My grandfather managed to stay with his father up until the very end, at Auschwitz. When his father died he had no one left. My grandmother, the youngest of six, arrived at Auschwitz with one brother and her mother, and was separated from them the moment she got there. The only other person in her family to survive was her eldest brother, who escaped to Russia before ghetto. He lives in Israel now, and they would only see each other once more in both their lifetimes, when my grandmother scraped together enough money to visit him.
After the camps were liquidated, both grandparents made their way back to Lodz, where they grew up. My grandfather found a friend. My grandmother found two sisters she knew, and arrived on their doorstep. “Rushka, have something to eat.” They said. “No, I’m fine.” My grandmother said, and promptly fainted. That’s how the story goes anyway. My grandfather’s friend was dating one of the sisters, and as a group the five of them travelled to America.
My grandparents were the first Holocaust survivors to get married in New York. The Times covered their wedding and they received $600 in wedding gifts from total strangers, which at the time, was alot for an immigrant couple fresh off the boat. They have not spent a single night apart from each other since. You can imagine the kind of dependence they had for each other. My dad says that my grandmother would wait and just stare out the window in the evenings waiting for him. They have both been so afraid their whole lives.
So, my grandmother’s passing is nothing less than traumatic for my grandfather. Burned into my retinas for the rest of my life is the image of him leaning into her coffin screaming, “How could you leave me here alone?”
My dad is still staying with him in Florida. Yesterday I set up an AOL account for my grandfather, filled his address book with all the family’s email addresses, and sent him an email with pictures, an email with links to things like the New York Times, and to my new blog about going to England. Today my dad dragged him to the Apple store. We think he really is afraid of computers because he is self conscious about his spelling- English being his second language and all. Sometimes he writes “Leha” on my birthday cards.
My dad showed him his AOL account on the demo computer. He lit up when he saw the pictures of me and my brother and our cousins. My new blog about England is a multimedia blog, with videos, and when my grandpa saw the video and heard my voice, my dad said he got so excited and really understood what the point of this whole “internet” thing was anyway.
They bought him an iMac, and the cable gets installed tomorrow. They also bought him a cell phone with a camera and text messaging. Everyone in the family, especially us grandkids, are going to email him and text him photos of us every day.
A lot of people talk about the internet as something that isolates people- replacing human contact with anonymity and shallow communications. Hopefully, in this case, the computer will help my grandfather feel less lonely and fill up the empty stretch of days before him.
And hopefully he will figure out that on the internet, spelling really doesn’t matter.
