We lived in a small town or a largish village, let’s call it a township. There were several doctors, several lawyers, a post office and a courthouse.
My father was a clerk in the courthouse. He was a kind of secretary, or associate judge. He also had to process files dealing with guardianship. Among others, there was the case of a child, a girl, aged ten at the time of her parents’ death, who was turned over to a farmer, the owner of a large piece of property. He adopted her. She was a sturdy lass, and performed the work of a stable maid. She worked hard, but the farmer was dissatisfied and declared in court that he was not prepared to support her any longer, and that some other work would have to be found for her.
The other work that was found for her was in the home of a Melamed. ( A Melamed is a teacher who teaches in a Heder, a school in which Jewish boys, aged three to ten or twelve,  are introduced to Jewish prayers, customs and practice. They all sit in one room, and are all taught together by the Melamed.)
The name of this Melamed was Binem, a poor man, who had children of his own, all of whom were healthy except for one, a girl, who failed to develop and who, until her death at the age of eighteen, lay, slept and ate in her crib. She had to be watched constantly. And it was our Anna who took on this task.
From Anna’s descriptions I can picture the scene: In a small one-storeyed house there is a large room in which all the family’s activities, as well as Anna’s, take place. Long wooden tables, and similar benches, in addition to a stove, which during the winter months, scarcely sufficed to heat the room.
Petite’s crib (for that was her name) stood in one of the corners. I don’t know what the source of the name was, maybe from the French, “la petite”, the little one. Anna sat beside her, tending her round the clock.
Anna, who, year in, year out, had learned the Melamed’s syllabus, and knew the students’ uestions and answers, became an invaluable asset for the students. In order to avoid the much feared punishment (a whip with several leather straps that were knotted at the end), the children turned to Anna who, using signs and words, gave them the correct answers. Anna, who was illiterate, was very happy there. She loved the poor unfortunate creature with a motherly love; she learnt to speak Yiddish and of course, mastered the Melamed’s  entire syllabus. All went well until her charge died at the age of eighteen.
She was free and had to find work once more.
One day my father came home from the courthouse and told us that he had a problem, namely that he did not know where to find work for Anna. He consulted with my mother, saying that it would be advisable to take on Anna, as the housemaid we had was on the point of leaving to get married. My mother was not at all happy at the idea of taking on help from someone who knew nothing about housekeeping and had never lived or worked in a normal household. My father convinced her by saying that Anna was very pious, went nowhere except to church, did not keep company with menfolk; it should be given a trial and if it didn’t work out then some other work could be found for her.
And so one day Anna turned up in our house. She looked the archetype of a Ruthenic farmer’s girl, stocky, large-boned, ageless. She had a flat, weather-beaten face and masculine, hard workworn hands like anyone who had spent a lifetime out of doors tilling the land. Her eyes were of a pale blue hue and conspicuous for their roundness. She wore a peasant woman’s costume, a coarse white linen shirt with a little red embroidery, a heavy, colorful hand woven skirt, high-laced boots of the kind worn by men. Her smooth hair was combed straight back and was covered with a colored kerchief tied under her chin with a knot. She did not look anything like the pretty, young coquettish country girls who had been in our service up till then.
My parents were at a loss as to what to do with Anna. They set her to work on the farm, in the garden, doing minor repairs; she tried hard to do everything right, and so, gradually, she became part of our family. Not that she changed, that never occurred to her; we indulged her, and so she became increasingly confident in her relationship with us.
She helped in the kitchen, she didn’t know how to cook, but she prepared the fruit and vegetables. However, her  principal preoccupation in the kitchen was to supervise my mother so that everything that was prepared was strictly kosher. When Mother took the wrong knife or fork for the meat, Anna, noticing this offence, would take the utensil out of her hand with a reproachful look and immediately stick it into the soil of one of the many flower pots, where it had to remain for at least six hours in order to revert to its kosher state. I remember that one could always see large parts of our cutlery among our plants.
Anna spoke only Yiddish with us. (My parents spoke Yiddish, but not with us, the children, so as not to ruin our German).
Thus Anna became more and more a part of our family, to the amazement of our friends who simply could not understand how we could employ or approve of such an unsuitable person in our household. We did not understand this either.
