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Holocaust survivors reveal love story |
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By: Agencies |
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Date:
2008-10-13 |
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Place: NORTH MIAMI BEACH |
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my angel: Herman and Roma Rosenblat pose with Angel Girl, a book about their relationship during the Holocaust. pic/ap | Before he was shipped off to a death camp, before the girl with the apples appeared, Herman Rosenblat's life had already changed forever. His family had been forced from their home into a ghetto. His father fell ill with typhus.
They smuggled in a doctor, but there was little he could do to help. The man knew what was coming. He summoned his youngest son. "If you ever get out of this war," Rosenblat remembers him saying, "don't carry a grudge in your heart and tolerate everybody."
Two days later, the father was dead. Herman was just 12. The family was moved again, this time to a ghetto where he shared a single room with his mother, three brothers, uncle, aunt and four cousins.
He and his brothers got working papers and he got a factory job painting stretchers for the Germans. Eventually, the ghetto was dissolved. As the Poles were ushered out, two lines formed. In one, those with working papers, including Rosenblat and his brothers. In the other, everyone else, including the boys' mother.
Rosenblat went over to his mother. "I want to be with you," he cried. She spoke harshly to him and one of his brothers pulled him away. His heart was broken. "I was destroyed," Rosenblat remembers. It was the last time he would ever see her. He met his angel It was in Schlieben, Germany, that Rosenblat and the girl he later called his angel would meet.
Roma Radziki worked on a nearby farm and the boy caught her eye. And bringing him food apples, mostly, but bread, too became part of her routine. "Every day," she says, "every day I went." Rosenblat says he would secretly eat the apples and never mentioned a word of it to anyone else for fear word would spread and he'd be punished or even killed.
When Rosenblat learned he would be moved again this time to Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic he told the girl he would not return. Not long after, the Russians rolled in on a tank and liberated Rosenblat's camp. The war was over. She went to nursing school in Israel. He went to London and learned to be an electrician.
Their daily ritual faded from their minds. "I forgot," she says. "I forgot about her, too," he recalls. Rosenblat eventually moved to New York. He was running a television repair shop when a friend phoned him one Sunday afternoon and said he wanted to fix him up with a girl. Rosenblat was unenthusiastic: He didn't like blind dates, he told his friend. He didn't know what she would look like. But finally, he relented.
It went well enough. She was Polish and easygoing. Conversation flowed, and eventually talk turned to their wartime experiences. Rosenblat recited the litany of camps he had been in, and Radziki's ears perked up. She had been in Schlieben, too, hiding from the Nazis.
She spoke of a boy she would visit, of the apples she would bring, how he was sent away. And then, the words that would change their lives forever: "That was me," he said. Rosenblat knew he could never leave this woman again. He proposed marriage that very night. She thought he was crazy.
Two months later she said yes. In 1958, they were married at a synagogue in the Bronx a world away from their sorrows, more than a decade after they had thought they were separated forever. |
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