W H A T W E R E Y O U doing at 14 years old? I was a freshman, in Buenos Aires. My father, my mother, my sister and I were living a stable life, in a typical middle class apartment in a quiet neighborhood. We were shielded from danger. We watched TV.
But for Susan Zuckerman, born in Poland, life at 14 was quite different, as the obituary on the left shows. She made it to 7th grade and then her life fell apart, torn away from the family and friends forever. She was shoveling snow for German tanks in a concentration camp at 17. By the time Susan was an adult, she had experienced detachment, deportations, deadly threats, and most likely hunger and despair. But she lived shy of her 95th birthday celebration. “In her early 90s [and already in the U.S.], she would sometimes shovel her own snow, saying that if she could do it for tanks, she could clear her own driveway,” as quoted on the New York Times. And she died, in a numerological twist, on January 27th of this year, the day of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
I cut out the obituary as a strip and kept it as a bookmark. And as a reminder that, next time I complain about a delay of an Amazon delivery, my health insurance objecting a prescription coverage, the gradual deterioration of Netflix series after a couple of seasons, potential spam calls in my cell phone, New York City humidity, and most importantly, the discomfort of wearing a surgical mask, life could have been definitely worse.
— West Village, NYC, 7/11/2020