For a change, a feel-good story:
Galia Joe Berry
Joe Berry here. I would like to tell you a little about the story of my birth, which is especially appropriate after Yom HaZikaron L’shoa and now that we’re celebrating the 70th birthday of medinat Yisrael thanks to the sacrifice of so many soldiers and pioneers and HaShem’s blessing.
I was born in Germany after the War. My mother and my grandmother had assumed false identities and were able to live in Berlin throughout the war. They were considered “aliens” since my grandmother came from Russia to Germany after WWI to marry my grandfather, but my mother and grandmother were not known as Jews. Every moment they lived in fear that they would be caught, and their true Jewish identities revealed. Even though they did not suffer in concentration and death camps like other Jews, they experienced much physical and emotional abuse when they were taken as “foreign laborers” to work within Germany. My mother was sent as slave labor to a farm where she was with other “alien” teenagers. Unfortunately the other teenaged forced laborers were Polish boys who, even though they shared similar circumstances with my mother for not being German, nevertheless were cruel to her in ways I will not share here.
My grandmother was forced to plant trees in the dead of winter, a senseless task and impossible digging in the frozen ground, and she suffered from pain in her chest her entire life due to the frostbite she suffered then.
My grandfather had been murdered in 1934 just as the Nazis were coming to power. He was a painter, and he painted a neighbor’s house who had recently joined the then-new Nazi party. When my grandfather asked for payment, the Nazi laughed and went straight to the police, telling them that my grandfather had stolen from him which was a complete lie. When he realized he was a wanted man, my grandfather fled illegally across the border, thinking it was temporary until things cooled down.
One day my grandmother got a knock on the door. It was the police, and they held my grandfather’s picture in their hands. They asked her if she knew this man. What should she do? If my grandmother said she knew him, they might arrest her as well, or take away my mother, who was a young girl. If she said no, she might not find out what happened to him. It was a terrible choice. She decided to say she didn’t know him, and in fact she was an agunah for most of the rest of her life until decades later when she found out he had been shot while trying to cross back illegally into Germany at the border to return home.
My father was the only survivor of his very large family (it seems they were Belz chassidim). Ironically my father was also the only one who was not shomer mitzvot. He ran to the forest to become a partisan, and fought during the entire war, escaping death through many miracles, many times. He had begged his family to escape to the forest from the ghetto, but they refused. He lived with survivor’s guilt, however, and many nightmares. My childhood in America, where we came when I was six, was not easy. There was tension in the house due to my parents’ experiences during the War and how it affected them and their relationship to their 3 sons, of which I’m the b’chor.
My parents met after the war in Germany and started a new life there. I don’t know if it’s true, but my mother told me I was the first Jewish baby to be born in the newly rededicated and restored Jewish hospital in Berlin. There were terrible shortages and hunger after the war, and the only way to survive was to be active in the black market. Since there was so little food, there was no expectation of a seudat brit milah. Usually the only thing that was given to guests at a brit was shnapps and cigarettes, both highly prized and very expensive on the black market. I was born on Shabbat, and my father was very excited about this because it meant he would only have to give out shnapps and not have to supply cigarettes for the brit milah, since smoking is forbidden on Shabbat.
Amazingly, a week after I was born, my brit milah was on medinat Israel’s first birthday – when Israel became a State and the very first Yom Haatzma’ut was celebrated. It really was an incredible miracle – – a new life after so much destruction and loss, and now a new homeland for the Jews.
I feel very privileged to be able to celebrate my 70th birthday and Yom Haatzmaut in our Holy Land, and very blessed that as I celebrate the remaining 50 years of my life, I will do so in my home in Israel, where we now reside permanently in the Galil, having come from the US a year ago. I feel it closes a very large and complicated circle.
The thought of turning 70 is something I did not want to think about: it means I’m old! But truthfully I am so very grateful for the brachot which HaShem has given me, for my children and grandchildren, my friends, my marriage, my life in Israel, and my work. For both my wife and myself, we never grew up with a grandfather, and our fathers died when we were teenagers. The fact that my children are adults and we just celebrated the birth of our 17th grandchild this week, is truly a miracle. I can only say ‘hodu lashem ki tov, ki l’olam chasdo” and Baruch Atah HaShem, Elokaynu Melech HaOlam, Shehechiyanu, Vkiyamanu, vhigiyanu lazman hazeh.
Happy Birthday, Israel!
L’chaim!Updated Apr 21, 2018, 3:44 AM