Remembering Mula Jasny At Hanukah

When Shmuel “Mula” Jasny was 14, he lied about his age in order to be permitted to work outside the ghetto in his hometown of Sosnowiec, Poland. He got a job as an icer in a bakery. One day on his way home, soldiers stopped the trolley he was riding, and took him along with all the other Jews off to Nazi labor camps. Many months later, Shmuel was sent on an errand to get nails, and vodka for the officers. He took the opportunity to sneak off and visit his family. It was the last time he ever saw his parents, David and Freymeta, his younger brother Menachem Mendel, and older sister Regina. They all eventually died in Auschwitz. Sam, as he was later called in America, survived. He survived years in labor camps. He survived the notorious forced death marches. He survived Dachau concentration camp, and the typhus he contracted there. He was “a survivor.”

Today I look around his apartment in Florida. It is small but very clean and bright. An elegant crystal chandelier hangs above the dining table but the big mirror on the wall behind is draped over with a sheet. We are observing the Jewish mourning practice called sitting shiva. Almost everyone in the room is a survivor, or the child or grandchild of a survivor, and everyone is telling stories. Mostly in English but if you sit quietly for a while you will hear Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, maybe even a little Russian.

The remaining survivors are in their eighties and nineties now, their group gradually dwindling away, but the ” young” people, those in their fifties and sixties, have taken on sharing their parents’ histories, helping each other fill in the gaps. I became part of this group 25 years ago when I married Sam’s eldest son, Max, who likes to say he was born in a resort town on the edge of the Black Forest in Germany. In reality, it was a Displaced Persons Camp where his father went after liberation to recover, then stayed to work for UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. It was there he found Leokadia, the cousin of his best friend from childhood.

I find a pre-war picture of her in a photo album. “This is grandma Lola,” I show my children. She is with her friend Stasia. Not long after the picture was taken, she, Stasia, and Stasia’s sister would jump off a train bound for Auschwitz and run for the woods. Stasia and Leokadia would make it to the safety of the trees but Stasia’s sister would be shot down as they ran. I look at the elderly women sitting around me, their stiffly coiffed hairdos, costume jewelry, and heavy make-up. As they reminisce fondly about Sam, or chatter about mundane things, it is hard to imagine what they endured in their youth.