Hesped (Eulogy) for Lilly Herzog
by Jerry Muller
January 1991
When I saw Lilly Omama last Rosh Hashana, she said it was the last time I’d see her. Of course, she had said that almost every time we’d said good-bye for about ten years. But this time I took it more seriously, since she added that I should give a nice talk at her funeral. Obediently, I said I would – and here I am.
Lilly Omama lived for a long time, longer than anyone I’ve ever known. For some time her longevity has been a source of wonder and amusement. It was said, for example, that the best investment made in the Muller family was buying Lilly Omama a lifetime membership in Hadassah when she was eighty.
Lilly Omama was born in 1887, closer in time to the French Revolution than to the present. She was born in Slovakia, then part of the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian empire, one of seven children of a merchant in spirits named Rosenfeld. She grew up speaking German and Hungarian. I remember her telling me that as a child she frequently visited Vienna – by train or by horse-drawn carriage of course – since it was an age when the automobile had been invented, but was not yet in mass production.
Lilly Rosenfeld married a Jewish doctor who was a physician with the Kaiserlich und Koniglich railway, which meant that he was an official of the Empire. In the First World War he served in the Austro-Hungarian army, during which time Lilly Omama served in the Red Cross, for which she was awarded several medals. At the age of nineteen she gave birth to the first of two daughters, the eldest of whom, Juliska, also married a Jewish doctor and raised one son who became a dentist and lives today in Prague. He in turn had two children, the eldest of whom is my age and has a daughter of her own, one of Lilly Omama’s eight great-grandchildren. Her younger daughter, Magda, was sent away to a Jewish finishing school in Germany to complete her education. She did not marry a doctor, but her husband Ferdinand later in life claimed he was an MD – a Meat Dealer.
Until the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Lilly Omama led, as far as I can tell from my conversations with her over the years, a quiet, respectable, bourgeois and Jewish existence, an existence outside of politics and free of concern with the wider world, or even with high culture (her idea of classical music was Der Czardas Konigin).
Then, in the years that followed, her once tranquil life was transformed by the anti-Semitism of the clerico-fascist regime that came to power in Slovakia, and then by the murderous policy of the Nazis themselves. Her daughters fled: Juliska to Budapest, where she was saved by Raoul Wallenberg; Magda to Canada with her husband and two children.
Lilly Omama and her husband stayed behind in Slovakia, however. When the Jews of Slovakia were rounded up by the Nazis, her husband served fellow Jews as a doctor in a transit camp in Sered. On one occasion, they were about to be deported to a death camp, but it turned out that the officer in charge had been delivered by her husband: in fact, he had been born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and was saved from death by her husband. And so he allowed Jacob and Lilly to escape. Later Lilly Omama and her husband, Jacob, went into hiding, with Dr. Urban, a non-Jewish professor in Bratislava who had was a long-time friend. He also hid a number of other Jews during those darkest of days, and his name deserves mention today.
By the time the war was over, all but one of Lilly’s sisters and brothers were dead, as was her son-in-law and most of her nieces and nephews. Her family in Canada did not know whether she was still alive. That of course was not unusual at the time; it was the experience of many Jews and non-Jews in war-torn Europe.
When her daughter, Magda, learned that Lilly Omama and her husband were still alive, she decided to bring them to Canada as soon as possible. The decision was reached well before I was born, and I always took it for granted, but I appreciate now that the decision was by no means self-evident, but was based on a sense of duty and responsibility which is all too rare nowadays, and which Magda Omama continued to display over the four-and-a-half decades that followed.
And so, in 1950, at the age of 63, she moved to a new country with a new language, which could not have been easy. She came to Canada as an old person (in her own eyes and in the eyes of others) and lived as an old person for over forty years. The difficulty of this transition was certainly compounded by the death, in December, 1953, of her husband Jacob, to whom she had been married for almost five decades.
By a stroke of mutual luck, I was born a few months later. It was lucky for Omama, who lived literally next door to us, and now had an object of her affection. It was lucky for me because – through no merit of my own – I was the object of that affection. And that was, literally, invaluable. For of the many things money can buy, the time of a loving adult is not one of them. Yet here I was as an infant, with the daily, undivided time and affection of a woman other than my mother. Whenever I wanted to, I could wander next door, knowing there was someone there who would prepare warm milk for me, massage my neck, scratch my back and sing Iullabies to me in German. She also instructed me with folk wisdom, such as “Alle Krankheiten kommen durch die Fusse” (an admonition to wear socks). Later on, when my sister Alice arrived and partially shared and partially interrupted this idyllic existence, Lilly Omama would walk us daily to Queen Victoria Park, which was just down the street. In ways that I myself can hardly appreciate fully, this was a gift of loving time that can never be repaid.
And that loving time continued. For years after we moved away from Centre Street, I would come to her house before cheder and after shul, bringing with me friends and cousins who profited from her baking and hospitality.
I also owe to Lilly Omama an early and tangible sense of the reality of Jewish history in the twentieth century. I remember as a child being shown her yellow star, which she had worn from 1941 through 1945 and dlscussing with her the circumstances under which she had worn it. When I was seven, I remember discussing the Eichmann trial with her. She planted in me the seeds of interest in the history of central Europe that eventually determined my choice of profession.
Lilly Omama’s other great-grandchildren also benefited from her presence; it is thanks to her that some of them can still function in German. As for her great-great-grandchildren, her presence was a living reminder of the family as a historical entity, of how far back the family actually went. In a century in which because of immigration and genocide many Jewish children have not had the opportunity to know even their grandparents, my children were blessed to know Lilly Omama, their great-great grandmother.
For many of us – not only those in the family, but others as well – Lilly Omama was a kind of historical landmark. Just as a tall mountain is a landmark in space, Lilly Omama was a landmark in time: she marked the oldest living generation, and for years she has been the only member left of that generation, so now that she’s gone all the rest of us are a generation older.
Lilly Omama was, essentially, a central European bourgeois woman, but she was also very Jewish, in her own way. This expressed itself not only in her lifelong observance of Kashrut and Shabbat, but also in a personal piety which included daily prayers in Hebrew, Hungarian, and sometimes German.
And so, the most appropriate words with which to end are among the first words I remember being taught by Lilly Omama, words which she said with me each afternoon before my nap:
Lieber Gott ich geh zu ruh, schließe meine Äugen zu.
(Dear God. I close my eyes and go to rest.)