UNBELIEVABLE BUT TRUE

A Girl with an Apple²

August 1942. Piotrkow, Poland. The sky was gloomy that morning as we waited
anxiously. All the men, women and children of Piotrkow’s Jewish ghetto had
been herded into a square. Word had gotten around that we were being moved.
My father had only recently died from typhus, which had ran rampant through
the crowded ghetto. My greatest fear was that our family would be separated.

‘Whatever you do,’ Isidore, my eldest brother, whispered to me, ‘don’t tell
them your age. Say you’re sixteen’. I was tall for a boy of 11, so I could
pull it off. That way I might be deemed valuable as a worker. An SS man
approached me, boots clicking against the cobblestones. He looked me up and
down, then asked my age. ‘Sixteen,’ I said. He directed me to the left,
where my three brothers and other healthy young men already stood.

My mother was motioned to the right with the other women, children, sick and
elderly people. I whispered to Isidore, ‘Why?’ He didn’t answer. I ran to
Mama’s side and said I wanted to stay with her. ‘No,’ she said sternly. ‘Get
away. Don’t be a nuisance. Go with your brothers.’ She had never spoken so
harshly before. But I understood: She was protecting me. She loved me so
much that, just this once, she pretended not to. It was the last I ever saw
of her.

My brothers and I were transported in a cattle car to Germany. We arrived at
the Buchenwald concentration camp one night weeks later and were led into a
crowded barrack. The next day, we were issued uniforms and identification
numbers. ‘Don’t call me Herman anymore.’ I said to my brothers. ‘Call me
94983..’

I was put to work in the camp’s crematorium, loading the dead into a
hand-cranked elevator. I, too, felt dead. Hardened, I had become a number.
Soon, my brothers and I were sent to Schlieben, one of Buchenwald’s
sub-camps near Berlin. One morning I thought I heard my mother’s voice Son,
she said softly but clearly, I am sending you an angel. Then I woke up. Just
a dream. A beautiful dream. But in this place there could be no angels.
There was only work. And hunger. And fear.

A couple of days later, I was walking around the camp, around the barracks,
near the barbed-wire fence where the guards could not easily see. I was
alone. On the other side of the fence, I spotted someone: a young girl with
light, almost luminous curls. She was half-hidden behind a birch tree. I
glanced around to make sure no one saw me. I called to her softly in
German.

‘Do you have something to eat?’ She didn’t understand. I inched closer to
the fence and repeated question in Polish. She stepped forward.. I was thin
and gaunt, with rags wrapped around my feet, but the girl looked unafraid.
In her eyes, I saw life. She pulled an apple from her woolen jacket and
threw it over the fence. I grabbed the fruit and, as I started to run away,
I heard her say faintly, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

I returned to the same spot by the fence at the same time every day. She was
always there with something for me to eat – a hunk of bread or, better yet,
an apple. We didn’t dare speak or linger. To be caught would mean death for
us both. I didn’t know anything about her just a kind farm girl except that
she understood Polish. What was her name? Why was she risking her life for
me? Hope was in such short supply, and this girl on the other side of the
fence gave me some, as nourishing in its way as the bread and apples.

Nearly seven months later, my brothers and I were crammed into a coal car
and shipped to Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia.. ‘Don’t return,’ I
told the girl that day. ‘We’re leaving.’ I turned toward the barracks and
didn’t look back, didn’t even say good-bye to the girl whose name I’d never
learned, the girl with the apples.

We were in Theresienstadt for three months. The war was winding down and
Allied forces were closing in, yet my fate seemed sealed. On May 10, 1945, I
was scheduled to die in the gas chamber at 10:00 AM. In the quiet of dawn, I
tried to prepare myself. So many times death seemed ready to claim me, but
somehow I’d survived. Now, it was over. I thought of my parents. At least, I
thought, we will be reunited.

At 8 A.M. there was a commotion. I heard shouts, and saw people running
every which way through camp. I caught up with my brothers. Russian troops
had liberated the camp! The gates swung open. Everyone was running, so I did
too.

Amazingly, all of my brothers had survived; I’m not sure how. But I knew
that the girl with the apples had been the key to my survival. In a place
where evil seemed triumphant, one person’s goodness had saved my life, had
given me hope in a place where there was none. My mother had promised to
send me an angel, and the angel had come.

Eventually I made my way to England where I was sponsored by a Jewish
charity, put up in a hostel with other boys who had survived the Holocaust
and trained in electronics. Then I came to America, where my brother Sam had
already moved. I served in the U. S. Army during the Korean War, and
returned to New York City after two years. By August 1957 I’d opened my own
electronics repair shop. I was starting to settle in.

One day, my friend Sid who I knew from England called me. ‘I’ve got a date.
She’s got a Polish friend. Let’s double date.’ A blind date? Nah, that
wasn’t for me. But Sid kept pestering me, and a few days later we headed up
to the Bronx to pick up his date and her friend Roma. I had to admit, for a
blind date this wasn’t so bad. Roma was a nurse at a Bronx hospital. She was
kind and smart. Beautiful, too, with swirling brown curls and green,
almond-shaped eyes that sparkled with life.

The four of us drove out to Coney Island. Roma was easy to talk to, easy to
be with. Turned out she was wary of blind dates too! We were both just doing
our friends a favor. We took a stroll on the boardwalk, enjoying the salty
Atlantic breeze, and then had dinner by the shore. I couldn’t remember
having a better time.

We piled back into Sid’s car, Roma and I sharing the backseat. As European
Jews who had survived the war, we were aware that much had been left unsaid
between us. She broached the subject, ‘Where were you,’ she asked softly,
‘during the war?’ ‘The camps,’ I said, the terrible memories still vivid,
the irreparable loss. I had tried to forget.. But you can never forget.

She nodded. ‘My family was hiding on a farm in Germany, not far from
Berlin,’ she told me. ‘My father knew a priest, and he got us Aryan papers.’
I imagined how she must have suffered too, fear, a constant companion. And
yet here we were, both survivors, in a new world.

‘There was a camp next to the farm.’ Roma continued. ‘I saw a boy there and
I would throw him apples every day.’
What an amazing coincidence that she had helped some other boy. ‘What did he
look like? I asked. He was tall, Skinny, and Hungry. I must have seen him
every day for six months.’ My heart was racing. I couldn’t believe it. This
couldn’t be. ‘Did he tell you one day not to come back because he was
leaving Schlieben?’ Roma looked at me in amazement. ‘Yes,’ That was me! ‘ I
was ready to burst with joy and awe, flooded with emotions. I couldn’t
believe it ? My angel.

‘I’m not letting you go.’ I said to Roma. And in the back of the car on that
blind date, I proposed to her. I didn’t want to wait. ‘You’re crazy!’ she
said. But she invited me to meet her parents for Shabbat dinner the
following week. There was so much I looked forward to learning about Roma,
but the most important things I always knew: her steadfastness, her
goodness. For many months, in the worst of circumstances, she had come to
the fence and given me hope. Now that I’d found her again, I could never let
her go.

That day, she said yes. And I kept my word. After nearly 50 years of
marriage, two children and three grandchildren I have never let her go.

Herman Rosenblat , Miami Beach, Florida

This is a true story and you can find out more by Googling Herman Rosenblat
as he was bar mitzvahed at age 75. This story is being made into a movie
called The Fence.