LOOKING AROUND : Candles

By Barbara Sofer
Dec. 5, 2002

Bus 16 moved slowly through traffic in Haifa. Olga Grossman Solomon was sitting in a seat that faced backwards. Across the aisle, in the window seat facing forward, a plump woman with soft white hair was staring at Olga. When a passenger got off, the stranger moved over and leaned across the aisle.

"Is your name Olga?" she asked. "Are you a twin?"

A twin! Olga's heart pounded. The question sent her hurtling back more than half a century to a freezing platform in Poland. Olga was clutching her momma Shari's long skirt, and a man with immaculate white gloves and a stick was asking, "Are you a twin?"

Olga and her sister Vera didn't look alike. Being twins had saved their lives. Dr. Mengele - Uncle Josef as he insisted they call him - had pulled twins out of line so that he could conduct his demonic experiments on them.

On the bus, Olga searched the other woman's face for a familiar feature.

She mentally shook her head. "I don't know you," she said.

"I wouldn't expect you to," the other woman answered quietly. "But I remember you."

The words came pouring out. The stranger was Bracha Karwasser, formerly Horowitz from Warsaw. After the war, Bracha, 19, was desperately searching for clues to the whereabouts of her two older sisters. An acquaintance had seen Hanna alive in December 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau. So Bracha set off for the now-liberated camp of hell. There she sought her sister, first among the living and then among the corpses, in the open pits of the dead. No trace. On that cold, dark day in Auschwitz, the spirit that had sustained Bracha through the war, through flight and hiding and pretending, was suddenly gone.

She was all alone with nothing left to live for.

At the moment of her greatest despair Bracha had noticed Shari Grossman, a woman so beautiful that even in her worn and emaciated state she was remarkable.

"Stay here. Sleep with us," the angel with turquoise eyes and jet-black hair urged her.

Two tiny, emaciated little girls clung to Shari's skirt. One of the girls was very weak and had a tendency to faint. All Shari could offer was a space near them on the hard planks of the old camp barracks. But to Bracha, that was a lot. "Just having someone speak to me kindly and know that someone cared changed everything," she said.

Later, Shari invited Bracha to remain with her and the girls. A cousin who'd survived as a partisan from Yugoslavia would take them back to Slovakia. Bracha could be part of their family.

"I was still hoping that someone from my family might turn up, so I refused your mother's kind offer," Bracha explained. "But I've never forgotten her kindness. At my darkest moment, she gave me the fortitude to carry on."

Bracha never found her sisters. She married and moved to Israel, settling in Haifa. She was a grandmother now, but she often thought of that beautiful woman in Auschwitz.

"Is your mother still alive?" Bracha asked Olga.

Olga shook her head. Her mother had died less than a year ago.

The bus reached the last stop. Olga and Bracha were hugging and crying. By then, all the other passengers, eavesdropping, were cheering them on.

When they got off, Olga and Bracha exchanged phone numbers and promised to meet again soon.
Olga sat down on the bus-stop bench. The dam she'd constructed to hold back her memories had never felt so fragile. She was flooded with memories of blood tests and injections and measurements and fevers, of motorcycles and German shepherds, of stifled tears. There were other memories, too, of cousin Rozi Grossman who risked her life to give the five-year-old twins her slice of bread; of her mother's loving voice urging the twins to keep going.

AFTER THE war, Olga and Vera were invited to join the Kindertransport led by Rabbi Shlomo Schonfield, first to Clonyn Castle in Dublin, Ireland, and later in the home of Rabbi and Mrs. Eliezer Posen in London.

"Only when I became a mother myself did I understand how hard it must have been for our mother, particularly after Auschwitz, to let us go, even to a castle."

Like Bracha, Shari Grossman, too, remarried, and moved to Haifa, where the family was finally reunited.

On a hot Haifa Yom Kippur, Olga, a frequent fainter, lost consciousness in synagogue. Raphael, a handsome soldier in an IDF uniform, stepped across the barrier into the women's section to revive her. It was an act typical of him. The only survivor of five siblings in his family, Raphael had dived into the water from the deck of the sinking Altalena and swum to safety. Her "angel Raphael" Olga always called him.

Olga and Raphael married, lived in Haifa, and brought up two children, Leah and Bezalel. Olga was devastated when Raphael died of an illness, followed soon after by her mother's death. But then she met Bracha, who had looked across a bus aisle and recognized in the grandmother the emaciated five-year-old from Auschwitz clinging to her mother's skirts. They had lived nearly all their lives in the same city.

Whenever Olga and Bracha got together after the initial meeting, Bracha encouraged Olga to begin talking about her history. Until then, she'd been silent. There was an organization for 200 surviving children of the 1,500 sets of twins and triplets used in medical experiments in Auschwitz. Candles, they called themselves: Children of Auschwitz - Nazis' Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors. She, too, could be a candle to others, Bracha urged.

In 1990, renowned psychologist Judith Kestenberg, herself a Holocaust survivor, lectured in Jerusalem about how a single act of kindness could rekindle the desire to live among the children of the Holocaust.

Olga's mother had once done that for Bracha. Now, more than 50 years later, Bracha was doing the same for Olga.

Said Olga: "For the first time in my life, I can talk about what happened to me. I realize I'm a witness. We are monuments to survival. We are walking miracles."

As part of that effort, Olga told me her story.

The day Olga and Bracha met on a bus in Haifa was the third candle of Hanukka. This is the season when we are commanded to publicize the miracles of the past and those in our days.

Some miracles, it turns out, require a human agent: They require us to emulate the Creator and exercise the transforming power of a simple act of kindness.