Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust

28. Wedding Bells

28 Wedding Bells F redka and Sol wed in a small temple on March 7, 1948, seven months after we stepped off the SS Marine Flasher. A kind, grandfatherly rabbi conducted the ceremony . A small group of spirited survivor friends joined in the celebration. Only a few members of our American family attended. After the ceremony, the Rosses, our wonderful neighbors, invited the entire party to their house for a joyful reception. As soon as Sol moved in with us, Mama began to find faults with him. “I think we made a big mistake. Fredka is far too good for him.” Mama didn’t bother to hide her scorn for Sol. I cursed the demons that had caused her love to twist. Before Mama had a chance to adjust to Sol, another young man, Henry, entered our existence . I met Henry at a political rally I attended with friends. I noticed him standing with a friend at a distance and looking at me. In no time, he was at my side and engrossed me in a conversation on a topic I have since forgotten. When we left the rally, Henry held in his hand a slip of paper with my telephone A New Dawn 196 number. I carried away a picture in my head of a thin, boyish-looking young man with huge, intelligent brown eyes, and a fashionable wave in his slick hair. The following weekend, Henry came to our house to take me out to dinner to Howard Johnson’s, on Jerome Avenue. We talked and listened to each other with rapt attention. That evening, Henry began to share with me his heroic story of being left alone in Berlin, Germany, while his beloved older brother, Eddy, fled from the Nazis to South America, and his parents escaped to China. Henry, thirteen years old then, remained under the guardianship of an uncaring uncle to await a scheduled departure on the Kinder Transport to England. A twist of fate changed this plan. Henry came down with scarlet fever. His uncle brought him to a hospital and never returned. A kindly man, Dr. Krohn, nursed Henry to health, then took him to his house to join other children who lived with him as his own. One day, a hoard of Nazis stormed to their door and roared, “Aufmachen! Aufmachen! Verfluchte Hunde! Juden!” (Open! Open! Accursed Dogs! Jews!). Dr. Krohn bolted the door shut, gathered his children close to him, the youngest (two years old) in his arms, and countered the savage pounding of boots and rifle butts with silence. Later, when the barbarians miraculously gave up and left, he soothed the children’s anguish with unbounded love and beautiful recorded classical music. Left to right: me, Sol, Fredka, and Mama at Fredka and Sol’s wedding, 1948. Wedding Bells 197 Henry and me, 1948. A New Dawn 198 Shortly after this, Henry’s parents managed to send him a visa to join them in China. That was still during the Hitler-Stalin pact, and Henry was able to reach Shanghai via Russia, traveling on a trans-Siberian train. Parting with his beloved Dr. Krohn and the children in the orphanage left Henry scarred with guilt and armed with love for music and books. Dr. Krohn’s love left an indelible imprint on Henry, as it did on me—the listener of his story. Henry and his parents spent the rest of the dismal war years in China. After the war, his brother, Eddie, brought them to New York. Henry’s story soon became part of my story. Every evening after work as a waiter in Manhattan , he dashed to the subway station to grab a train to the Bronx to be with me. One special evening, sitting close at a corner table in a Manhattan nightclub bathed in dim purple lights, Henry looked tenderly into my eyes and said, “I love you. Will you marry me?” He added quickly, “I know I have a miserable job, and I make very little money, but I promise to try to do better.” “I am not worried. You are smart and this is America—anything is possible. I love you and I will marry you.” Henry took me into his arms and we kissed as if no one else were present. We parted that evening fortified by love and the naive optimism of the young. I entered my...