Untitled, Ervin Abadi ©1945
from the collection - US Holocaust Memorial Museum
This post commemorates Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins in the evening of April 7, 2021
The setting was Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. The time, spring 1975. That's when I sensed tremors of past thunder, thunder which originally struck decades earlier.
I was closeted in a lobby phone booth frantically searching for coins to make an important call - can you even remember those pre-cellular days? My hands, usually surgeon steady, were jittery. The mounting tension could be measured by beads of perspiration populating my forehead. An event I can only describe as cosmic had occurred a few minutes before and I had to reach my parents with the news, the good news, the thunderous news.
A fortnight earlier, my wife Carol was thinking about soon starting her maternity leave roughly timed two weeks before her due date. We were expecting our firstborn and feeling confident all the pre-partum 'I's had been dotted and the 'T's crossed. Little did Carol know her colleagues back at the office were prepped to fete her that Monday morning with a maternity leave surprise party. They would have the party, but without her as our son Josh, healthy with ten fingers and ten toes, had just been born. When it became clear that morning the for-real contractions signaled this would be The Day, we mobilized to get to the hospital. Carol bemoaned missing a chance to neaten up her office before her leave, but I realized this day was destined to be even more special than I ever imagined.
That's why now, with sounds of silence from the Holocaust's lost six million voices whispering in my ear, I was losing it in that phone booth.
Now back to the thunder ....
The first clap struck on May 5th 1945 when the US 11th Armored Division, aka Thunderbolt, liberated the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in the waning days of World War II.
After landing in Normandy during the winter of 1944, the division marched across Europe initially fighting in the Battle of the Bulge before advancing east to the German Rhineland. It reached Linz, Austria in May. On the 5th, the troops entered Mauthausen and liberated the camp. My dad was among the prisoners freed that day. From then on with a new lease on life and feeling reborn, he always considered May 5th another birthday.
Long after I left home and could not help celebrate the day in person, I never missed making a call to wish him well (see previous blog post, He's the Only Left to Call (http://davidsfotovisions.blogspot.com/2016/10/leo-remembers.html).
So, when contractions began in earnest on the morning of May 5th, 1975, I knew our family was about to receive not only the gift of new life but also a message about survival, generation to generation continuity, Jewish legacy, optimism, and hope.
The thunderbolt that was Josh's birth, thirty years to the day of my dad's rebirth, continues to reverberate in my head and heart. Grandfather and grandson are linked together in a fashion few pairs can match. I believe I will always try to fully process those events.
And the thunder rolls.
Grandpa Joe and Josh
1976 and 1999
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Addenda: 1
Although my dad lived to reach old age, his creativity, energy, and inquisitiveness kept him from ever becoming an old man. Eventually he did lose his short but turbulent battle with cancer. Afterward, my sister and I knew his memorial headstone somehow had to incorporate the events of the 5th of May. Now etched in granite, just above his patriarchal attributes and favorite rabbinical guiding expression, are dates he entered and left our physical world bookending the day of his liberation and rebirth.
The Thunderbolt Division was recognized as a liberating unit by the US Army's Center of Military History and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1985.
Addenda: 3
Ervin Abadi, a Budapest Jew, was a young aspiring artist when World War II began. In the 1940's he was drafted into the Hungarian labor service from which he managed to escape only to be recaptured and deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration Camp. When the camp was liberated, he was hospitalized and during his convalescence created dozens of works of art illustrating what he had witnessed during the Holocaust.
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