We Are Here by Fiona Harari

Author:Fiona Harari [Harari, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, BIO006000, HIS043000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2018-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

Rina Schuldiener

BORN: Rivka Perl

28 April 1922

Sucha, Poland

Rina Schuldiener did not stop mourning. Not when she was shoved away from her Auschwitz-bound parents as they were being expelled from their Polish hometown in July 1942, and her life was spared because of her youth. Not when Russian troops crashed through the double row of barbed wire that encircled the last of three forced-labour and concentration camps into which she had been enslaved, and the freedom she had lost in her teens was returned to her as a young woman. And not even as she became a mother, and added a new generation to a once vast extended clan that had been otherwise extinguished.

She mourned even amid the joy of birth, as those first post-war lives were joined by a second generation and then a third. War had stolen her youth, curtailed her education, and claimed the lives of fourteen members of her immediate family. And even though the Holocaust was over, there was little about her cumulative losses that would be reversed as life continued.

Survival did not bring her happiness. On the contrary, it filled her with a sense of sorrow that has never dissipated, lingering longer than any of those she loved first ever lived.

In her post-war life, she has had many long associations. She was married for fifty-two years. She has been a mother since 1947. Sadness, however, has been her longest companion. It has accompanied her across continents, to her final home in Australia, through a brief stay in Israel that filled her with a sense of place she has never quite replicated, and all the way back to the Polish town where she had only ever lived until others took control of her destiny.

Sucha was an industrious place with a population of 6,200, almost ten per cent Jewish, an important railway junction near Kraków. She grew up there in an orthodox home, the seventh of eight children. Her father prayed at the synagogue twice daily, and her mother covered her hair with a wig in accordance with Jewish modesty requirements. From the multi-storeyed building in which they lived and worked, her parents ran a building-materials business, which at one stage boasted the town’s only telephone.

Anti-Semitism had been a fact of life for a long time as it had been in much of Poland, but, after Germany invaded in September 1939, the impediments facing Jewish families became increasingly sinister. Among a series of measures, businesses were overtaken and Jewish residents were required to report to police daily.

To avoid the crackdown, Rina, her parents, and her four brothers who were still at home grabbed a few belongings and fled to a distant town where one of her married sisters was living. When that part of Poland was also overrun by Germans, they went home within weeks, only to be ambushed on the return trip by German soldiers who threw away the family’s few remaining pieces of property and taunted Rina’s orthodox, bearded father.

Back in Sucha, the family’s home and business had been ransacked, and the contents stolen.

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