In time, Anna even developed a religious obsession. I do not believe that “religious obsession” is a correct description of her deep faith in G-d. She did not go to church often; and when she did, she went to the parson to give alms. At the same time she often laughed at the people who came to the parson for his advice. She knew of only one supreme power, and that was    G-d, who was responsible for all mankind, including Jews.
Before the Jewish festivals, especially Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement, she used to be in an extraordinary state of mind; she dealt with all the preparations for the fast day, supervised the kitchen to make sure that everything was kosher and correct. For herself she bought a candle made of beeswax, the biggest and most expensive she could find, and took it to the synagogue where my parents prayed. Here there was a room strewn with sand in which people stuck their candles. This may have been the custom in small communities. At all events, people who looked into the room to make sure that all was well with the candles, knew that the finest, most expensive candle had been donated by Anna.
She also felt responsible for all the other festivals in our home. Whenever anyone said to her: “If you believe so deeply in the Jewish G-d, you should convert to Judaism”, she would say with full conviction: “One shouldn’t leave one’s religion.”
My parents were active in many charitable associations. There was an association for visiting the poor who were sick (in Hebrew: Bikur Holim), for helping needy brides (Hahnasat Kala), for those who were embarrassingly poor, and of course the Jewish National Fund for what was then Palestine, and numerous other causes.
Apart from this, my mother had other personal needs, of which my father was not to know anything. Anna became her trusted and dependable ally. On Thursdays as darkness fell, she went to buy food for the Sabbath and brought it to needy families, usually families with a large number of children, whose breadwinner had fallen ill or died.
Or, at times, someone would come to my mother to ask for a short term loan; these were usually small merchants, craftsmen or just someone who urgently needed some money. My parents were just the right persons for this. Not that they were rich, but they were always ready to help. My mother would invite the person concerned, set a cup of coffee and a piece of cake before them, and since there was no money in the house, my mother would give Anna a sign, which she immediately understood, to go to Old Lea, a woman who lent out money at an exorbitant interest. Anna brought the money, the person concerned went home gratefully and content with his interest-free loan, while mother paid Old Lea the usurious interest on the loan.
Our Anna also had an artistic vein, and she also liked to be the center of affairs. So for weeks she practiced swallowing fire. She had no idea how to do this, nor did she know anyone who did. She practiced more or less in secret, filling her mouth with kerosene, then exhaling it, while at the same time lighting a match. My father had strictly forbidden this, for fear that the entire house and those of the neighbors would go up in flames. All this was of no avail; one evening while we had guests, Anna stood in front of the windows of the living room,  and spewed fire. She was highly amused at the people who rushed up, thinking there was a fire. She was also in the habit of keeping a hatchet at her bedside. When asked what she needed the hatchet for at night, she said: “To frighten the Angel of Death.”
Time passed; people thought Anna was not normal, and that we were no better, since we accepted her with all her eccentricities.
One day the court at which my father worked was dissolved for reasons of economy and my father was transferred to a town near Czernovitz. The town was Sadigora, the center of the famous rabbinic dynasty of the Friedmanns.
My parents rented a large spacious apartment which even had a so-called servant’s room for Anna. She didn’t dream of installing herself here; instead she settled down in the kitchen. There was a bench on which she slept at night, and so, as always, she was at the center of events. In the meantime, we, my sister and I, had grown and went to Secondary School, had friends and kept a dog. The house was always full of guests, relatives came from the provinces and often spent the night with us. All this was supervised by Anna, who either approved or disapproved.
(picture) “Our Anna”. Photo by courtesy of Sidi Gross.
All went well until the Russians moved into Bukovina, and reached Czernovitz in 1940.This changed our lives in every respect. To begin with, we could not keep Anna; according to Soviet law she could not be in our service. But where was she to go to? So my father tried to arrange things by means of a document that he had ostensibly signed previously. In this document he confirmed that Anna could live in our country house till the end of her days. The ruse worked, the house was as yet unoccupied and she had a roof over her head. And so there passed a whole year of harassment on the part of the Soviet authorities, accompanied by fear of deportations to Siberia. Anna often came to see us, usually on foot, helping us wherever she could.
In 1941 war broke out between Russia and Germany; the German-Romanian army, headed by the notorious SS marched in and on the very first day began the annihilation of the Jewish and the local populations with the Romanians as willing assistants. There was no end to the carnage; they murdered whoever crossed their path. And then the Aktion was organized; groups of Jews were herded together, a hundred up to two hundred of them; they were taken to a place where they had to dig their own graves, and there they were shot.
