In Israel, we are slowly and cautiously emerging from COVID-19 quarantine. But this year's Remembrance and Independence days are, sadly, still to be spent in isolation. The lights and the flags were still hung for Independence day, Yom Hazikaron was still somber – maybe more so, considering the prohibition on visiting the graves of loved ones. My daughters stopped their game of monopoly and stood at attention, heads bowed, when the siren wailed.
These days,those left from the Greatest Generation have found themselves traveling back in time. "I think about it all the time. My mind is always in Hungary, 1944," my Grandfather, a holocaust survivor, confided in me. "Do you have enough food? Do you have beans? We ate only beans for three months straight after the war."
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Since the coronavirus pandemic entered our lives, an ominous atmosphere, steeped with anxiety and uncertainty has been swirling around the globe. Most of us have never faced an event so universally encompassing and life-changing – except for those who lived through World War II, the ones who built Israel; the ones who faced an unimaginable, seemingly inescapable end, yet stood up to evil and survived.
I spent this Independence Day thinking about my 91-year-old grandmother, who was born in Jerusalem and fought for this country. I thought about her because this year, among all this uncertainty, I'm certain that I am thankful to be going through the pandemic here, in Israel – a country that exists in no small part thanks to her and her peers.
My grandmother, born Chayah Rosenberg, is still alive and well, and now lives in Montreal, Canada. But this is 2020, so the wonders of Skype allowed me to get a glimpse into a life that could easily be made into a hit television series.
"I was born in Jerusalem in 1929. My parents were religious, my mother more so than my father. We always felt that the Jews should have their own state. The reason we were in Palestine at the time, was that my paternal grandmother was both very religious and a Zionist – something rare at the time. She was something very extraordinary. She was into reading all kinds of Jewish literature, The End of Days, The Coming of the Messiah, etc. Her husband used to make fun of her. He would ask her to serve the meat first, because if the Messiah did arrive, at least he would not miss the meat."
Q: Tell me more about how your Grandmother came to British Palestine.
"Her husband died at the age of 48. With her three children grown up and married, she decided to go to Palestine. She arrived in Vienna from Poland, after the first world war, to go from there to Palestine. When she was asked what she would do there, she said she would like to die there. She lived for over 50 years in Israel, until she died at the age of 100.
"She was determined to bring her children to Palestine, which was under British rule. To receive a certificate for her children, she had to prove that she could support them. She was poor, so to show that she has some money, her neighbors put money in the bank in her name. All her children were [living] in Israel when she died.
"My mother was not happy when she arrived in Jerusalem as a young married woman, in 1927, [to find that] the apartment that my grandmother procured was a basement. She resented the fact she was in Israel – the British Mandate of Palestine, at the time – where the economic conditions were very poor. It was only after World War II, when all of her family members [left in Europe] died, except for one young niece, who came to Israel after the war, that she realized that her own family had been saved."
Q: Tell me about your upbringing – how you came to join the Haganah.
"My sister and I went to a religious school, Beit Yaakov. After finishing elementary school, I didn't want to go to a religious school. I had started to ask myself questions about religion and my priorities, I felt that unlike my mother, a devout Ger Hasidic woman, I did not identify with being religious and the way of life it entailed. I did get my Secondary education by studying at a night school.
"I had a friend from elementary school whose boyfriend introduced us to the Haganah. At the age of 18, I became a member and was sent to be trained as a soldier. My parents were not happy, but they accepted it. My friend's parents were very religious and [did not accept it] so they forced her to get married."
The Haganah was a Jewish paramilitary organization formed in 1920 to protect the Yeshuv – the Jewish communities in British Palestine. Israel's inception in 1948, it became the core formation of the Israel Defense Forces.
Q: What was it like to be in the Haganah and, later, in the Israeli military?
"After I completed my training for the Haganah, I was sent to train as a wireless operator in Shefayim, on the beach, near Herzliya. I asked to be assigned to Jerusalem, close to home, and they accepted it. I came back to Jerusalem one day before the siege, during which there was no way of going in or out of Jerusalem for a whole month.
"During this time, I worked at a station that was the only connection between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It was a very important job. I was also an 18-year-old girl and my upbringing and family expectations were still a big part of my life. Friday night at our home was taken seriously. When I happened to be on duty on Friday night, I felt that I had to be home. So, I shut down the station – and thus the connection between the two cities – for two hours in order to be home."
"When I messaged Tel Aviv that I would be shutting down to go home for Friday night dinner, they were not happy and I received in return the message: 'Not OK! Not OK!' Obviously, this was irresponsible, and very dangerous because of the Palestinian shelling of the area. I had a 20-minute walk home, which I made alone, through the deserted streets, keeping close to the walls and listening for bombs.
"When I returned to the station two hours later, I took up a message I had missed while I was gone and continued working. For two hours there had been no communication between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem because my obligation was to be home for Friday night dinner!
"One day I received a message sent to David Ben-Gurion saying 'mazal tov hayeled nolad' ('congratulations the baby has been born'). I was told to hand it over to [David] Ben-Gurion in person. I handed it to him and after he read it, he told me 'this is a historical message.' What the message meant was that it was decided to declare the establishment of the State of Israel.
"Then, after this, there were messages about a crib, etc. I did not understand it well at the time, but they were messages pertaining to the establishment of the state of Israel.
"As it turned out for me, I was very good as a wireless [Morse code] operator, so they decided to send me to train wireless operators. The place was called Giv'at Alchut and was then about one hour on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. I stayed there until I finished my army service in April 1950."
Q: What happened after your army service? How did you end up in Montreal?
"After the service, I registered at the Hebrew University to study English literature. In April 1954, I married Robert Vermes, a holocaust survivor from Hungary and a new immigrant to Israel. We are still married, 66 years and counting.
"In 1959, when our daughter was three and my husband finished his army service, we went to the United States, where Robert was working on his PhD. in Mathematics. After he finished, he got a job as a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada."
"We were hoping to go back to Israel, but sadly, it never happened. While in the US, I studied and got a BSc. degree in social work. Later I completed two master's degrees: In library science [now called information science] and in philosophy – my true passion. I worked for 30 years as a librarian for the French section of Radio Canada."
Chayah and Robert traveled frequently until recently, practically crisscrossing the entire globe. They wanted to learn and see as much as they could – there was always something or somewhere interesting to discover.
After my husband completed his PhD in Mechanical Engineering, he accepted an assistant professor position at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. In October 2014, more than 60 years after my grandmother, Chayah, completed her army service, we moved to Israel from the US with our two young daughters.
We had come home.
