For Holocaust Survivor, ‘Hashem Still Has a Plan’

Allan Ripp, principal of Ripp Media, a New York-based press relations/editorial services boutique focusing on law firms, corporate finance, professional services. This op-ed was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on July 13, 2020 and reprinted with permission on COLlive.com:

I wonder how Bina’s doing. That thought hit me over and over during the three months my wife and I spent sheltering 100 miles north.

Bina was the diminutive European woman who often occupied one of the green benches inside Central Park off West 96th Street. She was there in all weather, reciting daily prayers in Hebrew while her legs dangled over her perch above the path. Sometimes I walked her to synagogue on 95th Street—she went for lectures as well as services—and begged her to recount her experience as a survivor of Kindertransport, the mission that rescued thousands of Jewish children ahead of World War II.

“Why would I talk about that?” she said. “Who cares?”

Maybe next time, she added.

Not knowing her last name or how to reach her, I worried there might not be a next time, especially since Bina had circulatory issues that, combined with her advanced age, put her at risk for complications from coronavirus.

We returned late in June. Our dog was sick and our daughter was about to deliver her second child. Infection levels in the city had waned dramatically—it was time to come home. Elevator rides were stressful and some pleasures had vanished. But I was greeted like a lost hero by my masked dog-walking friends and immediately started looking for Bina in the park.

At first, I didn’t see her and considered asking her doorman—I knew where she lived from a time when I’d found her knitted beanie on the ground and a neighbor led me to her building. But then she appeared on a Saturday afternoon, mask in hand, having finished her davening. She was rotating her socked legs. I wanted to hug her but asked how she was and if she’d stayed healthy.

“I had a rash,” she said matter-of-factly. Was she scared? “Of what?” she shrugged. She’d gone shopping and didn’t avoid the benches for long. I told her “next time” had come and she owed me. “It’s Shabbos,” she replied. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Several days later she told her story. Her father was a devout Chasid in Vienna who somehow made a lot of money. “Tell them I sell insurance,” he instructed Bina to answer when asked at school. On a December evening in 1938, weeks after the Kristallnacht torching of Jewish homes and synagogues, her father put her and her two sisters on a bus to catch a train, then a boat that took them to England to live with a host family. She was 9.

She wound up at a hostel, went to a British school, and later spent six years in Israel—“kibbutz life was not for me,” she said—before coming to New York in 1956. She returned to Vienna once to see her childhood home—“not a pleasant experience.” She worked for years as secretary to a prominent rabbi on the East Side, never married but made many friends.

Her father fled to France but was discovered in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz. Her mother died at a work camp. Over time, Bina grew distant from her sisters. “Not such a happy story, is it?” she said. “But Hashem still has a plan and you need to pray every day.”