Transcript of interview with Esther Toporek Finder by Barbara Tabach, June 8, 2016

AN INTERVIEW WITH ESTHER TOPOREK FINDER An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ?Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV ? University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White Editors and Project Assistants: Maggie Lopes, Amanda Hammar iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader?s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE Esther Toporek Finder is a professor of psychology and has lived in Las Vegas, Nevada since 2010. She was born May 28, 1953, in Chicago, Illinois, and moved to Washington D.C. in 1979 after graduating with her Masters from the University of Chicago. While in Washington D.C, Finder was able to jump start her career as an oral historian recording Holocaust survivor stories with the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Shoah Foundation. Esther Finder is a second generation Holocaust survivor. Her passion for Holocaust education and its representation in society has led her to many opportunities to teach, facilitate, educate, create and contribute to many survivor oriented groups such as The Generation After where she was President for 15 years, the Holocaust Era Assets Conference as representation of the American survivor community, as well as the creation of the Generations of the Shoah International group in October 2002. When Finder moved to Las Vegas, she quickly and deeply involved herself in the Las Vegas Holocaust survivor community. She has been integral with Nellis Air Force Base?s Days of Remembrance, the opening the Generations of Shoah Nevada Chapter, and partnering with the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants to bring conferences to the Las Vegas Valley. In addition, she has been an organizer of commemoration programs for students attending UNLV and schools within the Clark County School District. Her involvement with the Governor?s Advisory Council on Education Relating to the Holocaust and the television series Eyewitness to History have highlighted the Holocaust survivors living in Las Vegas. In this interview, Finder discusses her childhood as well as the paths that led her to realize her passion for the Holocaust survivor community and her deep association with the community. She shares her experiences interviewing survivors and second generation survivors giving a deeper insight into the stories that they have shared with her over the years. In addition, she reflects on her long reach within the survivor community and brings to light the foundation of family being a survivor gives. Finder highlights the traveling, teaching and community service opportunities she has had over the years while enlightening people about the importance of countering hate through education. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Esther Toporek Finder June 8 and June 28, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Barbara Tabach Preface??????????????????????????????????..iv Session 1 Esther talks about her family background, and her individual family members involvement in the Holocaust as survivors; provides overview of her parents courtship, marriage and moving to the United States; Talks about her birth in Chicago and the large Jewish community of survivors in the city; Her mother?s death; Hearing stories in Yiddish and her experiences as a immigrant family; conversation about childhood experiences in Chicago as a Jewish child going to public school; Explanation of her mother?s visible scars from a war injury in 1945??????.1 ? 6 Talks about her Father?s tattoo removal and the personal interviews that she would conduct of his stories; Esther speaks about the disconnect between American and Jewish immigrants during the war; shares her experiences about growing up not feeling able to talk about her family history until college at Hebrew University; Organizing a student-orientation-seminar about the Holocaust in 1975?????????????????..???????????.7? 10 Esther recounts her experiences in college; Declaring psychology as her major and grad school at the University of Chicago; Her marriage to Charlie, the son of two Holocaust survivors; Moving forward with her life as a child of survivors; The birth of her child; She speaks about the sole burden of memory for survivors without family; Survivor guilt and rebuilding lives??...11? 16 Moving to Washington, D.C in 1979 or 1980. Volunteering at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum; Esther begins to work in oral history interviewing survivors; shares stories and interviews from other survivors she has learned over the year, about nightmares, replacement children, and botched surgeries. Shares interesting story about being lied to during the interviews and others faking their child?s funeral to escape the concentration camp???????.17? 21 Esther recalls her time volunteering with Steven Spielberg; Working with the Shoah Foundation in the mid 1990?s; Dealing with the emotional burden of interviewing over 200 survivors; Being trusted and spoken to freely because she is ?one of ours?; Interview with a spy in World War II who was credited by Eisenhower for shortening the war?????????????.22? 