OyChicago blog

Even though it seems like it was only a year ago, I'm about to have another birthday.

But this is no ordinary birthday. No, no, no. Not only is this the first birthday I'm going to celebrate without all of my baby teeth (I misplaced them on the bus), but it's also the fifth anniversary of my 24th birthday. So yeah, I'm going to be 29. I hope it will be a birthday to remember since I can't remember the last 28.

But fear not my generous Oy! enthusiasts, for I have a surefire plane to make sure this birthday is one for the books! That book being "The Book of Things Adam Kind of Makes Up to Make His Life More Awesome: Part 1." Journey with me.

I've never been big on birthdays. I'm usually normal size. But birthdays don't have the same profound impact on me as I've seen them have on others. I tend to care more for unique celebratory milestones, like when I celebrated turning 10,000 days old, or when I take a moment to enjoy some of the small things life throws my way. But this year, I'm quite looking forward to my birthday because it will be -- in my twisted logic -- the longest birthday I've ever had to perfectly accommodate the age that I will become.

You ready for this? Read on. Or read the title of the article. That's a dead giveaway. But then read on.

You see, I am fortunate enough to be going on a vacation this year to the most important state in the union, Hawaii, which is important because it helps make our flag look balanced. I mean, a 49 star flag -- that would be outrageous, egregious, and preposterous.

When I am in the Aloha State, a phrase which here means, "a quiet laugh," (Get it? A-low-ha. Heh heh … I'll see myself out) I will be celebrating my 29th birthday. I'll be doing this on May 12, because that's when my birthday is. I know because I was there.

But here's the thing, when in Hawaii the time zone difference from Chicago is 5 hours. So that means when it is 7 p.m. on May 11, Hawaii time, it will be 12 a.m. on May 12 Chicago time. So in a way, that is when my birthday is technically going to be starting. However, given that I am on Hawaii time, I fully intend to still consider the full day of May 12 -- all 24 hours of it -- as my birthday on top of the aforementioned additional time.

Do you see it? If you see it, that's great. You're amazing. You're basically mishpacha (family). If you don't, let me do some math for you so you can become mishpacha.

Let's break it down. My actual birthday is 24 hours long, but to everyone I know in Chicago, it will be starting five hours earlier since I will be in Hawaii. Mostly based on the fact that I know my Dad will be wishing me a happy birthday right at midnight Chicago time, it is safe to say that we can add five hours of celebratory shenaniganery to my normally 24-hour birthday.

So, 5 hours + 24 hours = 29 hours. And it's my 29th birthday.

I couldn't make this up. I couldn't have planned it. But if this was going to happen to anyone, it was going to happen be me. This blows the idea of a Golden Birthday (when I turned 12 on May 12) out of the water. Or my reverse birthday every year (again, given I was born on May 12, my reverse birthday is December 5). It's like some amazing, unbelievable, coincidence! (That's a previously written blog that came out last year -- on my birthday! It just keeps going!)

But when I had the realization that on my 29th birthday I would be having a 29-hour birthday, my jaw hit the floor. It was because I had tripped. But when I got back up, I immediately had to write this Oy! blog, which you are reading right now to immortalize my incessant dorkiness with the way I view the world and the fun moments that are hidden within the everyday ones. It was short. It was sweet. It took me about 29 hours to write ... it just keeps going!

Grandpa Max with Grandma Rita -- married 68 years -- circa the late 1950s.

My Grandpa Max passed away this spring -- on his 93rd birthday.

According to Jewish wisdom, dying on the same day that you're born is a blessing. In fact, Moses was said to have died on his 120th birthday. The Talmud teaches us that God calculates and completes the lifespan of a righteous person.

Jewish scholars say that righteous people are charged with a mission at their birth: To live their lives to the fullest potential and finish their mission completely. The mission ends on the very same day it was begun.

So that means Grandpa passed away on the exact day he was supposed to.

My grandpa -- my dad's dad -- was a mensch who lived his life with dignity and integrity. A kind, humble, generous, and gentle soul with the driest wit.

It was the way he loved and teased my grandma for 68 years.

It was the way he would interact with people at the deli counter, Grandma's beauty parlor, or the convenience store where he bought his lottery tickets, how he'd disarm them with a joke.

It was the way he would rarely sign his paintings, because he didn't care to take credit for his work.

It was the way he served in combat during World War II on the beaches of the Philippines and in the jungles of New Guinea.

