Celia of Steel… A Grandson’s Eulogy
By Robert M. Katzman © September 1997
Better tell God she’s coming
Her Granite Heart is still
After ninety-six years
So far from across the sea
*
Better tell God:
Celia of Steel
Is coming
*
She’s the last Immigrant
The last of the Europeans
The last of ten children
And with her husband Nathan
The last of twenty
*
Forged by murderous
Pograms in Poland
–Slavic for “devastation”–
All blessed by Czar Nicholas II
Celia saw her Grandfather Moshe
Killed by a mounted Cossack in 1914
And hidden behind a barn door
Watched as her Father Moshe
Be decapitated in 1916
*
Tiny Celia turned hard as Steel
Not warm like Copper
Not soft like Gold
But tough, rigid, unyielding
Like a girder holding her
American family together
*
Her fierce dark eyes saw you
And saw through you
Her words could slice like a blade
*
You don’t live nearly a century
Without a will of Steel
A determination to live when
So many Central European Jews
Were slaughtered
*
Teenaged Celia worked her way
Alone across all of Germany
As a waitress in Bier-Gartens
To escape in a ship by the sea
In 1918
*
But now she’s done with America
Finished with Earth and
The pain and memories she carried
All her long life
A fighter to the end
*
She never surrendered
Not Celia Warman
She’s just moving on now
To her new Shtetl
In the sky
*
Better tell God she’s coming
But He’ll know
They’ll Allknow
By the blazing reflection
Of the Sun’s
Incandescence
She’ll be That Angel
That Angel with
The Wings of Steel
——————————————————————————————————————–
Never before published, she taught me about the Holocaust and what happened to all in her family–my family– who never made it to America when I was 8 in 1958, horrifying me. I didn’t believe her. I began reading then, all I could find, and 63 years later, I’m still reading/watching/learning, remaining horrified. I saw Anne Frank film the next year in 1959, at 9, adding pictures to her words and the fucking nightmares lasted for years.
Yom HaShoah is the Jewish Day of Remembrance for all 6 million who were killed in the Holocaust. I am not assuming that everyone knows about this.? If this memory of a valiant woman moves you, please share the link. She was the smartest person in my family, sharp to her end, and cold as ice. She watched her father die.
She died before my eyes. I was 47, and I can still see her rise, and fall back again, like it was yesterday.