27 Esther recalls working with government agencies, like the Pentagon and The State Department; Represented the American survivor community at the Holocaust Era Assets Conference in 2009; She became president of the Generation After; stories of children of survivors; caring for aging vi parents with dementia; Comments on her father?s elderly years; Her time in Prague speaking about aging survivors; Writing for various worldwide papers; Working with Nellis Airforce Base; Moving to Las Vegas???????.?????????????????.28? 35 Holocaust survivors in Las Vegas; Survivor Community networking and organization formation in Las Vegas; Starting Generation of Shoah Nevada in 2002; Esther shares her thoughts on generational overlapping; Poverty in the survivor Jewish Community; Speaks of local chapter of GSI, Generations of Shoah Nevada; Facilitating the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants Conference in 2013; Provides insight into the feelings of the survivors in regards to the Arizona Cattle Car Exhibit; Assisting with the AHO Conference??????????????.?????????????????.36? 48 Provides an overview of her time working with UNLV; Creating I.D Cards for her family members for the U.S Holocaust Museum; sharing histories of non-Jewish Holocaust survivors; She speaks on policies on interviewing family members and shares a personal story from her father?s experience; Esther remarks about the proper timing to educate children on Holocaust;; Shares her involvement in the creation of Eyewitness to History in Las Vegas and interviews with local survivors????????????????????????????.49? 56 Esther discusses Brett Levner?s project and her honorable mention by the Jewish Family Service Agency; She discusses her inability to watch Holocaust films; speaks about the lasting legacy of the Holocaust; Mentions the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiments and there relation to the human condition; using the holocaust to enrich education; she shares personal stories of her father?s flashbacks???????????????????????.57? 66 Session 2 Esther shares experiences in Las Vegas; working with the March of the Living Program; speak of her family lineage; Esther provides examples of the Adelson?s involvement with the survivor community Hanukkah parties as well as Birthright Israel Trips; Esther?s experiences with Elie Wiesel?????????????????????????????????.67? 74 Talks of her time working with creating the Holocaust Education Seder in 2014-16; Discusses celebrating Passover and Yom Kippur during the Holocaust; Spoke about the Kristallnacht and added additional details of the impact the Arizona Cattle Car Exhibit????????.75?83 Reflects on her meeting with the son of a German Nazi Guard and a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto; outlines her role in the facilitation of bringing a variety of speakers to talk with students during conferences in Las Vegas; reminisces about her days editing books and writing recipes for the Holocaust Survivor Cookbook as well as contributing to films; Discusses her time training speakers to speak about the Holocaust???????.??????????.84?93 Her presidency of the Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada; Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, Remember a Child, Twinning and Adopt a Survivor; Comments on the benefit of technology today for education; comments on mandates in schools to teach the Holocaust????.94?102 vii Outlines the survivor population in Las Vegas; shares her reasons for coming to Las Vegas in 2007 and details her love for the city; Remembers how she became involved with the Las Vegas Survivors Groups; Discusses the reasons behind the large migration of survivors to Las Vegas; Esther explains the ?survivor hierarchy?; Recalls her visit to Poland with her Father and visiting his childhood home; Passion for supporting education; Immigration process of her parents in 1949; Stories about how she learned to speak English?????..????????.103?116 Esther discusses how survivors got their skill sets for working after the war; Reveals the emphasis on importance of education within a survivor family; Shares places she has been privileged to speak; Talks about the popularity of the Jewish Repertory Theatre and her time in Washington D.C working with many embassies; Esther reminisces about being an oral historian; Concludes with countering hate through education???????????????.117?132 Index?????????????????????????????????.133-135 Appendix: Photos?????????????????????????????137 ? 138 Pledge of Acceptance for Yom Hashoah??????????????????.139 Caring for Our Aging Parents: Prague 2013??????????????.140 ? 148 Op-Ed: Should the killers be the victims? heirs?...................................................149 ? 