To Life!

Wishing You a Happy, Healthy
and Sweet New Year

TRAVEL

(561) 479-3224
(561) 487-5886

Tina J. Krinsky

wwvv.bocaconnection.com

REALTY EXECUTIVES
OF BOCA RATON

Y•O•U-R

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4276 Orchard Lake Rd. @ Lone Pine

43183 Woodward Ave @ Square Lake

We wish our family & friends a very
healthy, happy and sweet New Year.

Roberta Wolf, Doug Wolf,
Jackie, Aaron, Samantha & Jared Perlman

T2eht W (6whTe-9ur CuAamzrs a,ul Frivatb

For A

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(248) 476-9522
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We wish our family & friends a very
healthy, happy and sweet New Year.

We wish our family & friends a very
healthy, happy and sweet New Year.

52

Evil And Hope

A trip to Europe reveals
family history, inhumanity and
redemption.

Zina Kramer
Special to the Jewish News

did not cry when I visited
Ponar, the forest outside of
Vilna, where my mother's
family died in mass graves along
with thousands of other Jews. I
did not cry at the Kovno ghetto
where my father's family per-
ished.
I did not cry when I saw
markers memorializing the
thousands of Jews who were
slaughtered throughout
Lithuania.
But I sobbed when I returned
to the United States, the land of
freedom and opportunity.
Reflecting on my family's good
fortune in coming to America
overwhelmed my emotions.
The thoughts of what my par-
ents lost and how they sur-
vived filled me with sadness
as well as gratitude when I
touched soil at home.
For too many years I had
promised myself that I would
make a journey to where I
was born, to my parents' birth-
place and to where my parents'
families were brutally and sense-
lessly slaughtered with 6 million
others.
When my mother passed away
in 2004, my husband, Michael,
and I finally made the commit-
ment to take my "roots trip."
We planned the trip with Sara
Mozes and her husband, Rafi,
who live in Israel. Sara, the
daughter of Channa and Dovid
Kahn, friends of my parents, was
a little baby — as I was — when
our parents were housed in a
camp for displaced persons at St.
Ottelien, outside of Munich.
The four of us met in Vilnius.
Our objective was to find our
history, to make some sense of
the senseless.
My mother, Tsila (Sylvia)
Grynberg Perlman, was raised in
Vilna, the center of Lithuanian

I

Jewish culture. Before the war,
she worked as a seamstress and
met a man from Berlin who
asked her to sew a waistband
into his pants where he could
hide money.
Thus, began a romance that
would culminate in my mother
marrying Alfred Feige, who
would take her to live in Kovno
in 1940, just before the Nazi
occupation. About a year later,
my mother lost Alfred, a diabet-
ic, because he was unable to
obtain insulin.
My mother met her second
husband, Grisha (Harold)
Perlman — my father — while
in the Kovno ghetto in 1942.
My father was born into a suc-

What we were really

trying to find was our

history.

{

cessful family that owned an
important textile factory,
Fortuna, in Slobodka outside of
Kovno. Unfortunately, when the
Soviets came in the 1930s and
took Fortuna as Soviet property,
he stopped his medical studies
in Zurich, returning to Kovno.
In 1941, he found himself a
prisoner in the Kovno ghetto,
along with his parents and two
sisters, when the Nazis sealed the
ghetto.
Fate would bring my parents
together in 1942 to endure the
last three years of the war. They
married in the ghetto and
escaped to survive. My father
was not only taken by my moth-
er's beauty but her fearlessness.
My mother was infatuated by my
father's brilliant blue eyes, sense
of humor, and intelligence.
My father worked in the ghetto

September 29 • 2005

J.N