Exhausted by the hectic day, with a thousand things to do for tomorrow morning, I wasn’t happy about waiting three hours in the torturous chairs of the optomologist. And opposite us were a very old couple, who seemed to remember nothing. They admired Ezi’s sandals and asked where they came from, and this started us on an internet search for the store. The woman sat with pen poised to write the address down, even though the sandals could be bought anywhere. Trying to remember their immediate past so they could share it with us, the woman touched her cheek and shook her head. They seemed so out of it. Until we got back into a more clear time – When he was 14, he said, his mother took him to the Lodz train station and said, “Child, save yourself.” That was the last time he saw her. She was killed soon after, and he was taken in by the partisans and remained in the service of the Russians until Malenkov…no Gomulka…let them out. When he showed me the watch he was given by Putin I was more than convinced that all the stories of heroism he had told me in the hours we waited for the doctor were not only true, but incomplete.
I have found this experience to be characteristic of the elderly in Israel. Once you get past the senility, there is a rich and heroic past.
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