By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — “Nobody could ever wear a hat like Annie,” said Carl about his beloved Anneliese. She died twenty years ago, July 3, 1995—spared the digital terror and religious insanity of the 21st century.
Annie survived the Holocaust, outwitting Satan’s agents and the silence of a complicit world. Never mind: she emerged from her native Berlin and then wartime France with exquisite taste, dancing legs, and mouth-watering recipes. Nothing delighted her more than hosting a soiree. She had an ear for music and an eye for elegant art. Men adored her; Carl had her heart.
As a teenager, she outlived the detention horrors at Gurs, lost both her parents, and escaped into the French countryside of Alsace. God kept an eye on her; she found her way to America and into the strong arms of her future husband.
Annie responded to all of it with an inventive commitment to life and without a trace of bitterness. She sought neither revenge nor acclaim and she volunteered for a rainbow of causes without fanfare. Then on that sizzling day twenty years ago, she succumbed at home after a long and dignified battle with cancer.
She and I had many conversations as she transitioned from dancer to angel. Just before the illness began to truly drain her of her engaging vitality, she asked me: “Who has time for nonsense? Why do people waste precious time fighting with each other? You never saw such a fight as when I was a child in Europe. For what? I absolutely forgive everyone who has had an issue with me. We fight with each other and put our pride up in the way and then the people we loved all along suddenly disappear.”
There are some people who, stricken with bitter experience, turn it over in favor of an equivalent wisdom. They realize that our little day on this earth is ill-equipped to absorb all the platitudes and proclamations that are the children of anger.
I’m thinking of Anneliese Schäfer today—an anonymous human coordinate of peace in a world-graph of perpetual war. I see her dancing at her daughter’s wedding near the end of life, swaying with grace, wearing a magnificent bonnet—beyond the barbed wires of global hate and family intransigence.
I recall her sky-blue eyes as clear as the sky. I will look for those eyes when I get to the heaven so I might be better prepared to properly herald my own family members in some later eternity. If God could produce a person as pure as Annie, then there surely must be a heaven.
A few days before she died, I called Annie to share my prayers and my respect. I told her that I really wasn’t prepared to say good-bye—not necessarily the best or most helpful rabbinic protocol when talking to a hospice patient. Here’s what she said to me:
“Rabbi Ben, you are so thoughtful. But I am dying and it’s fine. I do appreciate your prayers for life and good things. Better you should save them for yourself. You still have time to use them. I don’t.” Her voice was a complete song of kindness.
Who could hear such a thing and not know there is a God?
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and a freelance writer. You may comment to him at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com or post your comment on this website provided the comment is civil and you identify yourself by full name and your city and state of residence.s