For Rybsteins, it was numbers before names

I knew as a child in the 1950s that the numbers I saw on my parents’ arms represented something very dark and serious.

•My father Jakub Rybsztajn (who is being remembered on his first yahrzeit this Shabbos) always wore long sleeves to hide them.

•My mother (who is being remembered on her fourth yahrzeit this Shabbos) didn’t hide them and pointed to the symbol embedded between them, a faded Jewish Star.

My parents were known in the Five Towns Community as Jack and Bonnie. Sometimes, Jakub and Bronia or Yakub and Shprintza. Sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Rybstein or Rybsztajn. The names could change but the numbers didn’t. Neither did the memories or the losses.

Rosh Chodesh Iyar is their yahrzeit although their passing is separated by three years. Even here the dates and numbers have a special meaning — May 2, 2022 and April 29, 2025, both Rosh Chodesh Iyar.

91 is the number of immediate family members exterminated, remembered on a list my father compiled and distributed to relatives. My father was one of five children and my mother one of nine, all exterminated in the concentration camps.

127 is the number in the blessings my father gave the many who came to him, for a long life like Chaya Sarah.

My mother would say with a little smile, “We were nine children and I was the only one who survived.”

She survived Auschwitz and the death march, not allowing the two women around her to give up; finally running off and hiding in an abandoned farm, to be liberated two weeks later by the Russian army.

My father was placed on top of a dead body pile by two cousins outside the Langenstadt concentration camp because although unconscious he still had a pulse. He was found by an American soldier who removed him to recover at an army hospital. It took three months until he could eat.

My parents were married in Belgium in 1946 and came to the United States in 1950. They were married 77 years.

I miss them. May they rest in peace. They were and will always be number one to me.

• • •

In Hebrew, the letters of Iyar mean “I am Hashem your healer,” making the weeks between Pesach and Shavuos a time for spiritual, emotional and physical healing, as well as personal development and self-improvement.

Iyar is related to the Hebrew word ohr (light). My parents always said that they felt the darkness of the concentration camps would be followed by light. And now they have the same yahrzeit, Rosh Chodesh Iyar.

Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com