During this awful period Anna was a great help to us. I don’t know what we would have done without her. She was our only contact with the outside world. She went out, almost always without money, yet never returned without bringing us something. She pillaged (hundreds of houses and shops were looted and deserted) or stole, and thanks to her we always had food. And what was equally important, she brought us news of the situation, of our friends and acquaintances, telling us who was still alive or had been shot or had been robbed. She also helped others; she traversed many miles on foot, in order to bring news or some sign of life from relatives, who were presumed dead. She did this in the face of constant danger to her life.
Thus we were exposed to the machine of murder of the German and the Romanian military and civil authorities. We wore the Yellow Star; most of the Jews were deported to camps in the Ukraine, only a few returned. In the wake of the battles the Russians returned, and it was they who now became the masters of our fate.
We now saw Anna less frequently; she was still living in our house, but the Russian military occupied it for a time, and then left. She had to be in the house so that it should not be thought that the house was ownerless; she also helped the occupying forces with a lot of the housework and was given food in return.
In 1946 we succeeded in emigrating to Ro-mania. We would dearly have liked to take Anna with us. But the emigration permits were valid only for Jews. Anna was already old and ailing and what could we have offered her in a place where we ourselves were refugees without any material means?
A cousin of mine who now lives in New York wrote to me about Anna’s subsequent fortunes.
This cousin had returned from the camp in 1944. Czernovitz had already been freed of the Germans and the Romanians, but the war was not to end for a long time yet. The indigenous Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Germans and the Romanians, now formed gangs of murderers, calling themselves  “Banderiwzi” after the notorious murder captain Bandera. The departing remnants of the German army had left them in the lurch. They could not go to Russia or the Ukraine, for there they would be convicted of high treason. So they murdered anyone who seemed dangerous to them. Their victims were all Jews who had somehow survived the death camps. My cousin who had come in order to see to the things that she had left for safe keeping with her neighbors before the deportation, first went to our house to see if Anna was still there and could put her up for the night. She found Anna together with several Jews whom Anna had hidden in the house. These three men and one woman, human ruins who had returned from the camp, sought asylum and protection from the murder gangs in Anna’s abode. They knew that Anna would not give them away.
Anna had been allotted a small plot of land, where she grew potatoes, cabbages, cucumbers …; she hauled the heavy sacks of vegetables  and cooked for these people. She would never accept any payment from them.
It was Anna who brought the mass grave of the Jews who had been murdered, to the attention of my cousin. The grave was covered with a very thin layer of earth. The entire town, including the murderers themselves, had selected precisely this Jewish mass grave as a garbage dump. During heavy rainfall, the bones of those murdered rose to the surface. Anna often went to this awful place and lit a candle in memory of the souls of these victims. She told of how one day one of the murderers came up behind her, and seeing her light a candle and saying a prayer, shouted at her saying: “If I come across you once more, I shall kill you; you will lie here with the Jews.”
My cousin and her brother, a doctor, who had in the meantime returned from the front, took all necessary steps in order to have the remains of those murdered, appropriately buried in a Jewish cemetery. It was an undertaking that entailed much effort, as the Soviet authorities raised difficulties, but they finally succeeded. The remains of the murdered Jews were interred in six large coffins; in addition there was a smaller coffin with the bodies of children. It was impossible to obtain permission to set up a grave in the Jewish cemetery. On the gravestone was the inscription that this was the resting place of Soviet citizens who had been murdered by the Fascists; not a word to say that they were Jewish.
Our Anna could not be present; she was in hospital; her condition was far from good. My cousin went to visit her; with an effort she got up from her bed and they sat on a bench outside in the sun and talked about us, especially of our mother, who as Anna said, had been as a mother to her too. She said that the time she spent with us had been the most beautiful period in her life; she would die contented if she could see us once more.
Taking leave of Anna was heartrending; she died a month later. The director of the hospital, who was a friend of ours, told us that he had seen to it that Anna would be given a dignified burial.
As for the question: Who actually was this Anna, our Anna? Maybe there is such a thing as a heavenly messenger, who came to help us and others in time of need, no matter in what guise?
I would like to hope so, and that our Anna has attained a place of honor among the righteous in heaven.
She was and she has remained a ray of hope in a sea of blood and tears, a sea in the midst of which, thanks to our Anna, we remained alive.