150 Prague Presentation June 28, 2009??????????????????.151 - 163 1 SESSION 1 Today is June eighth, 2016. This is Barbara Tabach and I'm sitting with Esther Finder. Esther, spell your full name for us. Esther is E-S-T-H-E-R. My maiden name is Toporek, T, like Tom, O-P, like Paul, O-R-E-K. I've said that so many times in my life. My last name is Finder, F-I-N-D-E-R. We're sitting in your home in Henderson for the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage project. I'd like to start, like I usually do with everyone, with some sense of your ancestry. As far back in your roots as you can go back to?give us a feeling for that. And get us to the United States from wherever your family began. My parents were both born in the same little town in Poland called Lask, L-A-S-K. I actually went there once and it was a very small town, not a little village. Before the war I think there were seven thousand people in the whole town. Both of my parents survived the Holocaust. My grandparents did not survive. So I never knew my grandparents. Both of my parents were fortunate enough to survive with siblings. My mother survived with a brother and a sister. My father was one of five brothers to survive. Now, they both lost siblings and they both lost their parents, but I had aunts and uncles and cousins, which in the survivor community is remarkable, very unusual. Both of my parents had been in the ghetto in this little town for a little while. My dad was taken as slave labor very early, as a teenage boy. My parents were sixteen when the war started. My dad was in about twelve camps. I can only remember the names of eleven of them. One was a camp that he passed through in transit during the death march. I cannot remember the twelfth camp, but I have a list of the other eleven. My mother was in the Lodz ghetto until that was liquidated. Lodz was a big city nearby 2 and that's where they sent some of the Jews from the town. So my mother was in Lodz ghetto until that was liquidated. Both my parents went through Auschwitz. Both my parents were part of the death march. After the war they met. They didn't know each other before the war. After the war they met and got married and came to the United States. They were en route, I believe they were en route to Colorado, but they stopped in Chicago. My mother was pregnant with my brother at the time and she just wanted to stop moving. And she had a sister in Chicago. One of her sisters survived and one of her sisters didn't. The one that survived had already moved to Chicago. So my mother and father stayed there and that's where I later was born and grew up. Chicago. It has a large Jewish? My kind of town. ?population. Did you grow up in a typical Jewish Chicago community? I grew up in Lincolnwood, Illinois, and I went to high school in Skokie. So when the Neo-Nazis were there to march, I was out there with a picket sign. My brother and I were out there basically keeping an eye on my dad because we thought he might punch somebody. But we were out there. That was a Nazi march that never materialized. But, yes. Skokie, a lot of survivors in Skokie. That's why they deliberately picked that community for their march. Can you give us details of that what you remember? How old would you have been? I'm trying to remember. I don't remember too much about it. It was after my mother died. My mother died when I was in high school. It was after my mother died. We were more worried about my dad than we were about the Nazis because there were a lot of people around. We just wanted to make sure that he didn't have a heart attack or he didn't hit anybody or nothing bad happened to him. That's where my focus was that day. Then the Nazis never showed up; the 3 Neo-Nazis never showed up, which was fine with me. Right, yes. Did your parents share about their history with you willingly, freely? How did you learn that they were both Holocaust survivors? They didn't talk to us directly too much. But because they both had family, they would share stories about?and they're from the same town?they would share stories about their childhood and their upbringing, but they usually did it in Yiddish, not in English. Whenever they talked about the war...For them the war happened in Yiddish, not in English. So they spoke quite fluently about it with each other. There were a lot of other survivors in the community and survivor community networks. If you want we can talk more about that. The survivor community really networks. And so they would talk with each other and they would share their experiences with each other and they would knock each other out with their stories. "How did you survive this," and, "What happened?" If they knock each other out, what should we say when we hear some of these things? But they didn't talk about them to us directly. So we would sometimes be in the other room listening. I understand kitchen table Yiddish. I don't speak the language. I was growing up during the days of the great American melting pot where everybody was encouraged to discard their ancestry and their customs and their languages and join the great American melting pot. So I kind of threw that away with both hands and I am sorry. I understand a lot of Yiddish. Again, but it's kitchen table Yiddish. I don't know the language of the camps. I'm not sure that there's a vocabulary for that in any language. Certainly there isn't one in English. And we can talk about that later, too, if you want. So my brother and I would hear some of the stories through that. My mom started to tell me stories about her childhood because she wanted to connect with me as she was also a young 4 girl once growing up. On top of the survivor family experience, we also had the immigrant experience. I