Postwar

One day Anna heard that her father had been killed only days before the Liberation. Later she found out what happened to her sister, Erna. "Someone told me they put her on a boat with 300 other young girls and took it out and sank it. It was near the end, and they were trying to kill as many Jews as they could."

Her belief in God was severely shaken. She was taught that God was good and just. If there was a God she thought, then how could he cast such horrible fate upon her. Why was she put on the Schindler’s list and to survive but not her sister? And after experiencing the horrors of the war, after witnessing humans torturing, burning, hanging and shooting other innocent human beings, her faith in all humanity was shaken as well. In face of all this, one might understand if she choose to renounce God, and end up living a life of hatred and vengeance. Would Anna choose this path? But no, this was not to be ...

Soon after the war Anna met Jano Perl, another Holocaust survivor trying to rebuild his life. They fell in love, settled in Slovakia, married and started a family. Life continued to be hard. After Nazism, came a brief period of freedom. Jano resurrected his family business, which was expropriated and run by non-Jews during the war. 

Freedom lasted only three years when the Communists took over. Stalinism and harsh anti-Semitism set in for a long time. Once again, Jano lost his business. Branded as intellectual, capitalist, and a Jew, he was sent to harsh labor. He felt lucky to stay alive. Anna was always at his side helping to scrape a living and raise a family. In 1965, the family immigrated first to Israel, and then finally settled in the United States. 

Thirty years after the start of the war, freedom, peace, prosperity and comfort finally arrived.

Anna told the family a little bit about her war experiences, about Auschwitz and about Oscar Schindler, but she never showed hatred towards anyone. She chose to burry her pain mostly inside, working hard to nurture her young family. 

After some years of doubt, she started believing in God once more, thanking him for giving her home and family again.

She started practicing her Jewish traditions as her mother taught her. It was her obligation, she felt, to carry on the Jewish heritage, because she was chosen to live, she was chosen to pass life on to the next generation, and that was her destiny. She was thankful for what she had. 

Anna`s dedication did not stop with her family. She always treated people with fairness and respect. She worked for various charities, including WYCO and Hadassah, collected donations for other charities and gave to the needy as much as she could afford. She lived a quiet and simple life, working as a seamstress to help support herself and her family, and later caring for her grandchildren.