Five years later, she birthed her daughter Leah, named for her mother, whose appearance and stern demeanor she shared; later on, Renia jokingly nicknamed her Klavta, Yiddish for “bitch.” Renia had prayed for a daughter, feeling that naming her child after her mother was the only way she could ever honor her memory. Many survivors’ children speak of feeling like “replacements” for dead relatives, especially grandparents they never knew. “Missing relations” impacted survivor families. Often left without grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins, family members had to take on unusual roles, shifting kinship structures for generations.
Renia stayed home when her children were young. She was funny and full of life, quick witted and a good judge of character. Still charismatic, she also remained sartorially inclined. She had dozens of skirt suits, each to be worn with specific shoes, handbag, and accessories. When her hair turned white, she panicked, even though she was seventy-two. （Of course, she had not witnessed her own mother’s aging.） According to Yakov, the main fights he had with his mother when growing up concerned his appearance. She felt he looked too unkempt.
When Yakov and Leah were older, Renia went to work as an assistant in a preschool, where the children adored her. After that, she was an administrator at a health care clinic. Self-taught, she remained active in the left-wing Labor Party. Akiva was the manager of a national marble company and then an electric company. A man of encyclopedic knowledge, he was also an artist who created mosaics and woodcuts that hung at local synagogues. Though he’d grown up in a religious family, Akiva no longer believed in God. Most of his large family had been murdered. He refused to speak a word of Polish, and used Yiddish only if he didn’t want his children to understand what he was saying. The family spoke Hebrew at home.
Though Renia gave talks to students at Ghetto Fighters’ House, stayed in touch with Freedom comrades, and spent hours analyzing the past with her sensitive brother Zvi, she rarely spoke about the Holocaust with her new family. She wanted to show her children joy, to encourage exploration. Their lives were filled with books, lectures, concerts, classical music, home-baked cookies, homemade gefilte fish （her mother Leah’s recipe）， travel, and optimism. She loved lipsticks and earrings. On Friday nights, their house was crowded with fifty people. Records played: tango, ballroom. Adolescent Yakov had joined The Young Guard and was not allowed to participate in the drinking and dancing parties that his mother threw. “Life is short,” she said. “Enjoy everything, appreciate everything.”
Despite their jovial home, Yakov and Leah always felt the darkness of the past. They sensed that they were absorbing Renia’s history, even though they did not quite understand it. Leah read her mother’s memoir when she was thirteen but didn’t comprehend most of it. Yakov changed his last name from Herscovitch to the Israeli Harel in order to distance himself from the old land. A self-declared pessimist, he read his mother’s book for the first time when he was forty.
“My father treated Renia like an etrog,” Leah said, referring to the ceremonial Sukkot citrus fruit that is rare and expensive, and kept protected in a small box covered in soft, wispy cotton or horsehair. “She was strong but also fragile.” Renia was asked to testify at the Eichmann trial, but Akiva didn’t let her, worried the experience would be too stressful. Renia never requested financial compensation from Germany because she didn’t want to have to tell her story. Why should she owe them anything, her time or her narrative? On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the family turned off the television. Everyone worried that Renia’s memories would be too difficult for her to face; that she might crack. Or would they? “I was afraid her story would hurt me,” Yakov revealed, frank like his mother.
Yakov, a retired engineer and a graduate of the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, watched his first Remembrance Day programming only in 2018. Neither of Renia’s children had read her memoir in years; the details were hazy. In her sixties, Renia read her own book in disbelief: How had she possibly done those things? All she recalled from that period was her confidence and her incredible desire for revenge. Her adult life was so different: happy, passionate, filled with beauty.
Renia turned a new leaf, a thousand new leaves, a whole tree.