was born in this country, but my parents were not. There were some issues that made me look at my parents as if they had come from another planet. They were different. They didn't speak English the way other parents spoke English. I remember somebody calling my house once and my dad picking up the phone. And right on cue, there goes the phone. [Pause in recording] Right on cue, the phone. Somebody called my house, one of my classmates, and my dad picked up the phone. When I got on the line, the first thing she said was, "Who was that? He talks funny. What kind of accent is that?" And I said, "What accent? That's just his voice. That's not an accent." That was the first time I realized that my parents had an accent and that wasn't just their voice. I didn't have grandparents and when I was growing up nobody that I was playing with as a kid had grandparents because I was mostly meeting other children of survivors because that's who my parents associated with mostly. So none of us had grandparents. So when I started public school, I had this conception that Jews don't get grandparents. When I met other kids in school and they were Jewish and they had grandparents, it was like, how did you get those? How come I don't have any? I just didn't get it. As a little kid I just didn't get it. I must have asked, how come I don't have grandparents? I don't remember, but I had to have. My parents must have told me that of course they had parents, but they weren't alive anymore, and they spared us the details. My mother had to start to tell me about her history because she had a wound that was visible. My mother had a dent in her shoulder, like an L cut out of her shoulder, and I could see 5 it. When I was a little girl, she started to take me with her shopping. She'd take me to a dress store, whatever. I'd say, "What is that?" She could never wear anything without sleeves because of the dent in her arm. So my mother was old-fashion; she only wore dresses, never wore pants. I think once I remember seeing her in pants and she was very uncomfortable and she put a dress back on right away. But she used to get dresses and because she was short there was always a hem that had to be shortened. She would take some of the material from the hem and make a cap sleeve and that's how she covered that. So I could see that and I asked her, "How did that happen?" Then the stories started coming out. The story of that particular injury was that towards the end of the war, April '45, my mother and her surviving sister were part of a transport and the women were left locked inside cattle cars and the train was abandoned because there was Allied bombing run. The car next to my mother's sustained a direct hit. Everybody in that car blown away. One wall of my mother's car also blown away. So the women in my mom's car could leave. They could run. But my aunt was pinned in the debris. My mother wasn't going to leave her sister. So she was digging her out, trying to free her from the debris and while she was doing that one of the walls started to fall and the wall was coming right to my aunt's face. So my mother put up her shoulder and took the full weight of the wall in her arm. My aunt was unconscious. She had no memory of this. So that's how she got...She almost lost her arm. The doctors were able to save her arm at the end of the war. So this was again April of '45. She managed to get her sister free. The women that were still alive from this bombardment and being locked in the train had gone to the woods and they were liberated by the Russians. There was a Jewish captain with this Russian unit and he kind of took care of my mom and some of the other women and my mom started to get some medical care. She was 6 really very sick after the war after years of being starved. They thought she had tuberculosis, which apparently she did not have, but they thought she did. She had the injury to her arm and she almost lost her arm. So she was in pretty bad shape after the war. But that's why she had this dent. When I started to ask her how did that happen, I started to hear the truth. In a way, I'm lucky with that too because a lot of my brothers and sisters in the survivor community, their parents' scars were on the inside only and they didn't get to see them. They just saw the effects of the wartime experiences. I got to see a physical wound and it made it very real, very concrete. So in a way that kind of helped me understand a bit better even as a kid. I knew something bad had happened to my parents, but I didn't really know what. My mom preferred to talk about pre-war childhood stuff, the good times. So did you talk with your cousins and your peers or brothers and sisters of the survivor community as you refer to them, which makes a lot of sense? Did you talk amongst yourself about it, do you recall? Not when I was little. That came more college, grad school kind of thing. In fact, when I was in?so let me go back and finish answering the other question and then I'll go back because that was my mom. After my mom died?as I said, my mom died when I was in high school?my dad realized that my mother had told me some stories about the war and it was like the dam burst; he just started talking and talking and talking. So he had not spoken to you? No. ?about his personal experiences? He had not. He had not. The only thing on my dad was he had his tattoo surgically removed. 