This is Sally Dauman visiting her father’s grave for the first time, during the 2017 March of The Living trip.
Sally was blonde, very small, and German looking when she was a child, so while she and her family were in the Lodz ghetto, she would go under the fence, act like one of many Germans living in Poland, and smuggle food back for her family to eat. Nevertheless, her father died from starvation while in the Ghetto. Her family arranged for his body to be smuggled out of the ghetto and buried but the family never found out where the body was buried or if it was really buried at all. Sometime later, Sally and the remaining members of her family were shipped to Auschwitz. Recently, a granddaughter found the grave and it was rededicated, but Sally was not able to attend.
When we got to the cemetery, Sally ran to the grave, without letting anyone go in front of her. When she got there, she fell on her knees and began to cry. You could see tears dripping from her face onto the stone. In Yiddish, she began to speak to her father, “Father, you would always say goodbye to people by saying “Next year in Jerusalem”, I want to tell you that today Ir Hakodesh is ours and your daughter and grandkids live there. You would put on tefillin every morning, and today all the boys from our group put on Tefillin.” She then apologized to her father for not being able to smuggle in more food to save him. When she finished, the whole group gathered around her and the Rabbi said Kaddish and Shir Lamaalot, while we answered amen.
Source: Eithan Abramovich