When he returned to Long Island after the war, he met my grandma, set up by their two sisters who dreamed up their shidduch (match) at a canasta game. Max worked long hours in the family school supply factory in Manhattan. He would bring home for his two sons -- and later his four granddaughters -- notebooks and pencils with our names etched on them.

He never went to college, but he read voraciously, and seemed to know just about everything. Every day, my grandma would do the crossword puzzle, and any time she didn't know an answer, she would enlist the help of her Max. Whether it was a baseball player, an obscure politician, or even the name of a 1990s boy band member -- somehow Grandpa knew the answer.

In his free time, he loved to paint, especially portraits of the people he loved; Max would capture not only their physical likeness, but their spirit too.

When I'd come to visit, we'd paint canvases with his special acrylics; I'd get frustrated when my artwork, unlike Grandpa's, looked nothing like the person I was painting. But Grandpa would always tell me they were beautiful. I knew that they weren't, but I also knew that Grandpa believed that they were because he only saw the good in his granddaughters.

In the summertime, Grandpa and I would stroll along the boardwalk near Grandma and Grandpa's home in Long Island. We'd sometimes chat about school and friends and other times just walk in silence, smelling the seaweed and ocean air, and listening to the soothing crashing of the waves. For my grandpa was a man who was comfortable with silences, and who only spoke when he had something to say.

Each one of us have our own Grandpa Max, people we miss every day, people that paved the way for us, who live on in us forever.

My other grandfather, Harry, died two weeks before my second birthday.

Even though I didn't get the chance to know Grandpa Harry, he always held this superhero status in my mind and heart. After all, my grandma, my mom, and other people who knew and loved him would constantly nourish me with stories about him, about his decency and his moral compass.

A Jewish socialist, he immigrated to the States from Russia in the early part of the 20th century. Here, he met my maternal grandma and they bought a farm in Wisconsin, where they raised cattle, corn, two sons, and a daughter. He and my Grandma loved Israel and he insisted on investing their meager savings in Israel's early days. Harry would say, "If this is worth nothing, then our lives are worth nothing."

Grandpa Harry died 36 years before Grandpa Max. These last few weeks, since Max died, I keep envisioning my two grandfathers, who had been fond of each other back when my parents were first courting, reunited with each other now. I bet that they, along with my late grandma, are enjoying each other's company and making each other laugh.

Death has this way of making us take stock of our lives. When our loved ones die, in the best of worlds, their passing makes those of us they leave behind want to live our lives with even more purpose and integrity. Like Grandpa Max and Grandpa Harry, the really great ones inspire us to live our lives to our fullest potentials, to complete our own missions.

My papa, Ralph Rehbock, has been the greatest influencer and teacher in my life. Since surviving the Holocaust as a young boy, he has never been shy speaking about his past, or about teaching the lessons of the Holocaust as a member of Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center's Speakers' Bureau.

Carly and her grandparents

As a young girl, I was -- and still am -- captivated by his story of survival, including the historical learning that indulges my love of history, while still sharing life lessons in kindness, the importance of helping strangers, and taking a stand against injustice. His experiences and his lifelong dedication to spreading knowledge of the Holocaust have inspired me to be a better person and take action against injustice, and hopefully I can encourage others to do the same.

As a direct descendent of a survivor, I know how important it is to keep the story of the Holocaust alive. As the number of survivors dwindles, their stories are being told less and less.

Ralph as a boy with his parents, Ruth and Hans

Considering he fled Germany when he was only 4 years old, my Papa's survival story was different than the narratives that I had learned in school. We were taught the stories of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel, to name a few -- stories of concentration camps, Nazi invasions and the struggles of trying to hide as a Jewish person in Nazi Germany. I grew up believing that my Papa's story was atypical, and did not sound like all of the other survivor stories that I had been taught. As I grew older -- and wiser -- I learned how untrue that was.

My papa never had to hide in an attic like Anne Frank; he never had to survive a concentration camp as Elie Wiesel did. He did, however, have his life disrupted and completely changed due to the events of the Holocaust.

In 1938, while he and his family were visiting the American embassy in Berlin in order to get visas to come to the U.S., the Nazis invaded his home in Gotha. That was the night of Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," when Jewish shops, buildings and synagogues were destroyed and their homes ransacked.

After going underground for a couple of weeks, my great-grandfather was able to hide in a plane bound for London, where he met up with his brother. A short time after, my papa and his mother went to board a train to England to meet him, but when they arrived at the train station they ran into Nazi soldiers who called "all Jews out!" and strip-searched them, including my papa and great-grandmother.

