Please Help Me Find Her

By Nomi Eve

Editor’s Note: I read this essay — and request for help — yesterday on the Facebook page of Nomi Eve. It was accompanied by a photo of her at the age she was in this story. She is asking the community to help her reunite with a woman who rescued her when she was 9 years old and separated from her family on a German train. It felt like an opportunity for a mitzvah, and reposts are deeply appreciated to cast as wide a net as possible.

This story warmed my heart and spoke directly to my abiding preoccupation with the Righteous Among The Nations. Let’s do everything we can to bring these two back together. — Elissa Wald

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Nomi Eve at age 9

Please Help Me Find the Woman Who Rescued Me

Nearly fifty years later, I’m searching for the woman who rescued me and disappeared before we ever learned her name.

Maybe she is your mother. Maybe your aunt. Maybe your grandmother. Maybe your friend. Did you know someone studying in Germany in 1977? Someone absolutely WONDERFUL who I can’t wait to hug and thank?

Please read and share.

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I can hear it, the train going “clackity-clack.” The world outside speeding by in a blur of greens and browns. I’m walking down a narrow hallway. I’ve got my dolly in the crook of my arm. A white fluffy dog with pink ribbons tied around its ears. Most of the compartment doors are closed. Still, I can see through the windows. A family with small children, businessmen, a woman with red hair and a very big white hat. Oh, there’s a man with a knobby nose. I must have stared too long. He leers at me, in that way that nasty men have of letting you know that they have dark hearts. I feel a flicker of fear. I run on. Through that car, into another and another.

These are the smudges in my memory. People I’ve carried with me. I go through one car, and then I press the door open and ride for a terrifying, glorious second in the connector, feeling the rush of air, and daring myself to spend an extra heartbeat in the place between cars. The harrowing juddering shakes my whole body.

I leap through to the next car, and the next and the next. I go far. A grandmother gives me a piece of candy. A boy lets me play with his five stones. I’m having a jolly old time. Every so often a compartment door opens, and I hear snippets of German. I am, after all, in a train in Germany. I’m nine years old and it’s 1977.

We’d gotten on the train early that morning in Füssen and were traveling all day to our end point in Düsseldorf. An eight-hour trip. We’d spent the better part of a week rambling through Mad Ludwig’s castles. A summer adventure. My grandfather, father, mother, brother and me. After a few hours on the train, I was bored of card games and comic books. This was back when kids were free-range. “Can I go explore?” I asked my mother. “Sure, come back when you want a sandwich.” I grabbed my doll and made for the compartment door. My grandfather had been napping. He opened an eye and watched me go.

I am all the way at the far end of the train when it happens. In the bathroom, making funny faces at myself in the mirror. The train stops at a station and then starts again. I get a feeling in my belly. Something isn’t right. I suddenly very much want to be back with my family. I leave the bathroom and bolt back through the cars. Through one car, another, and another. But the faces are wrong. People aren’t where they should be. My family isn’t where I’ve left them. Dread floods through me. I keep running. Have I passed them? I run through the connectors, through more cars, and soon, I know, I just know I’m all alone. I double back. Maybe I’ve just run too far? But no, they are really gone.

I crash into a young woman at the end of a car. Her hands grip my shoulders. She asks me something in German. I’m already sobbing in English that I can’t find my family, that they’re gone, I’m lost.

A miracle: she switches to English. She’s an American college student with kind eyes and long straight brown hair. She listens – until my hiccoughing sentences must make a kind of sense. Then she says calmly, “You’re with me now.”

Here is what happened, what the adults would later explain: the train stopped and split. My family was in one half of the split, and I was on the other. In Germany back then, and still today, it’s common for trains to split at major hubs. Back in the 70’s, the long-distance rail network was transitioning from steam to diesel and electric. Locomotive swaps were part of normal operations. Electric locomotives took over in electrified zones and diesel elsewhere. After the split, one half of the train would be sent onto a major hub, in this case, Düsseldorf, and the other, which I was now on, would be sent across the border to the Netherlands.

The train separated while I was in the bathroom making faces. When it pulled out again, I was speeding away from my family in the wrong direction.