7 He didn't want to look at it anymore. But one of his brothers was in Chicago?actually, a couple of his brothers lived in Chicago. The two of them had been in the camp together and they had consecutive numbers. So I saw my uncle's tattoo. My dad was one forty-five one eighty-three; that was his number. And his brother was one forty-five one eighty-two. So I could see what the tattoo looked like and I could see where my dad had the scar. It was a great big scar on his arm. He just didn't want to look at it anymore. So that's how my dad started. Once he started?now he's not well; he doesn't speak anymore. But for a long, long, long time he would tell me stories and I would be more than happy to listen as much as I could stand. I will tell you one little episode. I was pregnant with my older daughter and I went to Chicago for a visit. My dad said, "Come on, we're going to set up the camera and I'm going to tell you my story." No warning. No preparation. I guess my dad, he just wanted to talk and he wanted someone to talk to. So it was a very awkward setup, homemade filming kind of thing, no extra lighting. So every time my dad turned his dead, his nose grew like Pinocchio because of the shadows. And the phone rang and someone came in and brought us food. Lots of unprofessional touches. But my dad started to tell me things that he never told anybody else. And I must have turned pale because at one point he looked at me and he said, "Maybe we should stop this. I can see you can't take it." And I was determined that that was never going to happen to me again. For every other interview I've done, and I've done a couple of hundred, I was prepared and I had braced myself for what I knew I'd be walking into. Some of those interviews, if you want later, I'll tell you about. There were a couple of interviews that knocked me down and I couldn't work for another six weeks. I couldn't do any more interviews. I was just destroyed. But that first time with my 8 dad gave me a real wake-up call and I was never so unprofessional again. It's your parent, though. And that's why they don't let you interview family members. My dad was willing to tell me things that he didn't tell anybody. He has since been interviewed several times. He didn't tell anybody else. Some of these stories were just horrific. Fortunately for me I'm limited by my imagination. I can't conceive of doing some of the things that were done. I don't think in those terms. That's my protection. Here he's knocking down my barriers and telling me stuff that for me is inconceivable. When you reflect on that do you have any sense about what was happening to him at that time? What tripped the trigger for him that he felt he was ready to tell you that story? I think my mother had told him to dial it down and not talk to the kids about the war. I know after my mom died he had said that he had wanted to put a memorial in the backyard to the Jews that were killed in the Holocaust and my mother said, "No, I'm not raising my children on a cemetery." So from that conversation I am assuming?and I could be totally wrong?I am assuming that she asked him not to say anything. I think also for some survivors?and now we can get back to your other question?for some survivors, their kids didn't want to ask them and some survivors' families, the kids couldn't hear the stories. So I guess he didn't know if it was okay or not okay. When the survivors first came to this country they were asked to talk about the war years and when they started the Americans said, "No, no, no, stop. We had it bad here, too; I couldn't get nylons." Whatever. And the survivors looked at them like they were crazy. What do you mean you couldn't get nylons? People were starving to death. They were dropping dead from starvation. And I'm supposed to feel pity that you couldn't get nylons? There was that 9 disconnect. So what you're referring to is maybe a casual conversation that some women might be having over coffee about what they were doing during the war? No. They used to ask the survivors. They would ask. They would directly ask, okay. They would directly ask, but they weren't prepared for the answers. And the answers were horrific. There's no question the answers were horrific. It was, again, beyond what normal people can fathom. The Holocaust was a bottomless evil. We're talking about the stories that the survivors tell. Think about what stories the victims could have told. Anyway, you asked if I talked to my brothers and sisters about it. Among the camp survivor offspring, I'm one of the younger ones. My parents were not child survivors. My parents were sixteen and a half when the war started; they were twenty-two or so when the war ended. So they're not considered child survivors. They were young adults. My mom was sick for five years after the war and there were no children for five years after the war because she was in and out of hospitals. There wasn't much left. She had been starved and beaten and she had a wall fall on her. She had all kinds of things happen to her. My brother, my sister and I were