There’s Something About Mary

If you’re petty like me, it’s not easy to meet someone who has a better social life than you. It’s even more of a blow to your ego if that seemingly fabulous person is in their 90s.

Before the pandemic, I’d call my friend, Mary Bauer, and ask if she had time to talk.

“I’m just on my way out to have lunch with a friend, darling,” (she always calls me “darling”).

“How about if I call you tomorrow?” I’d ask.

“Oh, darling! I have to give a lecture in the morning and I have two get-togethers after that!”

It’s easy to see why Mary, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, was so busy. At 92, she was not only a sought-after speaker but also an awesome breakfast, lunch or dinner date due to her indescribable joie de vivre and everything-out-on-the-table personality. In fact, she has a better personality than most people I know who are in their 20s and 30s.

I first met Mary in 2018, when we both delivered remarks to young professionals at Sinai Temple on the eve of Yom HaZikaron — Israel’s Day of Remembrance for victims of terror and fallen soldiers — and Yom Haatzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. Mary described her childhood in Hungary and what it was like to have barely survived the infamous Nazi Death March through the merciless winter. She was more charismatic, energetic and engaging than any speaker I’d ever heard, and that list included presidents and prime ministers. With shaky knees, I followed her talk and spoke about growing up in post-revolutionary Iran, but I felt like Salieri performing after Mozart.

We hit it off right after the program ended. For reasons beyond my comprehension, Mary seemed intrigued by me. Perhaps she saw that I was in awe of her. Perhaps, after her own traumatic childhood, she was dismayed to hear that children in Iran were (and still are) forced to scream “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.” I became ever so slightly obsessed with her because, in addition to her courageous life story, she’s such a hoot.

Mary was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1927. An only child, she was a quintessential “Daddy’s girl” and had an idyllic childhood until 1944, when German soldiers marched into Hungary and demanded that Jews pack their suitcases (without being told where they were going). At the railroad station, boxcars were ready to take them to Auschwitz.

At Auschwitz, Mary was forced to weave the shorn hair of Jewish inmates into items the Nazis used during the war effort. As a society, we talk a lot about the inhumanity inflicted against Jews during the Holocaust, about stolen jewelry and other heirlooms, yellow stars and reprehensible tattoos, rape, disease and intolerable suffering. But there’s something about imagining a teenage girl with a shaved head, sitting in a concentration camp, weaving shorn hair from Jewish men, women and children that rips my soul apart.

Mary’s story of Auschwitz doesn’t end with being joyfully liberated by the Russians. Knowing that their time was up, Nazi soldiers marched Mary, her mother and countless other Jews out of the concentration camp for miles in the snow. In the month of January. In Poland.

During that Death March from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück, Mary’s mother suffered severe frostbite and lost several toes. She gave up, fell with her face in the snow and waited for the Nazis to shoot her dead. Mary, who spoke German (as well as several other languages), calmly told them not to waste a bullet on her mother, because she was going to die anyway. When the SS soldiers weren’t looking, she helped her mother back up to her feet.

She and her mother were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust. After the war, she went back to Hungary and ran into a non-Jewish friend who was wearing her clothes. “You’re back?” the girl said in embarrassed shock.

Like a child awaiting a bedtime story, I often ask Mary to tell me about the decades after the war, when she moved to America, and especially about her visit to Israel in 1967, during which she and her husband found themselves trapped in Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. She stood with other jubilant Jews in the Old City when news arrived that the kotel had been liberated and the city reunited.

Every story that Mary tells would merit its own column and lecture. She’s one of the best people I’ve ever known. That’s why, before the pandemic, I made sure to have her in my home as much as possible.

Every story that Mary tells would merit its own column and lecture.

“Mary, will you come to us for the second night Passover seder?” I asked in 2019.

“Darling, are you sure your family will want me there?” she responded. Not surprisingly, she was the hit of the evening. And we spared no authentic experience (I think it was her first time being whacked with big, pungent scallions as part of the Persian Passover custom during the recitation of “Dayenu”). She whacked us right back and had a blast.

“Mary, please come for dinner the first night of Rosh Hashanah, before anyone else reserves you,” I asked later that fall, trying to beat out her sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren.

“Darling, is it okay if I come?” she asked. We treated her to my mother’s famous Persian black eyed peas and tongue dish (as part of the “head of the year, rather than the tail” symbolism of the simanim). Again, she was the hit of the evening.

“Mary, what kind of donut do you prefer?” I asked a few days before she was set to join us for Hanukkah.

“Darling, all I want is to be with you and your beautiful family,” she responded. By that point, our sons, then two and four, were so accustomed to having “Ms. Mary” in our home that they jumped for joy when she knocked on the door. It also helped that she always arrived with toys and sweets. We lit the hanukkiah together, sang songs, and Mary settled on the couch to read a book she had brought for my kids.

There was a 90-year difference between her and our youngest son. But you could instantaneously see the connections in their souls as he placed his head on her shoulder.

When Mary hears that I keep fully kosher and observe Shabbat, she asks whether I think she’s a “bad Jew.” But in my eyes, she’s irrefutably holy.

The last time she came to our home was a Shabbat lunch just weeks shy of the pandemic, in winter 2020. She was joined by two world-renowned Iranian authors, but, as usual, she was the hit of the meal.

That’s the thing about Mary. You have to be careful when inviting her to your home, because, quite unknowingly, she always steals the show.

The pandemic robbed our family of Mary’s physical presence in our home. After a year, it’s getting unbearable. I finally conceded and asked her to lunch outdoors a few months ago, just the two of us.

“Darling, can we go to a Persian restaurant?” she asked. Dressed to the nines in summery white and green gingham (she thought she looked shabby), she said it was the first time she had left the house for something other than a short walk around her West Hollywood neighborhood in six months. Her silver hair was lustrous, as usual.

Mary, I know you’re reading this because you’ve told me you read each and every one of my columns. And when you informed me that you recently received your second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, thanks to the amazing USC Shoah Foundation, I wanted to invite you over for a whole weekend, until I realized no one in our home had yet been vaccinated.

So I find my mind wandering to that night of Hanukkah in 2019, when our then-four-year-old sat next to you and asked if you wanted to hear him sing, “Hinei Ma Tov.”

“Darling,” you said to him, “Let me hear your song.”

And in his broken Hebrew, he began to sing: “How good and how nice is it when brothers sit together,” as you held his hand and the same luminous twinkle emanated from both of your eyes.

Tabby Refael (on Twitter @RefaelTabby) is a Los Angeles based writer, speaker and activist.