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Holocaust love story began with an apple
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-10-14 08:56 In the beginning, there was a boy, a girl and an apple. He was a teenager in a death camp in Nazi-controlled Germany. She was a bit younger, living free in the village, her family posing as Christians. Their eyes met through a barbed-wire fence and she wondered what she could do for this handsome young man. She was carrying apples, and decided to throw one over the fence. He caught it and ran away toward the barracks. And so it began.
As they tell it, they returned the following day and she tossed an apple again. And each day after that, for months, the routine continued. She threw, he caught, and both scurried away. They never knew one another's name, never uttered a single word, so fearful they would be spotted by a guard. Until one day he came to the fence and told her he would not be back. "I won't see you anymore," she said. "Right, right. Don't come around anymore," he answered. And so their brief and innocent tryst came to an end. Or so they thought. 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 a doctor in, 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. |
