On Sunday, I went to visit Betty Jacobovitch.

According to the records I had been provided, Betty was born in March, 1925, making her almost 94 years old.

When I went to see Betty, I knew she was a Holocaust survivor.

Going in, I was not sure how to act. How do you even begin to know how to treat someone who has been through that much?

•       •       •

On Sunday, I went to visit Betty Jacobovitch at her home in Bensonhurst – a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

She greeted my mother and me with a heart-warming smile. She shook my hand. She immediately told me that I was beautiful. She welcomed us into her home.

Her house was filled with pictures of her family. Her children, her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren. Or as she put it, her “reasons to be alive.”

We sat at her dining room table. Her story came out in fragmented pieces, but I began to put together the puzzle.

She was from a medium sized, primarily Jewish town in Romania. Sometime around 1939, she was forced into a camp somewhere in Germany.

For understandable reasons, her discussion of life in the camp was minimal. A hidden power was held in this silence; there was no need to voice the unspeakable.

She was with several of her siblings, including two sisters and a brother. The rest of her family was mentioned less frequently. She made minimal reference to the status of her parents, but ultimately it was clear that they did not survive the concentration camp. In order to stay with her sisters, they pretended to be friends instead of family. The Nazis wanted to break up families, she said.

In 1945 her camp was liberated.

She walked from Germany to Romania when she was freed.

•       •       •

On Sunday, I went to visit Betty Jacobovitch and I listened in awe as she told me how she started walking in April and arrived in her town with her sisters in late August. Everything Betty had hid in a cellar before the war had been looted and stolen. Betty said she saw a woman in town wearing her favorite shirt.

She and her sisters had to leave. She did not mention if she ever returned.

She walked from Romania through Hungary and Czechoslovakia to Austria. My heart traveled to a place of great despair and desperation as I tried to comprehend the story of Betty Jacobovitch, the story of a woman who, at my age, had to travel by foot across Europe after surviving a death camp.

The details after this were unclear, but she said she traveled from Austria to Toronto and lived there for close to 10 years, later moving to the United States in 1957.

Betty told me how she learned English. She already spoke Yiddish, Romanian, Hungarian, Hebrew and German. She went to night school, spoke with strangers she met on the train, and earned academic certificates that displayed her determination. She was able to earn her United States citizenship after five years.

She imparted to us that her citizenship papers are her most prized possession. When she travels, she holds them close. She said that aside from her family, it is all that she needs in this life.

The Holocaust and anti-Semitism targeted Jews in an effort to destroy them. Betty spent her childhood isolated in the Jewish sections of Romania, her teenage years alone in a concentration camp, and the beginning of her life as an adult walking across Europe. After gaining her American citizenship, she was able to belong somewhere.

Betty is not particularly fond of Germans. After what she experienced, her discomfort and anger is understandable. But she is able to comprehend that even if she holds her own prejudices against Germans, she will treat them with respect.

•       •       •

On Sunday, I went to visit Betty Jacobovitch and I learned how to treat someone who has been through that much.

You treat them the only way another human knows how – the way any human should know how – you treat them like a human
being.