I’m traveling, so we have a low power mode edition today—first time I’ve done this for Big Optimism. But, this is one of the stories I’ve found myself coming back to and telling people over and over. It’s powerful, and it deserves a wide audience.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, millions of tragedies resulted. Today we’re focusing on one person’s story.
Her name was Manya, and she was Jewish, age 13, living with her mother and father and siblings in a small city that the Germans turned into a ghetto. Her family took in other families for the first few years of the brutal occupation.
Eventually, the Nazis arrested her father, and then sent Manya, her mother, and her younger sister and brother to a labor camp called Strzelnica.
Obviously, this was a grim, terrifying experience. However, there was a small ray of light, in that in the midst of this, Manya met a boy named Moshe, and the two teens developed crushes on each other. As someone later said: They were kids, and they still found small ways to flirt and joke in the midst of horrible surroundings.
Over time, the Nazis began sending Jews from Strzelnica to even harsher concentration camps. Manya’s brother was sent away; they had no idea where. Then, Moshe disappeared as well. Then, in July 1944, Manya, her mother, and her sister were crowded into a filthy boxcar and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Manya’s mother is one of the real heroes in this story; with death and destruction all around, she somehow kept what remained of the family together. After six or seven months at Auschwitz, the three were sent to Bergen-Belsen, which is the camp in which Anne Frank and her sister Margot perished.
In telling this story, I worry that I might somehow underemphasize the unfathomable death, destruction and pain. So, let me quote two of the first British soldiers who liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, on what they saw immediately afterward:
“You just couldn’t believe the numbers involved. ... The whole camp was so quiet and yet there were so many people there. ... Everything was just ghost-like and it was just unbelievable that there were literally people living still there. ... So much death ...”
“We’d been trained for war wounded, we were used to terrible wounds ... [W]e hadn’t been trained for this ... It was so terrible and so different from anything we’d seen ... We’d seen distressed people about, people walking from town to town, but nothing like this.”
Miraculously, Manya, her mother, and her sister survived, and they lived for a while in a displaced persons camp nearby. Manya’s father had died, but she learned that her brother was alive in a hospital in Munich.
Then, another miracle: Moshe showed up.
He’d been through hell, left for dead, lost his own parents and most of his relatives. But, when he’d seen a list of survivors in another D.P. camp in Munich that included Manya’s name, he walked and hitchhiked more than 300 miles over three weeks to Bergen-Belsen to find her.
Mayna and Moishe were married while still in camp at Belsen, and they moved the next year to Canada, where Moshe’s sister had emigrated before the war.
Over the next year or so, they were able to sponsor Manya’s mother, brother, and sister (and her sister’s new husband, too).
Manya and Moshe anglicized their names to Morris and Mary when they reached Toronto. There, they had three children, including Geddy Lee, the lead singer of the rock group Rush.
Morris (Moshe) died in 1965. Manya took over the family store, and raised her kids. She also told them all about her experiences -- every detail she could remember. It seems she had two missions if I’m reading this right: Never forget, and keep her family together.
Maybe a third: Embrace the life she was blessed enough to survive to live.
As an example, Rush wasn’t exactly Mayna’s kind of music to begin with, and she wasn’t thrilled with her son’s long 1970s rock star hair. But she embraced it all and became the band’s biggest fan.
Geddy has a great story about walking onto the stage in one auditorium in the 1970s, and seeing his sister in the front row -- along with his middle-aged, suburban, Yiddish-speaking mother. She politely declined a marijuana joint from another audience member, but passed it to his sister.
Then, on April 15, 1995, Geddy took his mother and siblings back to Germany, for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.
“When I stood there, my proudest moment was that I’m here, with my three children, and Hitler didn’t get all of us,” Mayna told an interviewer from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The proudest moment in my life.”
If you’re interested, you can find Mayna’s entire testimony here.
Some of it is very hard to hear given the details and the subject, but the “Part 3” recording talks about life after the war.
Amusingly, even after Mayna mentions “my son the rock star” several times, the interviewer never thinks to ask if he was in a band he might have heard of.
I’m also going to add one more anecdote, which isn’t really chronological, but it’s such a great story. It has to do with Mayna’s son Geddy’s name.
In short, he was originally named “Gary” (middle name, “Lee”). But with her accent, some of his friends thought her “R’s” sounded like “D’s.” So, “Gary” became “Geddy,” which became his nickname. Ultimately “Gary” took it a step further and officially changed it.
Honestly, that’s why I started on this whole story: Is there a better way to say “I love you” to your mom than to legally change your name to the way she mispronounces it, so nobody can ever again say she says it wrong?
There are a lot of fantastic quotes from Geddy Lee about music and artistry and passion. Here’s one to tuck away:
“There will always be pressure on you to compromise, pressure to sell your dreams short, and there will always be people who want you to be something that you’re not. But none of those things can happen without your permission.”
But given the theme today, and the fact that this story is more about Mayna (who died in 2021 at age 95) than Geddy himself, let’s go with something a little more topical:
“I feel that we’re living in an era that seems to have forgotten what can and will happen when fascism rears its head. I think we all need reminding of it in the face of those who either deny the past or never knew about it in the first place.”
7 optimistic moments from history this week
Sunday March 29: “It seemed unthinkable for me to leave the world forever before I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce.” — Ludwig van Beethoven, who on this day in 1795 walked onto a Vienna stage at age 24 and made his debut as a concert pianist.
Monday March 30: “Henceforth we live in a new world, breathe a new atmosphere, have a new earth beneath and a new sky above us.” — Frederick Douglass, born into slavery, responding on this day in 1870 to the adoption of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Tuesday March 31: “I ought to be jealous of the tower. It is more famous than I am.” — Gustave Eiffel, whose iron tower opened on this day in 1889 as the tallest structure on earth.
Wednesday April 1: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs, who on this day in 1976 co-founded Apple Inc. with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, with $1,300 in capital and no real idea what they were building toward.
Thursday April 2: “I don’t see why [women] couldn’t play ball. I know I always wanted to.” — Jackie Mitchell, Chattanooga Lookouts pitcher, who at age 17 on this day in 1931 retired Babe Ruth on three pitches, and then struck out Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. Baseball voided her contract shortly after, on the grounds that the professional game would be “too strenuous” for women.
Friday April 3: “The most quickly adopted consumer technology in the history of the world.” — Martin Cooper, the Motorola engineer who on this day in 1973 stood on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk and made the first call ever placed from a handheld cellular phone.
Saturday April 4: “We are not a war-making alliance. We are a peace-making alliance.” — NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, on the alliance founded on this day in 1949, when twelve nations signed a treaty committing to collective defense.