Parents and grandparents play many roles in their children’s lives, but one of the most important is instilling in them a sense of hope and perspective about honoring the present, appreciating the past, and planning for the future. It’s also a way to be grateful for our own blessings, both personally and spiritually.
Long before “compassion” became a buzzword in the mainstream media, my father was filled with grace, humor and loving-kindness. A Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States after World War II, he respected his Jewish heritage; however, his worldview was that religion divides humanity. He chose the path of not being a practicing Jew, but was so elated to have survived the war, that gratitude and compassion became his religion. His experiences led him to the belief that if there was truly a God, then his family wouldn’t have been taken from him in the war.
During five of my father’s most formative years — from age 15 to 20 — he was a prisoner at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. While in captivity, he ate scraps of left-behind food, and at night slept on wooden barracks with hundreds of others, all shivering under thin blankets. His own father died of pneumonia just before the war broke out and had owned a well-respected lumberyard in a neighboring town. The Nazis knew my grandfather, so they gave my father a job working in the kitchen peeling potatoes. Unlike most of the other prisoners in the camps, my father claimed he had more food available than the other prisoners. His experience gave him a broader perspective and taught him the importance of being grateful for the gift of life.
Being imprisoned left my father with lifelong physical and psychological scars. For example, he couldn’t stand the sight of red meat because he claimed that he’d seen too many dead bodies during the war. “The sight of blood just turns my stomach,” he used to say. He shared how he witnessed his younger brother, Joshua, and his mother being taken from their ghetto apartment by the Nazis, herded onto a train, and transported to the gas chambers, which ultimately led to their deaths. He and his brother Bob were the only ones in the family to survive.
Well before he died from congestive heart failure more than 30 years ago at the age of 71 — my father told me the story about a scar on his forehead. He said it was left when a Nazi soldier hit him with the butt of a rifle when he spotted my father taking too much peel off the potatoes and tossing it to his barrack mates. This generosity got him into trouble, but for him it was worth the risk to help those in need. In later years he was also the type of man who walked down the streets of New York City tossing coins from his pocket into homeless people’s buckets.
No matter what horrible things he witnessed and endured, he never lost hope. Like fellow survivor Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, my dad believed that if you have meaning in your life, you can survive anything. My father was very thankful to be alive and to be able to put food on our table. He was grateful for his freedom and hopeful about humanity. This attitude has served me well, especially during the pandemic and recent years laden with illness. Through living his life the way he did, he taught me a great deal about having a compassionate perspective. I continue to hold his values close to my heart.
I am blessed to have grandparents who were experienced two world wars, who were able to share their stories and life perspectives with me during family dinner conversations and through the writings in their journals. Now that I’m a grandparent myself, I feel that it’s my turn to carry the torch of perspective and hope by sharing my own stories with the younger generations. My father lived each day as if it was his last, had no enemies, and was someone people never forgot once they met. My only hope is that I am remembered in a similar light — as someone who is compassionate, caring, funny, and always willing to lend a helping hand.
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Previously Published on Medium
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