I have so much to be thankful for this year and I know how lucky I am given what a rough year it’s been for so many people.
More than anything, I would like to thank my father. A little less than a year ago, I started him on a blog, and almost every day for 8 months, he shared the story of his life. I only ever knew the rough outline of what my father had lived through during the Holocaust and as an immigrant arriving in NYC as a teenager.
If you haven’t read any of it, and especially if you are feeling down-on-your luck today, please take a moment to reflect.
To me, this is still the most powerful moment in the story and the fact that this hunted child grew up to be my father, who is hosting 46 friends and relatives for Thanksgiving tonight still astounds me.
“The apartment became home, and it was there that I became conscious that my mother and I, as well as all the other unrelated adults who lived with us and with whom we lived, were prey, that there were people out there who wanted to kill us. While for the adults this was a strange and frightening situation, for me it was somehow natural. It was as if it had always been that way, and that it would always continue that way. That was simply the way the world was.”
–From “We Move”
And if you didn’t follow along while he was writing, here is the sequence of how it was that he came to America, nearly five years after the end of the war:
Thank you, dad, for sharing your story and for opening your heart and your life to so many people here in America.