My heart is broken. My dear friend Lily Cohen passed away two weeks ago at her home in Tel Aviv. I think today would have been her birthday. And I have been struggling to find the words ever since. Lily came into my life with an email ten years ago. My friend Varda had tracked her down from a book written by a woman who had brought her young son and several orphan children to the fledgling state of Israel.
In one of the first Holocaust survivor memoirs, Hilde Huppert describes the precocious young Lily, perhaps four years of age in , persuading her to reluctantly accompany her on the Train Near Magdeburg with her young son Tommy. Her mother died trying to care for her in Bergen-Belsen. The man then ignored and essentially abandoned Lily in the exchange camp. She did not remember much about her early lifeβflashes in black and white, a later writer put itβpeople running in Warsaw, loud noises and booms, her mother screaming, soldiers.
Flashes of a long journey on a train, her mother carrying her into a cold shower, then her mother being gone. Later, she recalled snippets of being placed on another train transport, which turned out to be the Train Near Magdeburg liberated by American GIs on April 13, The group of orphans led by Hilde Huppert made it to Israel via France after a long journey, one of the first ships carrying survivor refugees. Lily was adopted on a kibbutz and raised in a loving family; I met her adoptive mother at near years old in that very home outside of Jerusalem in , a pioneer of early childhood education in the new state.
Like Lily, she radiated goodness and love, and it was important to Lily that I meet her. You see, my life had taken a turn where I was engaged in connecting Holocaust survivors with their American soldier liberators. I was in Israel that time to watch 55 or 60 survivors have the opportunity to meet liberator Frank Towers. But I had met Lily the year before, when she was in New York and wanted to journey the four hours north to specifically meet ME.
She just had to meet meβnot a soldier, not a liberator, not another survivorβME. She came with her friend Lynda, and as it happened, almost exactly ten years ago, she was also set to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. She had questions about her early life, having been born in Poland to secular Jewish parents, but not even entirely sure of her actual birth date. Some of my friends at the Museum found the documentation to help her on that journey, so I think she would have turned just 79 or so this year, which is pretty young for a Holocaust survivor.
