The number 6 million is hammered into our brains as the number of our people killed. Although I feel the number is much higher, that's for another story to tell. There is another unknown number I wish to write about now.
How many survivors' lives were severely compromised by what happened in the Holocaust. I am not speaking about people who maybe had bad dreams or was slightly impaired. I am talking about people who became the living wounded.
People like Aunt Mina.
Mina Korner was a seamstress, a skier, a lover of fun. She was frankly in a school play in Vienna because of her good looks. Blonde hair, blue eyed, beautiful figure, and a personality to match. She wanted to date, to ride motorcycles, to maybe visit Paris someday. She was a modern young woman.
It all changed, as her brother was taken to Dachau, her family forced out of their home, her sister kicked out of school, Mina fired from her job. They fled to Italy. At first, in Genoa, things were good. They were free to live normally. Her father got a job at the synagogue. Her and her other older sister worked. Her younger sister went to school. dresses for second wedding
But the knock on the door ended that. Her father was interned in a camp in the North of Italy. The rest of them were sent to village in the South of Italy. There they lived in a hallway. They had to hide sometimes in cemeteries and wine cellars when German Nazis came to the village.
They were interned in Ferramonti briefly. Malaria almost claimed her younger sister. The British and Americans arrived in time to save Tina.
It was off to another internment camp in America. Finally freed, the family went to Rhode Island. Gone was the fun loving youth. Instead, when Mina looked in the mirror, she saw a stranger.
Mina now wore long dresses in the summertime. She had her coat on at all times, inside and out. She carried her belongings in a shopping bag. She feared Providence Police to the point of her running away when she spotted their brown uniforms.
She mumbled in a Yiddish-German combination, that only a few understood. If she was treated out to a restaurant by relatives, she stole silverwear off the table and would hide food in her coat.
Electric shock treatments knocked out all her teeth. She had to eat soft food now. No dentist chair for her. She stayed away from doctors.
She would sleep sometimes in the day, pace the floors at night. She checked food to make sure she bought it. If not, she would not eat it.
She rarely came to family events. She watched the house when each nephew died of Muscular Dystrophy to prevent robbery.
She came to my first wedding, not to my second one. She liked to let her great-niece play with the light in the living room.
She died at 77. She refused to see doctors or take medicine. She passed away at Miriam Hospital, screaming the Nazis were killing her. Miriam, at the time, was a Jewish hospital.
She was buried by her parents and brother and older sister. But her grave is behind theirs, not in the same row. Even in death, she stands apart.
The Holocaust killed the young, happy woman she had been. She became an old lady in her 30's. But she does not count in the 6 million number. Can we even know how many more became the living dead?