A person who influenced my life

¶ … Personal Influence

When I was a sophomore in high school, I began to act in a way that I now consider disgraceful. My high school was highly self-segregated, and the different ethnic groups refused to interact with one another. I fell prey to that behavior, though my initial motivation was simply to be with people who I considered to be my peers, not to exclude others. However, the ugly thing about segregation is that it breeds feelings of hatred and separatism, and my friends fell prey to that behavior. Eventually, I began acting that way, as well. To my great embarrassment, I even agreed to participate when some friends decided to deface a Menorah that was being displayed as part of local holiday decorations. The police appeared just after we had managed to topple the Menorah, and, though my friends escaped, I was escorted home in a squad car and faced the possibility of being charged with a hate crime. Because there was no actual harm done to the Menorah, the shopping center owners declined to press charges, but simply banned me from their center. My parents, however, were not as forgiving. They were appalled at my behavior and spent the entire winter break deciding an appropriate punishment for me. Finally, on New Year's Eve, my mother approached me and told me what my punishment would be. In addition to being banned from socializing with that group of friends, I would be required to spend three afternoons each week, as well as one full day each weekend, volunteering at the local nursing home. Of course, my mom's twist was that the nursing home was Jewish.

Nursing homes are depressing places, and my initial impression of the infirm elderly was that they were a group of very unhappy and angry people. They frequently yelled, at me, at the staff, and at each other, and never seemed satisfied with anyone's efforts on their behalves. The one notable example was a woman named Rose. The second time I went to visit the home; she cornered me, grabbing me with a bony hand, and holding on with a strength that seemed incongruous with her frail appearance. She made it clear that she had heard my mother's explanation for my volunteer work, by asking me, "So, you're the little Nazi, aren't you?" I was unsure how to respond, and she seemed to enjoy my confusion, laughing as I stared at her. She hauled me along to her room, where she put me to work putting together a bookshelf.

Every day that I appeared, I would interact with the other residents and try to do things to help them, but I actually spoke to them very little. However, Ms. Rose would always find me. Even though I was there four times a week, she always had some type of manual labor for me to do. Initially the hard work was definitely punitive. For example, one day she put me to work weeding the flowerbeds at the nursing home, though the nursing home was professionally maintained. Moreover, she talked to me continuously. Our conversations sharply contrasted with the tasks she had me perform. She asked me about school, about my friends, and whether I had any crushes. We talked about my family, and the fact that I respected my parents, but was not very happy with them. She showed genuine excitement for me when my parents bought me a car for my sixteenth birthday, and asked me to start taking her on various errands- to the drugstore, the dry cleaner, and sometimes to the movies. I had come to really enjoy Rose's personality, and was happy to do that for her. She had so much charisma that she seemed bored at the nursing home, so our jaunts would give her a little change of pace.

One day when I came to the nursing home, Rose asked me to help her go through her pictures. She wanted to divide them up for her children before her death and informed me that the project would take several days, since she wanted to annotate the photos, so the stories would not die with her. As we started going through photos, Rose began telling me stories about her life. I learned that she had been born in Germany, though I did not make the logical connections about a German-born Jewish woman of her age. It was not until I saw a picture of a pair of twins that I discovered that she had had a twin, and, as history reveals, twins were of special interest in the concentration camps. Rose was the control twin in the experiments, and her sister, Lillith, eventually died as the result of the concentration-camp experiments. Rose remembers knowing that her sister had died, though she was only six, because she was immediately moved from her privileged place to the general housing. She eventually located her mother and older brother, though her father died in the camps, and her grandparents died in transit. That photograph was the only picture she had of her sister, and she had no pictures of her father or any of her other relatives that died in the camps. The picture of her twin was actually one that was taken at a gentile friend's birthday party, which they offered to her mother when they were released from the camp.