Out of the Shoebox by Yaron Reshef Page A

difficulty. Not only was he a large strong man, but his
body was waterlogged. We carried him together, off the beaten track, and buried
him in the cemetery.
    “His
death was a harsh blow. He was a gentle man, always willing to help his fellow
man and, around there, were many people who needed help. That was the reason he
had volunteered, in the early days, to the Judenrat Police..."
    It
was Friday, December 28 2012. As I was driving, back from an early get together
with friends, I heard the horoscopes on the radio. It said Virgos are
experiencing an improvement in their health, and they are at their best. I
smiled to myself and decided to change my morning plans. I went to visit my
mother. As I was driving, I thought it was time for her to say a few words,
after a silence of a year and a half. When I arrived at the nursing home I
found my mother looking at me, her eyes open. When I said "Hi, Mom,"
she responded clearly "I'm happy to see you." I led her in a
wheelchair to a quiet corner and tried to get her to talk. When I got home I
wrote to Hanna and Miri:
    "I
visited my mother today at the nursing home. She's been unresponsive for a year
and a half. Most of this time she just sat there with her eyes closed, and
hasn’t spoken a word. She is a hundred and one years old and three months. I
told her how you told me about your mother Tonia, and that for the first time
I'd heard of Pepe Kramer. I asked her, "Who was Pepe Kramer?" She opened
her eyes and lucidly answered, "Pepe was Tonia’s best friend. She lived
with my father and mother after we left... she was a little girl." We
talked in the dining hall where the morning activities take place. The nursing
staff present were all surprised. I loaded a picture of Pepe, your mother and
another friend from the Chortkow website on my iPhone and asked my mother to
try and recognize the people in the photo (her eyesight is fine). When I
pointed to Pepe my mother said her name, and when I pointed to your mother she
very clearly said "that's Tonia." She did not recognize the third
girl in the photo. I then showed her the photo of Pepe and Tonia in the boat
and asked her where it was taken. Without a moment’s hesitation she replied "the
Seret River." Long story short, it was an amazing, totally unexpected
experience. I thought you might like to know..."
    On
August 6th, 2012 I received an email and photo from Miri.
    "I'm
enclosing a group photo of my father's friends who went out to the woods
together to have this picture taken before he left for Eretz Israel in the fall
of 1936. Among the people in the photo is your uncle; Moshe Kramer. My father
is in the back row, third from the left. Moshe is wearing the Polish high
school uniform. Jewish students in Chortkow were slowly being pushed out of the
Polish school because of the numerus clausus law (a limit on the percentage of
Jewish students in Universities). This means he was an excellent student and
the family had the money to pay the outrageous tuition Jews were charged. For
that reason the Jewish school was founded a year later in 1937. In 1938 it was
recognized by the authorities as a Jewish public school with its own public
school uniform and badge. I think classes stopped with the Russian occupation,
but I'm not sure. My father didn't study at the Polish school, which is why he
did not wear the typical uniform. My father told me, as it also says in your
mother's memoirs, that the Kramer family lived across from the bus station. I
currently don't have any photos of it, but when I come across one I will send
it along. My mother translated some of your postcards, the parts written in
Polish. If you go into Letters at The Kramer Family on the website you will
find her translation..."

    Moshe Kramer, front row third from
the right. 1936
    I
could easily identify my uncle. A smiling, good looking boy who looked exactly
as he did in my mother's photos. The hard part was reading the partial
translations of the postcards my parents