Gestapo. Shards of glass. Escape. Tante Anne gave me my children’s heritage

“HI,Tante Anne!” I shouted into the phone. “It’s Lori!”

“Who is this, Lauren?” my great-aunt asked in her thick German accent.

“No, it’s me, Lori!” I yelled louder.

“Oh, Lori! Lori! I’m so glad you called. How are you?”

“I’m good, Thank G-d! How are you feeling, Tante Anne?”

“Oh, you know.” Tante Anne laughed. “At my age, nothing works so good anymore. How are you? How are the kids doing?”

“They’re doing good. Keeping me busy.”

“I was hoping you would call. I was thinking about what you told me last time — how you’re having trouble training your son. You should really ask your pediatrician what to do. They should be able to tell you — they see kids all the time.”

“That’s a great idea, Tante Anne!” I shouted. “I’m going to do that!”

At 100 years old, my great-aunt still managed to live independently, in the same house where she’d raised her children. She was partially deaf, but her memory was sharp as a tack. Tante Anne would remember the details of every problem I had mentioned in previous phone calls, and she’d give me advice based on a hundred years of wisdom. Always upbeat and positive, she never wanted to speak about her own health problems, but instead about the little problems of my young family. “Thank you for calling,” she would tell me before we hung up. “Most people aren’t interested in old people. It’s so nice that you call.”

I was always close to my great-aunt. She lived near us and always came to our Passover Seders. I’d also see her and her adult children, Lynn and Eddie, at the family get-togethers we managed to make once or twice a year. But it was only after all my other grandparents and their siblings passed away that I started to call and visit her more often. She remembered a whole world that’s slowly fading from memory, and she made me feel connected to the grandparents I had lost. I also loved her in her own right for the way she was grateful for any small kindness, and how she was always so happy to hear from me.

My Tante Anne passed away this past January. You’d think that since she lived to be a hundred, her death would not be such a blow to her family. We had many long years with her, and she got to see great-great-nieces and -nephews. But it still feels incredibly sad. She was the last of her generation; we’ve lost a link to the past.

But memory is a strange thing — it allows us to live on in this world even when we’re no longer present. For so long, my Tante Anne was the repository of all our family stories spanning back a hundred years. Now that she’s gone, we’re passing on those memories to the next generation.