We packed up and moved recently, from suburban Philadelphia to our own promised land, Connecticut, three minutes by car from our daughter Ronni and her husband and especially her two little girls, ages six and four-and-a-half. In our seventies, we wanted to be near at least one of our three children.
In the process of unpacking I came across some possessions of my late mother, including a few pages from a newspaper published in Tel Aviv during World War II. My parents and I and my father’s mother, brother and sister, were living there at the time. The paper was in German, as my parents, like many Jews who fled Germany with the rise of Hitler to power, clung to their native language, rather than struggle with the difficult Hebrew.
The front page was headlined “The List of the Dead.” There followed the names, ages and addresses of 105 men, women and children who were killed during an air raid on Tel Aviv by Hitler’s Italian allies. Victims ranged in age from sixty, like Aron Hannasch, to one year, like little Amos Germann.
A note at the bottom of the list reported that another twenty-seven people had died, and thirty wounded were in serious condition in various hospitals. It was early in the war, because an article on another page reported an event that made it clear the Soviets had not as yet entered the war on the side of the Allies.
The list brought back memories to me of the frequent bombings we endured during those years. Included in the list were several dead from Sirkin Street 13 and 15. We had lived at number 19, a three-story walk-up apartment house, and had moved to another part of town just a few months before that particular bombing occurred. I must have been about twelve years old at the time. A memory that haunted me for years concerned a bigger neighborhood boy, who used to torment me with words, push and shove me in the street. One day I cursed him and said I hoped God would punish him and he would die.
Mussolini’s pilots dropped bombs on Sirkin Street, and the boy did die. I was convinced that my curse had cost him his life. And then, just the other day, there was his name on the list of bombardment victims that my late mother had brought with her all those years ago, when she and my father came to America on December 14, 1956. I’ll never know why it was still important to her or to my Dad.
And now, sixty-one years later, I was reading these names in suburban Connecticut, where the snow lay on the ground, one of our little granddaughters had spent the day with us, and I was glad to have survived.
