KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
Jew in the group. Leon Rubinstein and Aharon met in March or April of 1945, a month or two before the war ended and after Rubinstein’s Russian protectors had been killed on missions, leaving the boy to fend for himself. Rubinstein recalled, “I was walking on a street in Rov- no, probably by myself, wearing a Russian uniform and carrying a machine gun when Aharon saw me and looked me over. An open- minded fellow, he started a conversation with me in Russian and, once he realized that I was Jewish, he took me home to introduce me to his aunt and uncle.” When they arrived at the modest apartment in a crowded refugee building, he said, “Chava was cooking soup with herring, pota- toes, and perhaps some onion. Salt and spices were hard to find, and the herring was enough to make the soup taste good. In the Russian army, our diet had been mostly horrible tasting dried po- tatoes, sliced about an eighth of an inch thick, and canned foods. Nothing was fresh; even the cheese was canned. Food was terribly scarce and there was no bread and no milk. We ate a lot of sar- dines, canned cheese, and dried potatoes. Chava’s bowl of soup was wonderful.” In the apartment, there was a broken sewing ma- chine which Rubinstein recalled trying to fix. He was introduced to someone there who had papers for himself and his missing daugh- ter to leave Poland for “somewhere else, perhaps England,” and was desperately searching for the girl. He eventually let Rubinstein travel with him and use her papers, perhaps persuaded by Usher Edelman. “This man — I never knew his name, which was not un- usual because many people preferred anonymity — and I traveled together by train,” said Rubinstein, “but sat in different comers so that we wouldn’t look suspicious. After a full day and night we ar- rived at Bitom. We went to the address the man had been given, but it was after midnight and the people wouldn’t let us in, so we slept in the hallway. The next morning, we parted ways and the people there brought me to an orphanage in Bitom. A couple of years later, I bumped into the man I had traveled with and learned that he never corners
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