‘Sunshine’ Never Sets on Her Devoted Circle of Friends

“You know, some people don’t understand that you do something for nothing,” she is saying. “That is a sad, sad thing.”

This she punctuates with a shake of her head and a tired resignation in her voice as she asks me not to publish her name. Her memories, horrific and heroic, are sacred. She doesn’t want to peddle them for fame. “Whatever I did, I did it anonymously. It is between me and God.”

She is an old woman now, bedridden for the past eight months. Bones jut from beneath her skin, which seems draped across her small frame. Her long fingers are topped with perfect coral petals, the manicure fresh. The hairdresser will arrive in a few days.

“So don’t look at my hair,” she says, her Hungarian accent thick. The coral petals reach instinctively for the dark-gray strands on her head. Here, the vanity ends.

I have come to this small apartment in Fullerton because of the old woman’s pastor, her friends, her doctor, people who have heard of her through a “stories of faith” series in their Sunday school class. They told me about her extraordinary life, about how much she gives back, in friendship and in prayers.

It is her thank-you for the privilege of waking up each day.

I have no documents, no hard proof that the old woman’s memories are true. Papers are lost, pictures destroyed, many people are dead. I believe her, however, as I write down the names and dates she supplies and listen to her voice crack under the weight of calling such reminders up.

Her hand shakes as she reaches for a cigarette, a Kool, when she talks about her children, a boy, 3, and a girl, 1. They were killed in an Allied bombing raid that flattened the family home in Kolozsvar, Hungary, in World War II. The city, now in Romania, is called Cluj today.

“It’s so hard for me to talk about, because even after so many years, they are in my heart,” she says.

The old woman’s pastor had quoted Hemingway when he wrote me about his friend. “The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places,” he said.

She was to have been a doctor; when war broke out she was studying for her degree. Her first husband, a physician who was working for the Red Cross during the war, was killed when the Russians captured the train he was on. He was a lung specialist. His assistant was a Jew, forced by the Nazis to wear a yellow star.

“I did not have the heart to let him be taken away, so I hid him,” she says. “I did it for him, as a human being. There is no other reason. If I would need help, I knew they would go out of their way for me. I was not poor then as I am now. I had connections and so forth.”

She says the underground got the man out. His life was saved. But before that, the Gestapo tortured her for eight days. She never told them where she had stashed the doctor.

“They put needles under my fingernails,” she says. “They hit me in the mouth, and they brought on the big German shepherd dogs, which bit me on the breast, on the nipple.”

Years later, after arriving in Canada as a domestic worker, she had plastic surgery on her breast and dentures fitted to replace the teeth that she had lost.

“I remember people said to me, ‘A doctor’s wife is a housemaid. Aren’t you ashamed?’ I said, no. I didn’t lay down. I could have made it easy, have an American boyfriend and lay down for a chocolate bar. But no, I was a housemaid and proud of it. Work should never bring you shame if you are doing it the honest way.”

And many people, she says, have helped her out. There was her husband’s best friend who made sure she was on the last freight train out of Kolozsvar before the Russians arrived. She was in the hospital then recovering from emergency abdominal surgery.

Later, an American Army colonel at a transit center gave her papers to travel. In Canada, a doctor paid her tuition to McGill University, where she studied to become an industrial engineer. A chance encounter on a Canadian street brought her news that her brother was in California, and she came here.

She married again, to a doctor, an OB-GYN. “He delivered half of Fullerton,” she says, finally with a laugh.

She looks at his black and white portrait on the dresser before her bed. “He used to play Santa Claus at the church,” she says, smiling still. “He had such a deep laugh.” He has been dead for 14 years.

The old woman and I talk some more, about her work in Anaheim as an industrial engineer, her thousands of hours of volunteer work as a “guild lady” at St. Jude Medical Center, about people asking her is she a Jew, or a Catholic or what, and about her belief that none of that really matters because there is only one God.

“But there is one thing,” she says. “You cannot expect and take it for granted that God will help you. You have to help yourself and then God will help you.”

I have promised the old woman that her name will not appear here, nor those of the people whom she helped. I would have liked to have published them; I think it is important that people know. I ask her if there is a pseudonym that she would like me to use.

Her head goes back now, her eyes close and when they open, they are moist with tears.

“Sunshine,” she says, “because my life is a sunshine, even now that I am incapacitated. God always gave me the best support that anybody can have. Right now, I am at the stage where whenever God calls me, I am ready to go.”

“Is there anything else?” I ask. “Something that I have overlooked?”

“I love you,” she says.