In a long life where joy has more than once been overshadowed by loss, Lena Goldstein has known countless examples of what might have been. She was supposed to have become a lawyer, but as a Jewish student in pre-World War II Poland she was prevented from completing her studies. She then enrolled in dentistry in Belgium but the war intervened before she had taken a single class. And from a once vast, extended family, she emerged from that war having lost almost everyone.
But last weekend she experienced the joy that can sometimes come with the unthinkable, as 120 people filled a flower-decked hall in eastern Sydney to mark her 100th birthday.
And gathered at one table, in that room heady with food and love, three generations of another family delighted in the unlikely ties that have bound them to this centenarian Holocaust survivor.
Lena was a 20-year-old student called Chaya Midler when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Confined to the Warsaw Ghetto, where 400,000-plus Jews were forced to live, by early 1943 she was one of just 35,000 still alive. By then, her boyfriend and both her parents were dead, and so was an elderly man who had found refuge with her family, sharing their meagre rations.
All but alone, in April 1943, disguised as a Polish woman on her way to work, she was able to leave the ghetto with the help of two guards. For the next two years, wearing the same blouse and suit all the while, she hid with three others in the darkest recesses of the city.
Read the article by Fiona Harari in The Australian.