in the summer; she should come live with him and his wife and daughter in Missoula, “high in the mountains and very beautiful.”
Fluent in three languages, Adele once told me, looking stumped, “It’s funny, but the language I’ve forgotten is Latvian.” (To which I, the excellent grudge-holder, think: Murderers! Ninety-eight percent of Latvian Jews were murdered by Nazis and all-too-cooperative Latvian citizens—the largest percentage loss of any Jewish community in the world during the Shoah.) Yiddish, too? “Well, yes, but that I learned later in the camps.”
Adele moved back to New York in the fall of 1946, and worked for the next thirty-five years for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union as a bookkeeper. Her first day on the job was also the first day for handsome Ludwig Honigwill, a lawyer, a displaced Jew from Poland, who’d made it to the U.S. in 1941. “We went for our Social Security cards together,” she told me with a smile. “We were two numbers apart—we would have been just one number apart but because he was such a gentleman he let the woman behind him go first.” They married five years later, and were together until his death in 1977.
When the first cousins eventually met, Adele told my mother that the day the American relatives’ telegrams arrived was the day she’d set as a deadline for herself: if she’d heard back from no one, she’d have to start over, alone.
Adele died in 2004, strong to the end. If only someone could have told her in 1945, newly liberated but deathly ill with typhus, emaciated, grieving, lost: “You will live! You will make it to America, to safety and to family. You will find work there, and love. And not only will you regain your health, but you will live to the age of ninety-two in the borough of Queens in the great city of New York. You will look back at the pathetically small acts of kindness performed only rarely by monsters, and say with a shrug and a sweet smile, ‘People are people.’ And, most amazingly, sixty years from that hell on earth, you will sum up your life, on the record, as good and long and lucky. Imagine such a beautiful thing, newly liberated survivor Adele Rewitsch, because all of that came true.”