Quotes from Elizabeth Ehrlich

In 1942, somebody came back to our village from Treblinka. His name was Spivak, he escaped by hiding in a wagon full of clothing. He described what was going on there, and said he got crazy from what he had seen. We didn't believe him, we didn't believe in the crematoria. We thought he was a madman telling an unbelievable tale. How could such a thing be happening in our world, our modern world?

I knew that my parents were civil rights partisans. I was proud of the night my father had spent in jail in the 1950s, arrested and charged with "inciting to riot." He and a buddy had stood on a front porch in a white part of town, trying to protect the new black homeowners within from a rock-throwing mob on the lawn. It seemed the Jewish thing to do.

There was one pharmacist in town, a Polish man. He was a friend of my father. I risked my life to go to him for medicine. Two, three times a week, I took off my armband and went. If the Germans would have seen me they would have shot me. I told the pharmacist I couldn't pay, I had no money. He said, "Miriam, take it and go.

I watched and I learned. There is tumult, there is aggravation. There is love. For a mother, there is no such thing as excess.