Ralph and his mother, Ruth Nussbaum Rehbock

Then a total stranger happened upon them and said, "when I signal you by tipping my hat, run with me." They had no reason to trust this man, but my great-grandmother made a split second decision, took my papa by the hand and ran with him. This stranger happened to know the exact time a train was passing that was heading for the Dutch border, which had not yet been invaded by the Nazis. The three of them ran across the tracks and jumped onto the moving train, which eventually led my papa and his mother to safety, first in England where they met up with my great-grandfather, and then ultimately in America. To this day, the destination of the train that they were supposed to take is still unknown.

My papa and his family survived due to the kindness of a stranger, and because of that, his story became less about his survival, and more about the ability of individuals to take a stand for humanity.

Today, my papa serves as vice president of the Illinois Holocaust Museum, which encourages visitors to "be 'Upstanders,' not bystanders," and the way my papa tells his story demonstrates how essential that adage is. I have chosen to live my life as an "Upstander" and I attribute that to all he has taught me.

Because of him, I strive to be as involved as I can with the museum. In college, I interned in the museum's collections department, where I spent my days immersed in the stories of survivors and the artifacts that were left behind. The allure of this internship was in part to advance my knowledge of the Holocaust (I was a history major), and more importantly, it was a way to be closer to my papa. I realized that interning at the museum was simply not enough for me. I wanted to do more, and to make a difference, just as my papa had always taught me.

Family photograph of the Nussbaum-Rehbock family, taken on June 27, 1937, in Gotha, Germany. Ralph (Rolf) is the boy in the center.

Eventually I became part of Generation2Generation. G2G is a group focused on teaching the stories of Holocaust survivors long after they are gone. My G2G partner, Holocaust survivor Doris Fogel, has introduced me to a side of the Holocaust that I didn't even know existed.

Doris and her family were part of a small group of survivors who lived out the war in a ghetto, in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, China. Each time we meet, I learn more about Doris' childhood and her eight years spent with about 23,000 displaced Jews. Just like my papa's story, Doris' story is not traditional, yet it is an incredible example of survival and strength.

Generation2Generation has allowed me to cultivate a relationship with Doris and dozens of other survivors, with the promise that we, as G2G partners, will continue to bring life to their stories for many years to come.

My proudest accomplishment to date, however, has been becoming co-chair of the Illinois Holocaust Museum's new Young Professional Committee that hosts fundraising and friend-raising programs to support the mission of the museum. This role has offered me the opportunity to spread knowledge and awareness of the Holocaust, and stress the importance of taking action, just as my papa impressed upon me and so many others.

Everything that my papa has taught me has prepared me for this role. His influence has been so obvious in my life, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank him. I thank him for believing in me and helping me to get to where I am today and I thank him for sharing his story and inspiring me to be a better person and an Upstander. I hope that my achievements are making him proud, as I have been proud of him since I was old enough to understand his story and its many lessons.

My grandfather's Judaism called to him when he was 16. It was 1942. His family had emigrated to America decades earlier and he was living the American Dream. They lived in a spacious apartment in the Bronx alongside Pelham Bay Park. He attended public school, hardly ever went to synagogue and was happily assimilated. Yet when relatives told stories they'd heard of Jews being rounded up and killed in the very European towns they had left behind, something in him stirred.

He tried to enlist in the Army, but was turned away due to his age. A few months later he turned 17 and tried again, this time in the Navy. They didn't check his age quite as carefully and he was selected for the Underwater Demolition Teams, the forerunner of today's Navy Seals. He carried out missions from submarines in the waters of Northern Europe and swam first onto the beach at Normandy to blow up the barricades that prevented the landing craft from deploying troops.

My grandfather Melvin

My grandfather likes to tell a story from after Normandy when he met a captured German officer aboard an aircraft carrier. The officer was laughing and smoking with some troops, acting as if he was "one of the guys." When he asked my grandfather why he was so sour, my grandfather replied in his broken Yiddish, "Ich bein a Juden" ("I am a Jew"). He says the officer's face turned dark and he didn't say another word.

My other grandfather, on my mother's side, heard his Judaism call to him when he was 12. He was living in a very small rural village in Lithuania. For months, his family had heard of round-ups of Jews -- and they were coming closer to their village. When they finally came, they were told by the S.S. that they would be re-settled, but my grandfather's family chose otherwise -- they escaped into the surrounding forest.

For four years they lived in the wilderness, facing hunger every day, frostbite in the winters and surprise raids by German units combing the forest for them. Two of my grandfather's siblings fought with the partisans, and one was killed shortly before the war's end, betrayed by her Polish compatriots. My grandfather lost siblings, nieces, nephews and friends -- and his youth.

