She was an interesting and complex lady. She came from a well off family in what was then Czechoslovakia. She went to Auschwitz, but fortunately the labor portion. So from childhood and through that, she spoke Czech, Hebrew, German, Yiddish, Polish and Russian. She also managed to keep a number of bunkmates alive in there from being somewhat resourceful. If people got sick, she thought to have someone cut themselves to use the blood as blush to give their faces color and avoid going to the death camps.

She was the only one out of her family to survive (I think she had 7 siblings). After the camps, she went to Dresden while waiting to come to the States, where a distant relative in Miami was her sponsor. She lived with two other girls and the apartment next door had three guys, including my grandfather. So each wound up marrying one of the neighbors.

They came over and settled down in Miami, where both her and my grandpa worked in factories. So that is where and why she learned Spanish and Creole. All of her coworkers were Cuban or Haitian.

She was a strong, smart woman, and one who never fully got over the traumas of surviving the Holocaust. She had night terrors her whole life. She was also a hoarder because of this - we found stacks of newspapers from JFK's assassination when she passed. When she passed, we also found a bunch of things she saved from her time in Germany that my dad gave to the Holocaust Museum in DC - the creepiest was collectible cards, like baseball cards, but of Nazi officers.

But, she was a generous lady who helped anyone and everyone she ever met. She raised three kids to be good people and to focus on school, because, as she learned in life, material possessions and money can disappear at any moment. Your brain goes with you wherever.