After 66 Years, Cousins Renew a Bond That Survived the Holocaust

In the years before World War II swept across Europe, a pair of lively little cousins lived just one street apart in Warsaw. A year apart in age, both were named Esther, after the grandmother they shared.

On Monday, as Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, the two -- 81-year-old Esther Fruchter of Los Angeles and 82-year-old Esther Nissenbaum, who lives outside Tel Aviv -- were reunited for the first time in 66 years. Each had found out only a day earlier that the other was alive.

Fruchter, visiting Israel with a group of Holocaust survivors from Southern California, made the chance discovery when Nissenbaum’s daughter Rivka Leibowitz saw the busload of elderly visitors arrive at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. She asked, as she always does when she encounters such groups, “Anyone here from Warsaw?”

Within moments, she and Fruchter had discovered their blood tie. They shrieked and fell into each other’s arms. Fruchter’s immediate family -- parents, brother and three sisters -- all died in the Treblinka camp, and she had not known that anyone in her extended family in Poland had survived.

It was then that Fruchter learned that her childhood companion was still alive, although partly incapacitated by a stroke.

Less than 24 hours later, Fruchter -- a tiny, indomitable figure dressed in bright red -- slowly made her way across a weedy yard outside a simple concrete home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. She reached the porch, where Esther Nissenbaum waited in her wheelchair, swaddled in a blue blanket.

“Shalom, Esther,” said Fruchter, her voice ringing out clear and strong. “Shalom,” said Nissenbaum, hers catching on a sob.

Fruchter bent down to touch her hair and embrace her.

Such reunions have been a feature of Israeli life for more than half a century. Yad Vashem and various organizations have amassed exhaustive records to help Europe’s calamity-scattered Jews find one another.

Every year, by diligent research or sheer luck, some of these long-separated survivors come together again.

But even those who were young at the outset of the Holocaust are now old and frail. Inexorably, as the years pass, such reunions are becoming more rare.

Clasping hands, the two Esthers lapsed into the Yiddish of their childhood.

“Do you know who I am?” Fruchter asked.

Her cousin gazed at her, momentarily disoriented. “I don’t recognize you,” she replied haltingly. “But you somehow seem familiar to me.”

Nissenbaum’s daughters recalled that before her stroke, their mother had told them childhood stories of her mischievous cousin and playmate. The little Esthers would giggle so much when they were together that they were sometimes ejected from class or solemn occasions.

Fruchter wept when she heard the names of Nissenbaum’s children, who were gathered on the porch -- all of them old family names, those of vanished aunts and uncles. As she listed the dead, one of the younger generation would pipe up, “That’s me.”

The day’s emotion took a toll. “It’s exciting,” Fruchter said. “But it’s painful, painful.”

Nissenbaum looked teary and confused at times, but broke at last into a brilliant smile.

“I feel wonderful. Never in my life have I felt so good,” she said. “This is family.”

Neither Esther could recall the last time she had seen the other. They agreed that it was probably in 1938. By then, they were teenagers, and their childhood bond had begun to fray.

Fruchter recalled, with a shade of disapproval nearly 7 decades old, that her cousin -- with whom she had shared the same last name as well, Himelblum -- had developed a precocious interest in boys, which she did not share.

Although intertwined in each other’s lives in Warsaw, the two families were wrenched apart by the looming conflict. Nissenbaum’s fled shortly before the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. They made a hardship-filled trek to the relative safety of Soviet Central Asia, living for much of the war in Tajikistan. Most survived.

Fruchter’s family was less fortunate. Separated from her parents and siblings, she found herself alone in the Warsaw Ghetto at 17.

“By then, I already felt so old,” she recalled. Later, a wandering ghost in the Polish countryside, she hid in the forest, occasionally finding work and shelter with farm families. She never saw her immediate family again.

After years in camps for displaced people, Fruchter and her refugee husband, Moshe, made their way to postwar America with their infant son.

Strangers in a strange land, they lived in Louisville, Ky., and Cleveland before arriving in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. They ran the 7th and Valencia Market in downtown L.A. until Moshe retired. He died four years ago.

Widowed and lonely, Fruchter began spending time with Cafe Europa, a weekly gathering for Holocaust survivors organized by the Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. This year, for the first time, the group arranged a trip to Israel to meet members of its sister Cafe Europa in Tel Aviv.

Hanging over the cousins’ reunion was the bittersweet knowledge that they might never meet again.

“We’ll write, and we’ll call,” said Fruchter, who was to leave for home Wednesday. “At least now I know I have family in this world.”