A fond farewell to Clara Rosenberger

By Barbara Sofer
July. 10, 2003

Clara Rosenberger, 77, may she rest in peace, is widely known today as the 30th person to die from the Passover Massacre at Netanya's Park Hotel. It wasn't the first time she was known by a number. She had one tattooed on her arm.

Clara was born in Czechoslovakia, and remembered a time in her childhood when the head of state came to a wedding in the town's rebbe's family. But then everything changed. Her family was rounded up and taken to Auschwitz. Her father perished. Young enough to work, she sorted the personal items of men, women and children who had been burned in the crematoria.

Skinny and sick after the war ,she was sent to a recuperative village in Austria. She left to join an illegal immigration ship headed for Palestine. Her prized possession was a pair of new shoes she had received as a refugee at the village. On board ship she went barefoot to save the new shoes. The barefoot ping-pong player, they called her. She wanted to celebrate her first footsteps in the land of Israel wearing those new shoes.

The British caught their ship near Haifa harbor and turned it back. "New shoes?" smirked an officer, tossing one of Clara's shoes into the Mediterranean.

In the internment camps in Cyprus, she met Zvi and they married. She was pregnant when they arrived in Israel after independence. This time they could stay, but Zvi went off to fight. They brought up their two children in the embryonic state, through hard times and through war. Some may remember Clara from the gift shop in the old Diplomat Hotel in Jerusalem.

Zvi passed away. The children wanted her to come for Passover, but a friend named Lola suggested they treat themselves to Passover in a hotel. They loved the beach. There was a modest establishment called the Park Hotel in Netanya. Many of the guests would be Holocaust survivors like them.

When they arrived in Netanya, Clara and Lola carefully hung up their clothes. They got ready, with excitement, for Passover night, a time of so many memories. They didn't get to the beach. Never mind, they thought. They'd go the next day and stroll along the walkway. Clara wore a favorite dressy blouse. They went down to the lobby and took their seats in the dining room.

NO ONE stopped the terrorist from crossing the hotel lobby and entering the dining room. In the center of the room he pushed the button, his own death a side effect of the murders he was to commit. Lola and Clara were sitting at the table. Lola was killed. A piece of metal, shrapnel, or maybe part of the ceiling, severed Clara's spine. She was paralyzed from the waist down.

When she returned to Jerusalem for rehabilitation, I met her at Hadassah Mount Scopus. On Holocaust Remembrance Day I was with her when she went on Mexican television, speaking excellent English.

"Why would they want to do it?" she asked the young reporter. "You're a reporter, an intelligent young person. Can you explain it to me?" Then came a reporter from London. "I know you British," she said. That's when she told him the story of the shoes.

Now she would be confined to a wheelchair. She would have to leave her third-floor apartment where she had lived an independent life.

The situation was too grim. "Young people dying every day, and soldiers. I have a soldier too, a grandson, and I'm so afraid for him. I was in Auschwitz and I thought I'd finished all the trouble," she said.

Her granddaughter drew a picture of Clara outside in the park in a wheelchair to try and encourage her to rebuild her life once again. But this time Clara refused to snap back.

"I've never wanted to be a burden to my children, and I'm in despair now that I have become exactly that. But I'm not sorry I came to Israel. Where else would I have rebuilt my family? Where else could I have been anything but a second-class citizen?"

After the Holocaust Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, the former rabbi of the Kovno ghetto who dealt with many such questions, was asked by a young woman if she could have the number on her arm removed. He decided against it. The tattoo would go on reminding the world of Nazi bestiality. Removing the number would fulfill the wishes of the evildoers and allow them to have the Holocaust forgotten, as if the Jews were making up the claims against them. The number should become a sign of pride.

For Clara, the number was a double reminder. She never wanted to become the evil enemy of those who had oppressed her.

"I've never hurt anyone in my life," she said. "I don't hate them. I understand that they are suffering too. I know about suffering." Clara pointed to the tattoo on her left arm. "But why can't they stop their savage acts and get on with building their lives?"

It was a reminder that never again can we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to such evil. The injury Clara suffered penetrated her heart and soul as well as her spine. The reality of her dependence was more than she could bear. A downward spiral of depression, immobility and illness brought about her death.

Clara Rosenberger, mother of Israel, we remember you. You will never be a number to us. May your memory be for a blessing.