The Silver Box

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Among my most cherished possessions is a slim silver cigarette case, easily well over a hundred years old. Inside this engraved, antique box is a small picture of my great aunt Hattie, and the priceless memory of how she came to live with my family the year I was born.

Hattie Wunder  was a slender, gentle woman with a delightful European accent. She was many things, a speaker of countless languages, a story teller, and a survivor of one the most horrific tragedies in human history, the Holocaust. To me, however, she was simply “Tante” or my great-aunt, who helped raise me and who greatly influenced my life.

  Tante had a natural flair for languages:she was equally  fluent in Yiddish, German, Polish, Hebrew, and, of course, English. Growing up in my house, I picked up a little Yiddish from Tante when she spoke to my father and grandmother. I still firmly believe she switched  effortlessly from English when what she was saying was none of my business. So in high school, she advised me to  study German, since it was so close to Yiddish. With my great aunt tutoring me, I got all A's.

  As a young boy,  I was delighted  that Aunt Hattie possessed a treasure trove of folk and fairy tales. Instead of watching television on rainy summer afternoons or wintry nights, Tante treated me to stories of Hansel and Gretel, the Little Princess and the Little Match Girl. These tales, I found out later, translated  into English. Sometimes,Tante told us snippets about my dad’s childhood in Poland and how he and my grandmother had come to the United States.

 To her everlasting credit, Aunt Hattie never spoke to us of the horrors she left behind during the Second World War. From my father, I later found out that during the Holocaust, she escaped from Poland where her husband  died at the hands of the Nazis.She then fled to France right before the German occupation. From there, she traveled to Switzerland where she worked as a nanny.Then, after the war, she went to Canada to live with cousins. In 1947, she  was sponsored by my father and came to the United States where she was joyously reunited with the nephew and sister she hadn't seen in twenty seven years.

 One day, I  unwittingly made the innocent mistake of showing off my new Boy Scout uniform. As soon as she saw me, Tante began to quietly cry. My khaki shirt and bright red neckerchief reminded my aunt of the despised Hitler Youth from her past.  "Take it off, take it off," she whispered. It was only then that I realized that Tante had stories that never would be told.

Unlike many immigrant women of her generation, Tante was extremely independent. First, she worked as a care giver in a nearby nursery school, and later for the Spiegel Catalog Company, as an office assistant. When my she and my grandmother wanted to attend Saturday services at our synagogue, she insisted they could walk there by themselves. My dad enlisted me to walk along with them. I was rewarded by a gentle smile, a kiss on the cheek from both Tante and my grandmother ,and the inevitable hard candy when we came home from services later that day.

. A speaker of many languages, a teller of tales, and above all, a survivor who escaped the horrors of war, Hattie Wunder was a loving, courageous woman who left a lasting legacy on the people whose lives she touched. To my eternal regret, I never got to say a proper goodby to my great aunt. By the time I finished graduate school, she had returned to Canada, then  spent the last years of her life in Israel. When I heard  of her passing, I grieved for a very long time. Today, I  look at her photo in the silver box and honor her memory with this story.