A grandmother's message

September 11, 2011

For Etana Chaviva, On the eve of your departure to Poland.

My Dearest Etana,

Seventeen years ago, on a Thursday, March 7^{th, 1994 (5755),}  in a shul in Irvine, California I held my breath as your father announced the name that your mother and father had chosen for you.  With a beating heart I listened as your father explained to the members of his congregation who had gathered to welcome Joy and Rabbi Dan Epstein’s newborn daughter, that you were being named Etana after my mother, your great grandmother, Etka!  Your father further explained that the meaning of your name, Etana, implied a certain kind of strength, a force, like the force of a river or maybe even a waterfall!  And that was my mother!  How else could she have continued to work as a slave laborer day after day, enduring cold, hunger, physical and mental abuse, and still return in the evening to care and comfort her children to the extent possible under those extreme circumstances. 

 It sounds odd to refer to my mother as “your great grandmother”! She was only 30 years old, and the mother of two very young children when she faced the savage and destructive forces that were unleashed against our people in Czernowitz, the town where my sister and I were born.   My mother held on to us, her two young children, and to life with all her might, as we were chased from our home, first into the Czernowitz ghetto, and later aboard those infamous cattle cars to Transnistria.  You and your friends are not likely going to hear about Transnistria, a place often described as “the forgotten cemetery of the Jews of Bukovina”.  You and your group will not follow the path that led us to spend 22 months in the Tulcin district in that area called Transnistria where my mother was a slave laborer in a stone quarry from June 7, 1942 until the Spring of 1944, when the Germans and their allies were defeated and we miraculously remained alive.  Only G-d knows how your great grandmother continued to endure and to envision a future for her children, and grandchildren.   You have inherited not only here genetic makeup but also some of that firmness, that strength.  

You are the flower of my mother’s dreams, firmly planted in the soil of Israel! 

I ask you now to carry with you the memory of my mother, your great grandmother, Etka Strum Neuman, as you and your 80 classmates travel to the lands that once flourished with true 'Yiddishkeit', faith, and passion; the wellspring of  Jewish learning and spirituality from which we still draw inspiration today, more than 70 years later. 

Make your diary your confidant, and confide into it your random thoughts, feelings and impressions even if you can’t find the right words to express what you’re feeling. …It may take you time to sort it all out.

I love you and wish you a meaningful journey.

Your ever loving Savta Paula