all born in this country after the war. A lot of my brothers and sisters in the survivor community were born in DP camps. After the war there was a huge population explosion. The DP camps had the fastest growing Jewish birth rate in the world. They were embracing life again. They were, many cases, trying to replace lost families. So I'm one of the younger ones of that set of survivors. So when I was growing up, there wasn't really anybody talking about it yet. Certainly no teachers would talk about it. I remember in high school I asked about it. My teacher dodged that question so fast. I don't think he was 10 prepared for it. In college I started asking and nobody would answer me. So I took myself up and I went to the Hebrew University and I studied the Holocaust over there for a while. I took one summer and studied at the Hebrew University because there was nobody here doing it yet. When I came back?and this was at Northwestern?when I came back, my senior year I organized a student-organized seminar?it was an SOS, they call it, student-organized seminar?on the Holocaust. I brought professors from different departments in to help me. I had a sponsor who was from sociology. He was new to the sociology department. Just as a footnote, years later my daughter went to Northwestern and she had the same professor at the end of his academic career. Bookends. So to give it some sort of historical context, what years are we talking about there? We're talking about around 1975. I had put together this course and I brought somebody from the history department. I brought somebody from the speech department to talk about propaganda. I had somebody from the sociology department. I brought different people in and we took an interdisciplinary approach to looking at this history. I still wanted more and more and more answers because I couldn't understand why this could happen, how this could happen, how could people do this to each other? I'm sure that they had a lot to do with my choice of going into psychology. There are many of us in the second generation, children of survivors, who went into psychology or social work or therapy of some kind. I think we are probably disproportionately represented in those areas. I don't know if anyone's done a formal study, but my guess is that we're just disproportionately represented in those. Anyway, it wasn't until I got to grad school at the University of Chicago when I started talking with other brothers and sisters, other children of survivors. That was a time when people 11 started doing the rap groups. If I'm dating myself, I'm older than dirt. [Laughing] But I found a couple of people who were also children of survivors and that was the first time I really formally sat down and talked with other people. I'm sure I must have had conversations with my cousins and siblings when I was growing up, but I don't remember anything really remarkable. I found out later that some of the experiences that I had were shared by other children of survivors. I started at that point and I just never?okay. I started in grad school. I put all of this away for a while and I started my career and I finished my studies and I started teaching and put it all away. I got married. I married somebody who is also the son of two Holocaust survivors. Oh, really? Interesting. And I felt quite comfortable. In many ways my husband and I were finishing each other's sentences because we had similar experiences although his parents had totally different fallout after the war. His father, may he rest in peace, was the only survivor in his family. His mother was also the only survivor. She never really talked about it. She doesn't talk about it now either. Her experience was such that compared to what other people went through, she felt a little guilty that she had it relatively easy. She was in labor camps, but she was never in an extermination camp. Whereas both of my parents had been in Birkenau even for a short period of time, she had just been in labor camps. My husband's mother was in the camps with Gerda Weissmann Klein. So in Gerda's book All But My Life, she mentions my mother-in-law and that's how I found out my mother-in-law's story. When I first met her, I asked her, and she said, "Oh, my girlfriend wrote a book." When I found out, "Gerda is your girlfriend?" My mother-in-law gave Gerda a few sheets of paper on her eighteenth birthday in the ghetto. My mother-in-law was at Gerda's birthday party. Gerda used to write little plays and stuff and my mother-in-law was one of her actresses. 12 Oh, really? Yes. What is your mother-in-law's name? Ruth. Her maiden name is Singer. Interesting. Yes. So that's how I... How did you and your husband meet? We'll segue off this a little bit. We're going to always come back to this theme. How did we meet? We have a mutual friend who was also second-generation, one of the people I started speaking with in grad school as part of this rap group. This is in Chicago that you met. Yes. He was in medical school in Chicago and I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago. She grew up with him. Their mothers were in the same concentration camp. That makes them family. So she introduced us. It wasn't a fix-up. She told us, "Oh, no, n