“Why am I smiling instead of crying? Because emunah is simchah and simchah is emunah"

The Bnei Brak street where we are supposed to meet is deserted. The sun peeks out from the clouds, but the intermittent showers are keeping most people behind their doors.

My interviewee settles onto the bench beside me, smiles, and introduces herself, “I’m Doba’le Stern,” before launching into her story.

“I have no grandchildren and children,” she begins, “and I have no siblings or in-laws. My husband, Tuvia z”l, passed away almost a quarter of a century ago, and all of my extended family ‘disappeared’ in the Holocaust.”

“So, you’re… you’re basically here alone.” I talk slowly, searching for the right words.

She shudders. “Never! I have the Ribbono shel Olam, the shtiblach, and my sefer Torah too.” Her eyes sparkle as she speaks.

Several orange bird-of-paradise flowers sway with the wind at the end of the block. She gestures toward them. “Let’s walk while we talk.”

“What wonderful weather there is today and always,” Doba’le says.

“Bli ayin hara, Mrs. Stern.”

She waves my words away. “Meideleh,” she says. “Nothing bad comes from Hashem.”

Strong Foundations

Doba Kozack was born in Warsaw, Poland. Her father, who was very close with the Slonimer Rebbe, spent his days in the beis medrash. She recalls her mother as “a true Yiddishe mamme” who would stand over her pots davening.

The impoverished family of eight — “We had no coins, and certainly no bills,” Doba recalls — lived in a cramped basement. The six siblings slept together on a surface on the floor, their heads lying on a pile of rags that served as their pillows.

When Doba’s oldest brother, Moshe, went to learn in Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman’s yeshivah in Baranavich, the family couldn’t afford train fare, and so her brother would lie beneath the train benches, jolting up and down on the tracks, until he reached the famous yeshivah.

Doba’le, the youngest, doesn’t recall any of her siblings ever complaining about the situation. “We greatly admired our father’s Torah learning and automatically had mesirus nefesh for it. We gladly paid the price of ‘pas b’melach tochal — eat bread with salt, and drink water sparingly.’ ”

When it came to his children’s chinuch, Doba’le’s father cut no corners, hiring the best melamdim for her brothers. Doba’le was among the first students to attend Warsaw’s Beis Yaakov.

The Kozack’s basement was in close proximity to Warsaw’s bustling marketplace, which offered an abundance of fresh fish and juicy vegetables all week long. On Thursday evenings, when the merchants left their stalls, all unpurchased merchandise was left over for the cats and panhandlers.

“We’d go out and collect the leftover fish and vegetables for Shabbos,” Doba’le remembers. “Our mother would turn them into delicacies, creating something from nothing.” She laughs. “My childhood wasn’t a childhood of luxury, but it wasn’t a childhood of want either. Ours was a life of ahavas haTorah.”

But then World War II broke out, and the angels of destruction swooped down upon the city of Warsaw, bringing havoc and devastation in their wake.

Young Doba’le, just 12 or 13 years old, left the ghetto in search of bread for her family. “German soldiers caught me red-handed,” she recalls.

She was released by the 9th infantry division a short while later. But by then, none of her family members were still in the ghetto. “I never saw my father, mother, Moshe, Kalman, Yankel, Dovid, or Rivka’le again. They were all taken to Treblinka or Auschwitz. They are surely sitting in Gan Eden; only I am still here in the land of the living.”