There is one Holocaust sadness that strikes me as unusually sad. Part of the reason is that it concerns my own family, but part of it is that ever-so-human need to dwell on just how avoidable it really was.
In the later 1920s, my grandmothers family (consisting of parents, two girls, and a slew of budding torah scholar men) immigrated to America from Romania in the face of growing anti-semitic restlessness. However, once here, in a veritable drought of torah learning institutions (specifically hasidic ones) my great-grandparents decided to send the 5 boys back to study.
All of them, with the sole exception of my Uncle Abba’le, perished, whilst my grandmother contained growing up in Pittsburg, ignorant of the fate of her brothers until years later.
The story gets somewhat worse as meanwhile, many states away in Wisconsin, my grandfathers parents were strongly considering sending him, the rising rodigy, back to the Ukraine to study, as well.
However, one day, my great-grandmother in Wisconsin got a telegram from my grandfather then learning in Torah V’daath in Brooklyn. All it said was (in the succinct way of telegram era) “AM ILL.”
My greatgrandmother panicked. She called my greatgrandfather home from the synagogue and they decided to spend an exorbitant amount of money to place a phonecall to Torah V’daath, desperate to find out how sick their oldest and beloved son truly was.
However, when they placed the call and asked whoever picked up, “Hows Shloime?” The receiver simply handed the phone over to the very much in good health boy, who soon clarified the issue.
In truth, the message had said “AM WELL” and however it had gotten from Shloime’s mouth to the telegraphers ears (via who knows how many European-accented middlemen) it had telegraphed a very different message.
My great-grandparents, breathing a sigh of relief, decided categorically that if this, over a traveling span of a few hours and a couple hundred miles, had sent them into such a tizzy, they definitely could not send my grandfather back to Eastern Europe.
Luckily.
