Sunflower in the snow

My parents, Esther and Jacob Rubinow, were handsome, rich and popular. Mother's family, the Rakowskis, were rabbis for generations, brilliant and eloquent writers, scholars and orators. Also, they were as poor as synagogue mice. Father's family were rich and arrogant. Most importantly, the Rubinow men were the tallest Jews in Eastern Europe at a time when Gentiles pictured all Jews as midgets. My father was 6'3 and my brother Wolf 6'5".

In years to come height would greatly contribute to their survival.

Mother was pretty and sweet like a heroine of romantic Russian novels, her favorite reading. Father described himself as "gorgeous," as indeed he was. The other handsome guy, my brother, was 10 years my senior, which made every gossip monger ask: Why would a rabbi's daughter wait 10 years to have a second child?

It was a sad day when I found out.

Two weeks later the train deposited us in Biysk, a city in north eastern Siberia, without electricity, running water or paved streets. We would have frozen or starved to death if it were not for a local Christian family of women who took us into their house and kept us for the next 5 years. The matriarch, Petrovna, taught me all I know of mercy, honor and resilience in the face of adversity.

It is time to explain my book's title: Sunflower in the snow. In Siberia summers last for only two months. But oh—are they gorgeous! The fields are covered with perfect sunflowers, the most beautiful colors nature can create. Running through the fields I felt like a sunflower—I was a sunflower. But much too soon snow falls and covers the fields with a pristine white shroud.

Now I was a sunflower in the snow.

Shortly thereafter, Petrovna's young son, Dima, returned from the war hobbling on a pegleg. He had stepped on a mine and was sent home a cripple. A strange friendship developed between me, traumatized by my brother's revelation and this once-beautiful boy sinking into depression and alcoholism.

Father returned from the war a year later, and in March 1946 we found ourselves back in Bialystok. Now our horrors began as never before. Here, in this free and independent Poland, our countrymen were seized with maniacal zeal to kill every Jew still alive, that is concentration camp and ghetto survivors, Siberian refugees like us, forest fighters and Red Army veterans.

Mother suffered a nervous breakdown. She cried uncontrollably and had violent nightmares. In the fall of 1946 we moved to Lodz, a bigger and safer city. And there Father abandoned Mother and me. He boarded a train to Vienna—and disappeared. Mother was 46 and I was 10. We were homeless, literally on the street without two suitcases. Mother went to live in a shelter, and I moved into an orphanage.

After two years of such existence, Mother was falling apart. Despite her protestations, I wrote a letter to my two aunts in Israel and finally they learned about our nasty lives. In less than a month we were aboard a Greek trawler headed for Haifa, Israel.