remember..

 January 27 is the anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz-Birkenau, and is an international holiday "Holocaust Remembrance Day" created by the United Nations to honor the millions of victims of the Holocaust and develop educational plans to prevent further genocides. I don't generally dwell on serious matters in this blog but this deserves remembrance.  I have visited Holocaust museums and one concentration camp, and it was horrific.  I am not Jewish but I do have one tenuous connection to Europe during World War II and it involves a lady who became one of my heroes.  My stepmother was born in the US of Polish parents who decided to move back to Warsaw, Poland in the early 1930s to help with a family business, so my stepmother grew up there.  She was not Jewish but, in bits and pieces, I learned about her involvement in WWII.  She recalled Jewish friends disappearing, the extreme shortages and rationing, and the fear of living in an occupied city.  She was a young woman at the time with an infant son living with her parents. Her first husband had left Poland to fly with the British Air Force.  They were reunited years later in the US.  While she was living in Warsaw, she worked for the Polish underground, carrying messages.  She said the German soldiers didn't suspect a woman with a small child.  When my daughter was in high school, my stepmom was invited to come and speak to her history class.  Since she wasn't driving at that point, I took her to Carroll High School and got to stay and hear her talk.  Imagine this frail but very sophisticated little lady standing up in a large auditorium style classroom, in front of a  combined class of junior and senior history students.  She spoke with and accent and I was concerned about how the students might react to her, but when she started talking there wasn't a sound from the kids. I think they sensed that this was someone who had lived what they had only read about.  She spoke for about a half hour and then invited questions.  One girl asked her how she felt when they were liberated.  Like the girl, I was expecting an answer about celebration and rejoicing but her answer has always stayed with me.  She said "You have to remember, we were liberated by the Russians. The Germans were at least civilized. (obviously not to the Jews, but that was her experience) The Russians were savages."  I learned later that she had been raped by a Russian soldier, had an abortion, and was helped to come back to the United States (she was a US citizen and it should have been easy, but there were lots of complications) by posing as the nurse of the doctor who had helped her.  I loved her as my stepmom and honor her as my hero.