Even as a child, I knew we didn’t have real grandparents

I never had a grandparent.

Both my parents were orphans. Hashem sent me a precious aunt and uncle, and others too, who all became my substitute grandparents. But somewhere inside I needed to connect with that lady looking down silently from my bookshelf.

She was my own, real grandmother. The photograph, taken just before World War II, is in shades of fading gray. I detect softness in her eyes, a silvery empathy deep inside them. But it’s as if she’s in a mist, ethereal, behind the curtain of those who died long before I was born.

Would we have had long talks between us? My mother always said she was a good listener and people came to her to unburden themselves.

Back to 1939. My grandmother, Fanny, managed to reach England just before the war broke out. She was already a widow. My grandfather had been arrested and detained in a camp with many other key figures of the Munich kehillah on Kristallnacht. A lawyer by profession, he’d protested and at some point was thrown out into the snow, later to die from exposure to the cold.

My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Martin, saw the writing on the wall and managed to get the family over to England. He rented a house in North London for the whole family, including my grandmother.

And then the horrific happened: During the Blitz, while Hitler pounded the civilian population, one bomb exploded in the area. It was a direct hit, and it fell on that house. Five of our family members were killed at once.