Who we are

Imshin links to this amazing story about two women who met by chance on a bus in Haifa. In Israel. This is an extraordinary account. But, incredibly, it's not as unusual as you might think.

The words came pouring out. The stranger was Bracha Karwasser, formerly Horowitz from Warsaw. After the war, Bracha, 19, was desperately searching for clues to the whereabouts of her two older sisters. An acquaintance had seen Hanna alive in December 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau. So Bracha set off for the now-liberated camp of hell. There she sought her sister, first among the living and then among the corpses, in the open pits of the dead. No trace. On that cold, dark day in Auschwitz, the spirit that had sustained Bracha through the war, through flight and hiding and pretending, was suddenly gone.

She was all alone with nothing left to live for.

At the moment of her greatest despair Bracha had noticed Shari Grossman, a woman so beautiful that even in her worn and emaciated state she was remarkable.

"Stay here. Sleep with us," the angel with turquoise eyes and jet-black hair urged her.

Two tiny, emaciated little girls clung to Shari's skirt. One of the girls was very weak and had a tendency to faint. All Shari could offer was a space near them on the hard planks of the old camp barracks. But to Bracha, that was a lot. "Just having someone speak to me kindly and know that someone cared changed everything," she said.

Later, Shari invited Bracha to remain with her and the girls. A cousin who'd survived as a partisan from Yugoslavia would take them back to Slovakia. Bracha could be part of their family.

"I was still hoping that someone from my family might turn up, so I refused your mother's kind offer," Bracha explained. "But I've never forgotten her kindness. At my darkest moment, she gave me the fortitude to carry on."

Two weeks ago on Tisha B'Av, my friend, Tuvia Chaim Ariel, passed away and was buried in Tekoah, a yishuv (settlement), in Israel. . . .

Several years ago Tuvia Chaim made aliya and worked in a kibbutz factory that made baby formula powder. Due to an accident with a grinding machine, he lost his right leg above the knee. Undaunted, Tuvia Chaim studied and became a tour guide.

One morning he picked up a man from New York at Ben Gurion Airport to bring him to Jerusalem. The man was bedecked in gold chains and had an overbearing attitude. On the way to Jerusalem it became obvious to Tuvia Chaim that theirs was not a match made in heaven. Tuvia Chaim pulled the van to the side of the road and told the man that he would get him a different tour guide. The man responded, "Listen, you think I'm just your typical overbearing New York Jew with gold chains -- I paid my dues." The man then rolled up his sleeve to expose a tattoo from Auschwitz which ended with the numbers "7402". "I lost my mother, my father and all my brothers and sisters."

Tuvia Chaim looked at the man's tattoo and turned white. In the carpentry shop on his kibbutz there worked a man who escaped from Auschwitz, fought with the Polish partisans and later made his way to Palestine to join the Haganah. The man also had a tattoo on his arm -- a number that ended with the same last four digits of Tuvia Chaim's Social Security number and coincidentally his telephone number -- "7401".

"Did you have a brother named 'Zalman'?" asked Tuvia Chaim.

"Yes, but how could you know that?" replied the shocked man.

"Was he tattooed before you or after you?" persisted Tuvia Chaim.

"Before me, but why?" responded the puzzled man.

"I think your brother is alive," answered Tuvia Chaim and with that he made a U-turn on the old Jerusalem road and headed back to his kibbutz near Lake Tiberias to reunite the two brothers in what my friend described as "the most emotional, God-filled moment of his life."

Helluva small world, ain't it?