Long lost Cuzzin

From my friend Paul Mirbach (PEM)

I was a young boy in Bulawayo, when a man walked into my father's photographic shop. He asked for Boris Mirbach, my grandfather, who had died a few months previously. My father introduced himself and told the man that my grandfather had passed - and the man burst into tears. 

His name was Irving. He walked with a limp. Irving was a few years older than my father and as it turned out, my father's second cousin, the son of one of my grandfather's sisters, who had remained in Kovno, Lithuania.

One day, while sipping his gin in my father's study, he told me his story. They lived in a two storey house in Kovno, when one day the SS came to the street and banged on the door, until they broke it down. He was in the attic, playing. While they were rounding up all the Jews in the street, he opened the attic window and crept out onto the roof, to the back of the house, and jumped. He broke his leg in the fall, but he managed to drag himself away and finally made his way to a forest.

After the War, he made his way to America, believing that his entire family had perished in the Holocaust. He started a successful clothing business, and one day once he had made enough money, he decided to travel the world, to look for survivors of his family. He found none, until he came to Rhodesia, following a lead he had picked up somewhere. 

My father was the first family he had seen in in thirty years! From his visit, he learned that my late grandfather had a sister who survived Auschwitz, who lived in New York - where he lived, and he didn't even know. Her name was Sonia.

I will never forget that story. I will also never forget what he said afterwards. He said to me, sipping his drink, "Paul, the thing about gin is you never know when you're drunk, until it creeps up behind you and knocks on your door".

Dedicated to Irving and all families who found long lost relatives, years after being torn apart in the Holocaust.