Adelman - "Ver is dos?" "Who is this?" - Ida

Just in the last few years, I have found, via the Internet, members of two branches of our family that we did not think had survived the Holocaust. My grandmother had two brothers and several cousins who perished, but one child hid under leaves in the forest and was not discovered by the Einsatzgruppe who were eager to move on to shooting elsewhere. And on my grandfather's side, I found a host of relatives whom we had not known of, since the only link was a photo, clearly of a relative, among my grandfather's effects. On the back, my mother had written, "Ver is dos?" "Who is this?"


A distant cousin contacted me to say she would be in Paris, and didn't we have relatives there? I said that we had tried to find any survivors of that branch, but as far as I knew there was only one, and he was too traumatized to speak about family matters when I met him - he lost his wife and seven small children, while he was off fighting in the Maquis, the French underground. But a visit to the Yad Vashem website showed that a few days earlier, someone had posted information about our family, so I wrote to the poster, who turned out to be the son (by a second marriage) of the elderly man I had met years before. He himself knew nothing about his father's first marriage, but when his father died, he found a hidden compartment in his father's clothes closet, with a letter from his father's first wife, dated July, 1942. She wrote that a policeman had tipped her off that she and her children would be deported the next day, he did not know to where, and so to be sure that her husband could find her and the children, she had photos taken of each of them, together with identification papers, and she placed them in this secret compartment that only the two of them must have known about. She died, together with her seven children, at Auschwitz, probably later that week. Her husband came back to Paris when it was liberated in 1944, found her letter, and started making inquiries, but the war was still going on. Gradually it became clear that three siblings, their spouses, his mother, and all the children in the family had been murdered.


I called the man who had posted, and he floored me by saying that his father had two OTHER sibling who had gone with him to fight in the Maquis, and one, his Aunt Ida, was still alive. She had exactly the same name as my mother, who had just died recently, never knowing of this other Ida. I organized a group of cousins, and we flew to Paris to meet them a year and a half ago, and we remain in touch. When I saw this Ida, I was floored - she looked exactly like my mother. She, in turn, looking through the pictures I had brought, picked out a picture of my mother at age 5 and said, "Ver is dos?" "Who is this?" I told her it was my mother at 5, and she pulled out another, of my mother at 70. She said, "She looks just like me. She must have been a strong woman!" I pointed out that in our family the women have been not only strong, but highly educated and professionals for generations, as her three daughters are.


It was joy mixed with tears, not to be able to share this with my mom, who would have loved to meet them.