Throughout my youth, my maternal grandfather bestowed his personal philosophies on me through tales of his experiences in Europe. A survivor of the Holocaust, he often recounted life as a Jewish partisan in Eastern Europe, and the kind gestures of gentile friends and strangers who saved his life by offering him food or shelter.<\/p>\n
One of his stories in particular stands out in my memory, a story that began before the breakout of World War II when, as he would recall, God gave him the medicine he needed before he was sick.<\/p>\n
As a young man in the Ukraine, my grandfather was the director of a petroleum wholesaler, rationing out gas and oil. Once, a woman came to him asking for more than her ration allowed. At first he turned her down, but then \u2013 not knowing why \u2013 he changed his mind and gave the woman a barrel of oil.<\/p>\n
When war came, he was hidden in attics and basements and given food by former employees and friends, and he moved in and out of the ghetto, planning and hiding in the surrounding forests. One day with almost a year left before Soviet liberation, as he and another man moved from house to house looking for safe haven they arrived at a home with a familiar face: the gentile woman once in need of oil.<\/p>\n
While she asked my grandfather\u2019s companion to check on her cow in the barn, she quickly told my grandfather that she remembered him and his past generosity. She then hid him in her home among her two daughters and grandson for the remaining nine months of the war.<\/p>\n
Of the few thousand Jews who lived in the area before the war, only a hundred or so survived. My grandfather attributed his survival to luck and the reciprocated kindness of friends and strangers.<\/p>\n
After the war, he met and married my grandmother, who survived the Holocaust with her mother and sisters in Poland, and began a new family, immigrating to the United States in 1949.<\/p>\n
Once their children and grandchildren were old enough to understand, my grandparents told us their personal stories of the Holocaust, hoping that we would understand the power of hate and kindness to do evil or good. My grandfather was not a religious man, and he had not been allowed to attend Hebrew School before the war in the Soviet Union, but he believed in a living God \u2013 one who gave him the sense to offer kindness that would save him in his eventual time of need.<\/p>\n
\nThe most American thing you can do is stand up for someone else. — Eboo Patel<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n