He tells a story of smuggling food into the forest that he'd stolen from an outlying farm. He was returning alone with his bounty late at night when a pack of wolves began stalking him. He reached into his pocket and grabbed his grenade, the only weapon he had, believing it would be better to die like that than to be eaten by wolves. It was then, he says, that he felt the hand of God on his shoulder, and he knew that he would survive the night, and the forest.

My grandfather Larry (left) and family.

Most of his family survived the forest and eventually came to the U.S., but one family member who did not was his sister, for whom I was named and whose name I carry proudly today.

Both of my grandfathers' stories weigh heavily on my heart and mind. I constantly think about how we, in this generation can perpetuate their stories and achievements, as well as the memories of those we have lost.

I have chosen a career in the Jewish world to try and do what I can to strengthen our community, ensure that we have opportunities to remain a growing, vibrant and strong Jewish people. My previous work at the JDC brought me great pride; I was working for an organization that was instrumental in helping my grandfather, as well as millions of others, after the war ended. And now, living in Chicago with my husband and working at JCC Chicago, I am impressed with the breadth of opportunities available to families, young adults and children here. We are living in a strong community where we can be proud of our Jewishness and have spaces to celebrate it -- something that previous generations were not always able to experience.

Our Judaism calls to each of us. Sometimes it is a call of conscience or a call for help; sometimes it is a call to life or a call to spirit; sometimes it is a shout and sometimes a whisper; sometimes we must seek it out, and sometimes it seeks us out, whether we want it to or not.

The question for each of us is, how will we answer when it does?

I first remember learning about the Holocaust when I was 5 years old. Sitting in my grandparents' living room, the camera crew entered with all of their equipment and I sat quietly on the couch with the rest of my family as we waited for the interviewer to begin asking my grandfather questions.

Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation had contacted my grandfather about sharing his experience surviving three concentration camps during World War II. At the time, I knew that this was something important to my family, but I had little context for how and why this would have a major impact on my life.

My grandfather was one of the sole Holocaust survivors in his family. Prior to his deportation at the age of 23, he had lived in Plonsk, Poland, where he and an older brother worked as barbers. His family was placed into a ghetto before making the agonizing transport to Auschwitz in 1941. At Auschwitz, where he spent the majority of his captivity, his job was to cut the hair of the arriving prisoners -- stripping them of their identities as they entered the camp. The Nazis considered this necessary in order to carry out their plans of dehumanizing and eliminating the Jews of Europe, and that made my grandfather a crucial commodity to the Nazis. He was given extra food in order to stay strong enough to cut hair. So it was being a barber that kept him alive.

In January 1945, my grandfather was taken on a death march to Mauthausen and then later to Ebensee in Austria, where he was liberated by the Americans in May. My grandfather -- even in the face of death -- was incredibly lucky to survive the atrocities and horrors of the Holocaust.

Whenever we learned about the Holocaust in school and religious school, I was always quick to raise my hand and share my grandfather's story. I knew that having this family history was something that set me apart from many of my peers and I often wondered if they could grasp the gravity of what my grandfather had gone through, even though I never could. My mind always returned to one thing: an awareness that had my grandfather not survived, I would not be alive. I still grapple with this notion to this day as I talk about and continue to process my grandfather's experience.

Today, my grandfather is 96 years old. He is still cutting hair at his barber shop in West Rogers Park and he refuses to retire. He believes that his work is what keeps him going every day and if you ask him, he will tell you that he has enough money to pay the bills and to keep the shop running and that is all that he needs.

Forced work kept my grandfather alive in the camps, but now it is his own personal choice to work, and he chooses to do the work that has shaped his entire life. My family believes that his work is what keeps him alive. Despite his lack of hearing, he is still as sharp as a tack, and when you set him loose in a shopping mall, he will take off like he's running a marathon.

As I've gotten older, my grandfather has shared more and more about his past. This usually happens at the dinner table when he and my 90-year-old grandmother tell my brother and me what life was like in the old country. In college, I interviewed him for a class about workers in America and I enjoyed talking with him about his love for the barber shop and his commitment to his customers, some of whom are the third generation of their families to sit in his barber chair. He is truly an inspiring and resilient individual and I am proud to call him my grandfather.

As a Social Studies teacher, I also share my grandfather's story with my students. I remind them that although the Holocaust was an event in history, it is still so painfully tangible today in the lives of survivors and their families. I share his story to encourage my students to not be bystanders. I share his story to spread love and acceptance. I share his story because if I don't, who else will?