Memory keeps a sister searching

Rose Toren sits at a table in a fashionable restaurant, hands folded in her lap, coiffed and dressed in the precise manner of the Beverly Hills matron that she is. It is only as I move closer that I am aware of the anger behind the placidity, an expression facing inward to a memory that is hard to vanquish.

She is a woman who still harbors a quiet rage toward the Nazis and what they did to her family more than 60 years ago. It isn’t hatred that she feels, Toren is quick to explain, because hatred is a demeaning emotion that, like an arsonist’s fire, can engulf and destroy the hater.

But she will never, not ever, forgive the brutality of the Nazis. And she will never, not ever, stop searching for the little sister she lost as war engulfed the world.

I had approached Toren on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, one of the most monstrous of Hitler’s death camps, but she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. She had refused invitations to attend memorials observing the anniversary because, as she says with a snap in her voice, “I wasn’t liberated. I escaped.”

She is a cultured woman in her mid-70s whose instinct for survival carried her through the darkest days of the war. Her father, brother and two sisters were murdered by the Nazis. Her mother died at Treblinka. One sister, Eda, two years younger than Toren, disappeared into the shelter of a starry night.

Toren has searched for Eda ever since and is convinced that the bright, teasing little sister, “beautiful enough to be a model,” is alive somewhere, and asks that I use the family name of Orenstein in case someone knows what happened to her or where she might be today.

The Germans were rounding up Jews after their quick conquest of Poland in the autumn of 1939. The Orensteins were living in a small town called Strzyzow, near Lubin, when soldiers came in the night, herded the family into a barn and ordered them to remain there until morning.

But Eda, just 12, wasn’t going to wait. “She said goodbye,” Toren says quietly, “and that was the last I ever saw of her.” Her father urged Toren also to seek safety, and she went to the home of a friend, whose family obtained papers that identified her as a displaced Polish Christian. The lie was a burden to her. She longed to reveal her own identity, to proudly exclaim that she was a Jew, but knew it would mean her death.

“I could tell no one who I was,” she says, “so I had no one. I would talk to the person within. I would pretend.”

Even when a co-worker at a factory turned her in, she still insisted to the Nazis that she was Christian. Uncertain, they sent her to Auschwitz, but the uncertainty kept her alive while others around her died. She remained there, ever close to extermination, until she fled into the forest while on a death march -- days before the camp’s liberation.

At the end of the war she came to the U.S., married and settled down. Her husband died in 1993. And through it all, Toren has never stopped searching for Eda. She has traveled to Poland four times, and was planning a fifth trip when I saw her the other day.

She learned of her family’s death during one of the trips. A woman who witnessed it told Toren that Nazi soldiers took them to a field. “They shot them,” the witness said. “They murdered them all.” But no one knew what happened to Eda. When Toren returned to Poland to look for her, the whole neighborhood where they had lived was gone. Only a sugar mill remained.

“I have a feeling Eda’s still alive,” Toren says, toying with her food in a restaurant of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “She was younger than me and I’m still alive!” It is said with a mixture of pride and defiance. Then: “I’ve been lucky. I don’t know why. Knock on wood.”

She avoided ceremonies observing the anniversary of Auschwitz’s demise not only because her freedom was created by her wits and not by liberation. “The memory makes me sick,” she says, as dinner ends. “I don’t like to think about it.” A long pause. “But I’ll never forget it.”

She has written two books, “Destiny” and “A New Beginning,” and both were difficult for her to compose because they reached into dark areas of her memory, where the threat of death followed like a bad dream. The books were written, she says, because just before he sent her running toward a new life, her father made her promise that she would tell their story.

Our conversation was equally hard for her. There were things she didn’t want to remember, and the anniversary brought back “all the living dead people” who inhabited Auschwitz. On the evening of the anniversary, she remained in her home. “I lit a candle,” Rosalia Orenstein says. “It was for my family. It was for everyone.”

Her expression softens, but then, as the moment passes, the sustaining rage returns, fixed on her face like a mask, as she gazes across the room at memories that are never very far away.