Emunah Klein Barnoy wrote:
One morning this week I was sitting with the mother of a friend of Uri’s from daycare, and we were yapping on about the kind of things that we mothers yap on and on about.
While we were talking, this other mother received some WhatsApps from her grandmother, and we laughed about grandmothers and how her grandmother is Hungarian, and also my grandmother in Hungarian. Wow, cool! From where? And her great-grandmother was from Khust, and my great-grandmother was from Khust and, wow, this was also so cool because Khust was a very small town and most of the Jewish community there was murdered by the Nazis.
What are the chances?
And her great-grandmother worked for the town wig-maker, sheitl macher, Chanchi Rosenfeld and my great-grandmother WAS the sheitel macher Chanchi Rosenfeld!
And once upon a time, the sheitel macher, Chanchi Rosenfeld arrived in Auschwitz with her daughter, my Grandma Leah, and five women who worked in her wig factory. And they formed a mutual support group and helped one another to get things like food and woolen yarn for socks and work. And they survived. All of them.
The Jewish community in Khust was almost completely destroyed, but its wig factory survived intact…
These closely-bonded, very Hungarian survivors of Auschwitz would have reunions from time to time.
And their story has been passed on, by word of mouth, to their families for five whole generations.
And now, five generations later, Chanchi Rosenfeld’s great-great-grandson began attending a daycare center in Jerusalem, and he became very attached to the great-great-granddaughter of Peery Kretz.
And these great-great-grandchildren became such very, very good friends, that the only way I can convince my son to get dressed in the morning is by telling him, “Let’s go to daycare so you can play with her!”
And if only I could go back to those days in Auschwitz, when our great-grandmothers crowded together in the bunk for warmth, and tell them that the Prophecies were true, and that the day would come when “The streets of the city [Jerusalem] would be filled with boys and girls playing in her streets’.”
Translation by Chana Jenny Weisberg, JewishMOM.com