Normalcy Masks Indomitable Spirit

The Boston Herald

We had lunch with Sophie and Sam one day. It was open-seating on a two-week cruise. We were led to their table and for an hour we made small talk Where are you from? What do you do? From Montreal now, they were both European born. Sophie had been a doctor in Vienna but stopped practicing when she arrived in Canada. Sam was a salesman. They had two children, a winter home in Florida. They travelled frequently. Sophie wore black eyeliner, red lipstick and her dark hair pulled from her face and piled on her head. In her 70's, she was stunning and charming and warm.

Sam was the quieter of the two. He simply smiled as she talked. Both gave the impression that they hadn't a care in the world.

We ran into them after that lunch too infrequently. They were warm and positive, the kind of people you look forward to seeing because they so openly loved life.

Because our cruise ship docked in Le Havre, France, just two days after the D-Day commemoration, there were many veterans aboard and lectures and programs about the invasion and events that led up to World War II. Not scheduled to speak was a fellow passenger from Miami, Anita Karl. She and her sister were on holiday, not on the lecture circuit. Yet at the urging of someone who knew her story, one morning she stood on a small stage, without anything to lean on, and in a voice that never wavered explained how it happened that her family, which numbered more than 300 before the war had been reduced to four by the end of the war.

First, there had been the restrictions, she explained. Then the round ups, Jews ordered into the ghetto, people crowded into one room. There was never enough to eat. Dozens died every day.

One afternoon she and a cousin were playing outdoors and an SS officer approached and offered the pair some candy. Anita, then 8 years old, was hungry, but she said no. Her cousin, slightly younger, said yes. The officer beckoned to the child, sat her on -- his lap, unwrapped a chocolate bar, smiled at her, then took his gun from his holster and shot her in the head.

A rumor circulated that the ghetto was to be evacuated and everyone sent to concentration camps. Anita's mother knew that to save her children she had to escape. She was fair-skinned and blonde and spoke Polish, not just Yiddish. She believed she could pass for Aryan. He husband was dark and didn't speak Polish. He wouldn't pass. She and the girls would have to escape alone.

'You're crazy,' the family told her. 'You will be caught and be killed.'

'We will be killed anyway if we stay here,' she answered. She sewed money and jewels into her corset and fled the ghetto at night with two small children and an infant. The next day she and her daughters walked past the hanging bodies of dead Jews strung up at the train station, reminders of what happened to those caught escaping. Anita, her sisters and mother survived by passing as Christians. 'For a long time I wanted to remain a Catholic because I knew then I'd always be safe,' Anita said.

Her father, who eventually joined his family outside the ghetto, hid in a hole in the backyard on the farm where his wife worked. On bitter winter nights, he would sneak into the cellar and stand for hours in the small dark space between the furnace and the brick wall.

One night, when Anita was very ill, he left his hiding place to comfort her. He wrapped his wool scarf around her and kissed her cheek. She carries that scarf today. It is all she has left of her father. The Germans found his hiding place and executed him.

When she finished speaking, I noticed Sophie and Sam. Sam's head was bowed, and he was crying. 'I spent 27 months underground in a hole where pigs were kept,' he whispered. 'From 17 to 19 and a half. My mother, father, brothers, we lived in this hole. Worms crawled all over us, lice, vermin, 27 months in unimaginable conditions.'

Sophie survived by passing for Catholic. After the war, she emigrated to Canada. She gave up practicing medicine because she couldn't speak English and couldn't take the courses she needed to be certified there.

Sophie and Sam, Anita and her sister, four passengers out of 1,000. You'd never single them out. You'd never think they were extraordinary. And yet they are. They survived where millions of others died. Somehow, through a combination of ingenuity, luck, courage, fortitude and good health, they managed to endure. Fifty years later people line up to hug Anita Karl, to thank her for telling her story. She holds her father's worn scarf in her hands.

In the corner, Sam continues to cry.