"He shook my hand. He smiled. He told me the gloves were keeping him very warm. He said they fit well. He thanked me. That evening my father came home from work. He was full of smiles. He told me everyone had been shaking his hand. They were congratulating him. Everyone said to him that because Frank shook your daughter's hand it would save the Jews. We thought if they were pleased with our work they would let us live."
A year ago she happened upon a picture of Frank. She learned, for the first time, that after the war he had been condemned and hanged by the Allies at Nuremberg. He was one of the very few Nazis at Nuremberg who, before being executed, expressed remorse for his crimes.
The photograph and news of Frank's execution were devastating. "I cried hysterically," she told me. "I don't know why. I could not connect him smiling at me like a father, shaking my hand and thanking me and then think of him hanging dead."
In the ghetto her parents arranged for her brother Oskar, who was two and a half years older, to study with a rabbi.
"My brother became, because of this rabbi, very orthodox," she said...
"He was about 14. He would be charitable to everyone because the Bible said to be charitable. My mother would get some potatoes and peel them. She would say that when she came home from work she would cook us potatoes. But sometimes the potatoes were gone when she got home. My brother would have taken them to a poor family and we would have nothing to eat. One day he came home in wooden shoes. We asked, 'Where are your shoes?' He had given them to someone who was barefoot. He became like that. He was like a monk."
Once, hiding under the sawdust pile during one of the mass deportations, Lola crawled over to her brother. "We talked," she said. "It was the first time we really talked. He had a piece of bread. He said, 'I am not hungry.'"
Her voice broke. She began to weep.
"That is hard," she said haltingly. "And he did give me that piece of bread. It was like a rind. We were not like sheep. We lived. When we finally left the bunker I saw him dressing. His belly was distended from hunger."
The factories and workshops were closed in 1943. Large sections of the ghetto were emptied. Most of the ghetto residents had been executed or taken to death camps. When Lola's father sneaked out of the bunker at night he would wander through empty streets and forage in abandoned apartments. It resembled a ghost town. The fence around the ghetto was being rebuilt and pushed inward to open the emptied sections of the ghetto to the non-Jews in the city.
Lola's father decided to move the family, along with her aunt's family of four and two cousins, to a basement in an abandoned part of the ghetto. He said that when it got dark he would take five of them at a time to the basement. He took Lola, her mother, Lola's aunt and a young cousin to the basement and went back to get his son and nieces and nephews.
"He never returned," Lola said...
"He was captured by a Jewish policeman. It was Succoth. My mother and aunt lit candles in the basement. We found a deeper basement. There was an Orthodox man hidden in the attic of that house. He visited us. He told us stories about the Messiah. He told us when we died we would go to heaven. I felt better, even with that gripping fear. My cousin and I went out at night to a vegetable field to dig up something to eat. There was a well, but it made noise when you cranked it up. That was dangerous. We could hear dogs barking.""One morning we heard a sound like someone scraping a stick along a fence," she said. "My mother stiffened. She knew. They were shooting people. We could see the man in the attic make a sign with his arms like shooting. Then we heard singing. It was Shema Yisrael."
She began to sing Shema Yisrael, the central prayer in the Jewish prayer book, softly in Hebrew.
"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words which I command thee this day shall be in thine heart."
"There were 200 people singing Shema Yisrael, including my father and brother, going to death," she said. "I did not at the time connect the shooting with my father and brother and cousins. The shots became steady and constant. My mother held me tight."
Lola read from a letter she wrote in 1981 to her four children:
"Here is the essence of my story. To help my children grow, flourish and multiply without guilt or remorse, without a feeling that they are descended of people who went to slaughter like sheep. No song like Eli Eli or Ave Maria will surpass the chant of my father, my brother, my cousins and hundreds of others as they were led to be shot. It was the most powerful, courageous and victorious hymn. Their voices did not bleat like sheep. Their voices told of victory overcoming evil by dying like men without somebody's blood on their hands. Their voices sang in unison a praise to the Lord. There was a might in them as if they were already one with their master. And it said Shema Yisreal, Hear Oh Israel, I will take you from your suffering and you will flourish. This was the message I received. That song was sung for me by my father. I flourished as I wish and hope my children will. My children, my dear sweet children. Your daily problems, which you try to solve with so much determination, are insignificant in the view of the awesome past of your ancestors. So you are told, but this is not true. Life is made out of difficulties and joys, of sorrows and utter happiness, but as long as your souls are not soiled with meanness which hurts others be proud of your life. Your life is the extension of the ones which are gone. And now they are immortal. Don't pity them. They went peacefully because they had hope for the future, your present. My father's mighty chant was meant as well for you and yours. With all my love, your Mom."
German soldiers discovered Lola, her mother, her aunt and her cousin in the basement. They were detained and, because hiding was a capital offense, waited to be shot. Her mother, holding her, told Lola they were going to the Garden of Eden to meet those in the family who had died. But they were spared and assigned to the last detail of 100 Jews used to clean up the remnants of the ghetto. The mother, working in a laundry, found her son Oskar's shirt, apparently cut from his lifeless body. Josef Muller, the commander of the ghetto, had by then a Jewish mistress, a practice common among ghetto commanders and camp guards. The remaining Jews in the ghetto nicknamed her Mata Hari.
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