family

 I receive worried messages from relatives all over the world. They are all great-grandchildren of my grandmother's sisters.

From Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa, Copenhagen in Denmark, Sao Paulo in Brazil, Chemnitz in Germany. A small town in Alabama whose name I forgot, there are also in Australia and England but I haven't heard from them yet.                                                                                                                           These are the eight sisters. The only brother for some reason does not appear in the picture. The picture was taken around 1905 in Leipzig, Germany. The four little sisters, including my grandmother who was about five years old when the picture was taken, left Germany in 1933. My grandmother was already the mother of a six-year-old girl (my mother) and had to leave Berlin, where she lived then, and to abandon the shops she had there in Alexander Platz.                                                                Tsila, the eldest sister, left for South Africa many years before the rise of the Nazis, one of her grandsons was Nelson Mandela's advocate and had to flee South Africa, the Australians refused to accept him and that's how he came to England. He was very successful there and even became a lord.                                  Ida and her husband Jacob ran a Jewish orphanage in Oslo. The Nazis sent her husband to Auschwitz with many of their housemates. She was disabled and therefore saved.

Anna went to Alabama to meet Jacob's brother, she married him and stayed there. Bertha married a German in Chemnitz. When the Nazis wanted to take her he broke her leg and that's how she was saved.

Louisa and her husband sent one child to Denmark and one child to Israel even before the war. They did not manage to leave in time and arrived at Auschwitz.

Sophie stayed with the old father in Leipzig, he eventually managed to reach his daughter in Oslo but she did not manage to survive in Germany.

And that's why we have so many relatives all over the world.

My grandmother Dora lived here for sixty years. She never managed to learn Hebrew properly and that's why I understand German as my mother tongue.

I still miss her and the wonderful foods she made all my childhood. She was an artist, a talented painter, but there was always the feeling that she was someone who was uprooted from her roots.