Name: Bella Weinreb

Location: Boro Park, Brooklyn

Dream: Visit my mother’s hometown

Growing up in Boro Park as the only child of survivors, I knew there was nothing more important than family.

My mother, a victim of the twisted experiments of Mengele yemach shemo, had been told she’d never have children. I was a miracle child and my parents showered me with love. If anyone voiced a concern that I’d become spoiled, my mother would object that a child can never have too much love.

At the same time, she was careful not to keep me tied to her apron strings. She encouraged my independence, and I started going away to camp before I turned four.

Though my mother rarely shared her wartime experiences, she constantly reminisced about pre-war Rachov, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine), where she’d been born and raised.

I grew up hearing stories about her brilliant grandfather, the town’s rav, and the sterling character of her father, who’d turned down the rabbanus in favor of his brother but was still sought after for advice and counsel. I heard how, in order to contribute to the family finances, my mother used to pace the train station, looking for tourists coming to their resort town who needed lodging and for wealthy passengers who needed their silk stockings darned.

Maybe because I was an only child, the sole remaining link to a lost world, I had a burning desire to see the places my parents had come from. That desire grew as I got older. I longed to connect to their past, to get a glimpse of the world they’d known.

My father, a milkman-turned-storeowner, and my mother, who ran the dress shop with him, were hardworking people with no time or money for nostalgic trips. But I longed to travel there on my own once I was old enough.

Instead, baruch Hashem, life happened. I married and moved to Eretz Yisrael, and after three years returned to New York with my fledgling family.

The next few decades were a happy whirlwind of children and work. For over 30 years, I had the zechus to direct Camp Chayil Miriam, so my summers were taken up, and the months before them were intense, too. As the years passed, I also found myself at the helm of a seminary.

Life flowed busily, predictably, happily, until its peaceful course was upset by my mother’s petirah three years ago. My father had been gone for nine years, but after my mother’s petirah finalized their loss, I was seized with regret — how could I not have visited her past? How could I have let her go before she showed me their hometowns?

And so last summer, the first in 31 years that I wasn’t in camp, my husband and I embarked on a visit to Europe.

While there was little of my parents’ past still extant, the echoes of bygone years reverberated powerfully. We davened at kevarim of ancestors and reverently touched headstones engraved with names that our children and grandchildren carry.

From Temesv?r, Romania, I sent my children a picture of the epitaph on my paternal grandfather’s kever, and with one voice, without hearing each others’ comments, each responded, “That could have been Zeidy!” “That describes him perfectly!” Suddenly, their rootless, refugee grandfather had a past, a context, a family from which he’d sprung.

It was real.

(Excerpted from Family First, Issue 627)