CHRIST HAS RISEN

 

CHRIST HAS RISEN

By Ann Szedlecki

One day I came to Aunt Katia’s house, not realizing that it was Easter. It didn’t make any difference to me. I didn’t know when Passover occurred, either. When I entered, she greeted me with, “Christos voskres!, Christ has risen!”

 

I didn’t know what to say, and she told me that I was supposed to reply, “Na vieki viekov!, Forever and ever!”

 

I reminded her that I was Jewish, but she already knew that. Still, she expected me to answer this way because Jesus was Jewish, after all. I didn’t know that. I still can’t make up my mind which of us was more ignorant. It must have been me.

 

The question about the ancestry of Jesus never came up back home. His name was never mentioned. I had to come to the Soviet Union, a godless country, to find out.

 

For the Easter holiday she killed a pig and then made blood sausage. She offered to share it with me. I refused and almost gagged just looking at it. It must have been my Jewish background. Not that I ate kosher food in Siberia. And where would I get any, anyway? It was the blood I could not tolerate.

 

She called me maya malenkaya zhidovetchka, my little Jewess. It sounded endearing. We were fond of each other and she was very lonely, too.

"Christ Has Risen" became part of the award-winning book "Album of My Life," by Ann Szedlecki, (c) 2009, as part of Series II of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs, published by the Azrieli Foundation. Released in English and in French, "Album of My Life" is still popular and available.