How can I sit at the dining room table, knowing that next week Mutty’s chair will be empty?

June 1964

Mutty Levine walked into the army recruiting office, bringing his Social Security Card, driver’s license, high school diploma, and college transcripts. Most important to him, if not to Uncle Sam — he also was carrying the blessings of Mama and Dad.

The recruiter welcomed him warmly. It wasn’t every day that he met a graduate of a top college who was not frantically looking for a deferment. Even more surprising, Levine was joining up as an enlisted man rather than an officer. “I want to see the army from the ground up,” Mutty explained to him, “as a medic, with the men in the field.”

Whether he was an idealist or a fool, or a combination of both, didn’t matter much to the recruiter, who promised to get Mutty quickly through the army’s bureaucratic maze. There were exams to be taken, physical tests, reams of paperwork — but miraculously, in almost record time, Private Mordechai Levine had his orders to report to an army base in Georgia for Basic Combat Training.

I

will not cry.

There would be no tears on Mutty’s final Shabbos with his family. He was leaving on Sunday morning, and his last memories of Shabbos would be sweet and filled with music and divrei Torah, with the joy of family and faith.

I can’t. I mustn’t. But how?

How would she find the strength to give her son, her bechor, the final parting gift of a beautiful, laughter-filled Shabbos, when happiness seemed so far away?

How can I sit at the dining room table, knowing that next week Mutty’s chair will be empty?

A thought suddenly flew into her head. I will NOT sit at that table this Shabbos. We will spend our final Shabbos together with Papa and Moe.

At the Hotel.

In the first years after the Holocaust, the Freed Hotel had been a haven, a place of refuge for survivors of the Nazi Gehinnom, and as their numbers increased, Papa often turned to Annie for help. Though she was raising her own young family, she would always be available to assist Mrs. Horn in the kitchen, to help an orphaned girl study for her citizenship test, or to comfort a survivor on the yahrtzeit of her entire family.

And now, in a strange irony, the Freed Hotel would be her refuge as well, the place where she would find the strength she so badly needed.