From a Passover column in the Washington Post by Daniella Greenbaum Davis about the part her grandmother once played in their Seder feast, she has since died, when they retell the story of how the Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt and how through “signs, wonders and a hard-earned exit—we became free.”
“When, reciting, we reached the line “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt,” the room would fall quiet, and she would begin her own story: of Jewish ghettos, concentration camps and a Passover conducted with no food, no wine and no books, in the filth of Bergen-Belsen. She told us how she and her fellow Jewish prisoners recited the words “Now we are free,” even though they weren’t.
A week or so after uttering those words in Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Masha was liberated. She thought she had died or was delusional when she heard someone speaking in Hebrew over a loudspeaker, reciting Havdalah, the prayer that separates shabbat from the weak, the holy from the mundane. She wasn’t hallucinating; the man on the loudspeaker was a chaplain with the British army troops who threw open the camp’s gates. He would later become her husband.”
I was telling Beth about this yesterday, on our walk, and it made her cry. That’s why I’m sharing it with you. Not that I want to make you cry, but to connect you, me, us– to a shared history this holy season. Today is Palm Sunday. The Blessing of the Fleet is at 3pm this afternoon at the harbor and there will be snacks and coffee at the Presbyterian church afterwards. I am going to be sure my old friend Betty is represented. She died a few (how many? I don’t know. ) April’s ago, on a calm, misty morning like today. It was peaceful. She was in her bed and ready to go. Betty always attended the blessing so that when the bell at the church tolled for the dead and her son’s name was called in the list of fisherman and boaters lost at sea, she could hear it, and walk up and drop a flower or a palm frond in the basket. The scattered bouquet is later tossed off the back of a gillnetter, to float out into the inlet.
I’ll do that for her today.
And since I can’t leave you with tears, there’s this: Betty was a birder. She fed birds and watched birds, and knew their calls and colors and habits. This morning might look very still. Very quiet, but it’s noisy with bird song. Trilling thrushes, robins, chickadees, whistling eagles and scolding crows, gulls. Ducks. She would call me when she saw the saw the first Northern Harrier, which she said meant spring was here. And there was one on the beach today. It hovered and swooped above the wrack line. Just watching it, and thinking of her, changed the cold drizzle into a light spring rain, which is the best kind.
