Michael Zank

My colleague, Elie Wiesel, was a year older than my mother-in-law, Sarah Shenitzer, and six years younger than my mother, Rosel née Koch. Sarah was from Vilna, the capital of Lithuania and a Jewish cultural center, Wiesel from Sighet, Hungary. He was a Hungarian Jew, my in-laws were Polish Jews. Like Sarah, Wiesel was interned in Auschwitz. While Sarah was liberated by an action of the Red Cross, Wiesel ended up in Buchenwald before he was liberated. My mother was spared the concentration camps. Her father, my extraordinary grandfather Heinrich, a German Jew, managed to get her on a children’s transport to England in 1939. Her twin brother wasn’t as lucky. Temporarily interned at Dachau in November 1938 he didn’t get out on time to make use of the ticket his father had purchased for him. He stayed with his parents in the Mainz ghetto and ended his life in 1942, deported to Lublin (Majdanek). The  documents are at Yad VaShem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial archive and museum.

Wiesel survived, as did my mother. I want to say he was more fortunate, but that would be presumptuous. What do we know? My mother had a mental breakdown and ended up in London where she was impregnated by the Maltese brother of the owner of the restaurant where she earned a living as a waitress. Nine months pregnant she was caught shoplifting at Marks and Spencer and put in prison. In 1944, she gave birth at a London hospital where she stayed for months. She put her son in a home north of London and took care of him until he was two-and-a-half years old, then gave him up for adoption. His name was Peter. Which is also the name of her second son, born in Germany in 1953. His father was also mine. They married in 1955. I was born in 1958. I have as yet to read an account of the lives of women like her. The ones who survived and succeeded in rebuilding their lives but neither in a neat or easily narrated way. My mother is my hero. I owe her everything.

Rosel Koch, c. 1950