Now in her eighties, 
Erika sits in a chair in a circle of chairs
to tell us her story for Yom HaShoah.
“During the Second World War,
the British took in ten thousand children
from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.
I was one of them, sixteen years old in 1938.
 
“I was scared, lonely, unhappy.
When the blitzkrieg started, 
the bombs fell indiscriminately all over London. 
Then I felt better; 
I had wanted to be like everyone else,
and now I was.
 
“I never dreamed my parents were murdered.
I didn’t learn until after the war.
I was completely unprepared.
The way I felt – it’s more than anger,
it’s the deepest despair. 
I lost my faith in God.
I’d made a bargain—
I’ll get through all this,
and You’ll reunite my family.
 
“The bargain was one-sided.
When I found out, 
it was Yom Kippur, 1945.
I went to a non-kosher restaurant.
The meal I ate stuck in my throat,
but I wanted to make my point.
 
“After Chamberlain and Munich,
I remember my father saying,
‘It’s a good thing there’s no war.
If there’s a war, they’ll kill the Jews.’
My parents might have known
they were saying goodbye for good
at the dock in Hamburg in 1938.
 
“I was the youngest 
and they considered me useless.
All my efforts were for them.
I wanted to show them what I’d accomplished.
In some ways I’ve never gotten over it.
I think of what they did for me.”
 
Erika’s daughter Kim says,
“My mother was P.T.A. President 
and led the Girl Scout troop.
She never talked about herself,
but I knew she was different.
When a friend said, 
‘Your mom has an accent,’ 
I replied, ‘She does?’ 
my voice rising in a question,
knowing and not knowing.”
                        

“On September 1, 1939, 
when war broke out,
I locked myself in the bathroom
and wouldn’t come out.
I was crying; I knew 
my world was ending.

“We had a good life in Warsaw.
My father owned a business; 
we kept two servants;
my sister and I went to private schools.

“After one week the city was bombarded
from morning to night.
Warsaw was beautiful, 
and it was completely destroyed.

“No one knew at first
of Hitler and Stalin’s secret pact.
Soon the city was reorganized
and the ghetto set up.

“Young Jews were going to Russia.
Before the ghetto was closed,
my fiancé and I escaped
across the green border to the East.

“It wasn’t so easy.
He was very smart at arranging things
and on the black market bought me 
an original birth certificate
of a person my age
who’d been taken to Siberia.

“I spoke excellent Polish
because we’d spoken Polish at home.
He and I lived in the suburbs of a city
that was Judenrein.
I looked Jewish but he didn’t.
He had blond hair and blue eyes.
“One day he left in the morning 
and didn’t come back.
I still don’t know what happened to him.
The Germans picked him up.
They killed people for nothing.
With men, it was simple,
‘Pull down your pants.’

“My parents perished 
in the Warsaw Ghetto.
My sister died with her daughter
in a terrible concentration camp.
She couldn’t think like a person
after her husband died 
in the Army in the short war.

“He was wounded at the front
and brought to a hospital in Warsaw.
The Germans used poisoned bullets.
His wounds weren’t mortal,
but infections developed.

“My second husband
saw his wife and daughter
killed before his eyes.
There are things you don’t talk about
or understand.
Until the end of his life
he screamed in his sleep
and I would hold him.
He was a good husband,
a good father, a good man.

“For a year and a half,
until the end of the war,
I survived on my own without means,
with no family or home.
I had a twenty dollar bill
to buy my life if I were arrested.
No one knew I existed.
I believe I was fated to live;
I don’t know why.

“Truman is my favorite president
because he let us in the U.S. after the war.
In New York I found my cousin.
She took me into her bedroom
and showed me her photo albums.
‘Take what you want,’ she said.
Can you imagine what it meant to me
to have a picture of my parents?”