My hero mother
My mom, Edith Grosman, nee Friedman, passed away three weeks ago at the age of 96. She told me once that she had gone to a fortune teller as a young woman and was told she’d live to 94. Once she had reached that feared milestone, every day was a bonus.
At the age of 18, my mother, along with about a thousand other Jewish girls from her hometown of Humenne in Slovakia, were snatched from their homes, stuffed into filthy cattle cars and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She passed the all important first selection at the hands of the Angel of Death, the elegant and pleasant looking SS-Hauptsturmsfuhrer, Dr. Josef Mengele. Left — gas chambers and crematoria. Right — slave labor. She spent a full 3 years in Auschwitz, the Death Factory, as Czech writer Erich Kulka titled his novel about the camp. She started on the infamous death march with thousands of other walking skeletons in January 1945 as Red Army artillery fire boomed on the horizon, but was able to slip away and arrived back home in Humenne three months later, in May 1945.
She met my father and together they settled in Prague, where they forged careers. He as a successful writer and screenplay writer, mom as a biologist. While their marriage was extremely happy, they suffered serious after effects from their war years. Mom had bone TB and her left kneecap had to be removed. Father’s affliction was more mental in nature — we’d call it PTSD now but of course there was no name back then for his fear and trauma. Around the time they were married, Czechoslovakia ceased to be a pro-Western democracy and became a Communist dictatorship following what the Party faithful called “Our Victorious February”. For all intents and purposes the takeover was a good old fashioned coup-d’etat — but that was not something you’d read about in your school book.
Mom enrolled as a part-time student at Charles University in Prague, majoring in Biology. Since she had to hold down a full time job, it took her about ten years to complete her Master’s Degree. My dad was even more proud than she was. He saw it as a triumph of “his” will…the early morning shouting matches when mother refused to go to lectures and dad literally had to push her out of the house, the periods of extreme nausea and vomiting before every major exam, the moaning and the wailing “I can’t do this!” But dad never lost sight of the goal, which was for my mom to complete her education. Delayed by almost twenty years by Hitler and Stalin— but finally completed.
Life in Prague was certainly many degrees better than life in Fascist Slovakia in the war years, not to mention the camp years but it wasn’t peaches and cream. Basic necessities were hard to come buy. Getting decent meat meant standing in line from 5 in the morning and hoping some meat would be left once you got into the store. Consumer goods were almost non-existent. We had no fridge, no TV and definitely no car. Freedom of assembly was tightly controlled although my parents did have scores of friends over all the time. No travel abroad, no free press and in the early 50’s a constant threat of false imprisonment. Things got better in the late 60’s, culminating in the so-called Prague Spring, which was eventually crushed by Soviet tanks.
My parents and I emigrated to Israel. Mom picked up Hebrew relatively quickly and got an excellent job at Tel Aviv University. Once again, adversity that would have derailed most people for years was simply understood as a part of our fate, the fate of the Jews. We work, we travel, we suffer, we pray, we eat. After my father’s death in Israel in 1981 mom once again weighed anchor and moved to Toronto where I had gotten a job as a teaching assistant. And yet again, she learned another new language (English), got herself a good job with the Canadian Red Cross with whom she stayed until her retirement. In her sixties and seventies she babysat my kids and the neighbors’ kids, she cooked and knitted and sewed and traveled. She bought herself a condo in Israel and would escape the cold Canadian winters to spend time in Netanyia where her family lived.
But her most important job began when she was in her eighties. Along with a Rabbi from her shul, Rabbi Lori Cohen, she would travel across the province and lecture about the Holocaust to kids of all ages from first to 12th Grade, sometimes a few times a week well into her nineties. She videotaped an interview for the Shoah series by Spielberg and did countless radio and TV shows. She traveled to Auschwitz with tours more than once. She repeated to whoever was willing to listen that there was only one reason God had allowed her survive the camp: to become a voice for the 6 million voiceless, the 6 million murdered souls of whom her beautiful sister Lea was one.
Mom did not understand the concept of looking back, of regret. Always forward, always upward, always on, always learn, always read, add to your knowledge and disseminate that knowledge to the world. She used her iPad until just a few days before she passed. She was a tower of strength. A dynamo that never stopped demanding the very best of herself, her family and others. She was a true fighter against injustice and tyranny till her last breath.
But alas, even the most powerful engine will eventually come to a stop and mom’s did in the early morning hours on Friday, July 31, 2020 — about three weeks after her 96th birthday. She leaves behind a an incredible legacy: myself, my two daughters and my two grandsons…all of us heirs to this “eshet chail”, this one of a kind, incredible fighter, a true Captain who led her troops through the battles, breaches and frays that all our lives are. May she rest in peace and may her memory be forever a blessing.