The American student took me off the train with her at the next stop. She went to the station conductor and spoke to him in German while pointing at me. The conductor got right on the phone, nodding, speaking very deliberately. I asked what she said to him. The words blur. Mostly I remember a feeling, and it feels like this:

“I told him that you are mine until you are theirs again. That I won’t leave you.”

What I know for sure is that she gave me her hand. We walked to a bench. She squeezed my hand. I held on tight and leaned against her, feeling my heart pounding in my chest like crazy drum. She sang me songs and told me jokes.

My parents, on the other part of the train, had realized I was missing, panicked, ran around looking for me. Then my mother looked out the window and realized that the train they were on was shorter than the one we’d been on that morning. She intuited with a shock that I was gone. They scrambled to find a conductor.

“When we understood that you weren’t even on the train with us….” My mother says, her voice trailing. “We’d lost our little Jewish girl in Germany just 32 years after the end of the Holocaust. You can’t make this stuff up. On a train. I thought the ground would open and swallow me. You should have seen me, like some sort of mad woman. But it was your grandfather who was the worst. Sobbing like a baby. But then, miracle of all miracles, you were found. When they told us, I swear I rose up. Feet off the ground. Like gravity couldn’t hold me anymore.”

Lickety-split, they took my family off that train and put them on another, going back to me.

I remember my family tumbling down the train steps. Running towards me, enfolding me in their arms. I’d never seen my grandfather cry before or again. It was shattering, to see his fear and grief, and feel the jagged edges of hurting love.

They thanked my American student exuberantly. So many tears. They hugged her over and over. She hugged me. Squeezed my hand one more time. And then she was gone. We never even learned her name. This was long before social media. People could really disappear forever.

I’ve thought of her, and the choice she made to take me off that train and see me to safety a million times. That moment lives in me like my bones and blood. I recently learned a term that puts a name to it. It’s called a moral act of beauty. A moment when doing the right thing creates a ripple of harmony in the world. A moment when someone goes out of their way to smooth the hard corners of life for someone else. When we see or experience a moral act of beauty, the waters part in this harsh world, if only for a few seconds. We realize we are not alone. We realize that there are angels and we can hear them sing.

All my possible futures were on that train with me. The man who leered at me. He grabs my tender wrist and won’t let go. Or when I’m frantically running between cars, I stumble down into the rushing void. So much could have gone wrong. A train, a little girl lost.

And there’s the little matter of the where. What my mother said: “We lost our little girl in Germany…”

Germany, where just three decades before, train stations like the one where I was separated from my family, was the stage upon which millions were separated from theirs.

Sometimes when I imagine myself back on that platform, I feel the echoes of history. I’ve heard the stories about how when families were shattered, strangers became family. I wonder who they were, those women who claimed lost girls. The men who claimed the lost boys. Strangers who became family in the moments before the abyss.

And all those angels. Janusz Korczak who went to his death to save the Warsaw orphans. Miep Gies who helped hide Anne Frank. Schindler and his list. And all the nameless people who did beautiful things in a hideous age. Their moral acts of beauty create vibrations. Like harp strings, the strumming turns sound to light.

My American student. She was my light.

I was so lucky. I was born just two decades or so after the Holocaust. But the echoes were there with us. So close. On those trains, on those platforms, as we faced our own ordinary fears.

As I grew up, she traveled with me. I imagined her getting older. I gave her a wedding, a husband who loves her boundlessly, a long flowy veil, I gave her children, a meaningful career, laughter around a dinner table filled with faces that look towards her, like flowers to the sun. Like I look towards her. I gave her grandchildren who adore her.

I keep trying to see her face, but I never manage to. But these days I give that faceless angel a touch of grey, some wrinkles. She would in her early 70’s now. I want her to know that I habitually give her a good life because she gave me a life. She rescued me, after all. I wonder if she remembers me. If she remembers that she saved a child once.

If I could tell her one thing, it would be this. That I have loved her my entire life since that day. And that I know that she had straight hair and kind eyes. And that she took me in her arms and wouldn’t let go.

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