No one could get a firm fix on the Yiddish expression being bandied about in Edith Rechter Levy’s Morgantown living room last Sunday.
A’kapura, Hitler.
“Kapura” means “sacrifice,” in Yiddish. Except when it doesn’t.
Especially when it’s attached to the name of the architect of the Third Reich, the man whose decisions led to the deaths of 6 million Jews in World War II.
Most of Levy’s family, including her blond-haired, blue-eyed father, perished in the death camps.
The grim accounting would have included Levy and her brothers Leo and Lucien, were it not for the kindness and sheer fortitude of a Belgian war widow who secretly harbored the siblings in her apartment in Brussels — while doors were being kicked in all across Europe.
Levy emerged from that apartment in 1945, a 15-year-old roiled by emotional trauma and wracked with tuberculosis, but she was alive. And so were her siblings.
It was a long road to get there, but she even started smiling and laughing again.
Maybe that’s why, in her house years away and worlds away in West Virginia, on the day before Martin Luther King Day, such an expression, with such a horrible backstory, could be delivered with such chutzpah.
Now 88 and a retired WVU professor of languages, Levy smiled as she tried to sort it all out.
“Hoo-boy,” she mused in softly accented English.
“The expression carries so many meanings. ‘He is done.’ ‘He is defeated.’ The sacrifices you made. Naturally, I’ll figure out what I meant to say after you leave. That’s how it always works.”
With a smile like her grandmother’s, Yaffa Elaina, visiting from Israel, offered an interpretation.
“Grandma: A’kapura, Hitler’ means, ‘In your face, Hitler.’ You got the last word.”
Yaffa paused for a beat, and added, with Borscht Belt timing, “Of course, that’s the redneck definition.”
Girlhood, gone
Levy doesn’t necessarily like telling war stories. She will allow she was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1930, and that her parents were fairly well off before the war.
She’ll admit she was a “little spoiled” and she’ll say her childhood ended when she was 8 years old after Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass” that ushered in the sanctioned persecution of Jews by Nazis.
No more pretty dresses. No more playing in the park. She remembers regarding the Führer from a distance at a parade and rally she was ordered to attend.
Her parents tried desperately to avoid the inevitable.
Levy’s mother paid someone to smuggle them across the border to Belgium as they raced the tanks and the jackboots.
Little Edith got tangled in a barbed wire fence in the middle of the night during the rushed passage.
In the urgency and confusion, she was left behind. She was too scared to move or cry out as she waited for her parents to double back.
The soldiers eventually got her father and several other friends and family members. Auschwitz. She never saw them again.
On, the remainders shuffled to Brussels.
In the underground of the city, a ruined family shouldering terrible grief made their acquaintance with a woman who showed fierce love.
Elizabeth Hoolman scooped up Edith, Leo and Lucien, the sudden refugees.
“Obviously, it was at all the risk in the world to her,” Levy said.
“And she had lost her own husband to the Germans. She could have been bitter. But she always told us, ‘If the soldiers come for you, they’ll have to go through me.’”
‘I think we’re home’
Levy didn’t have a home to go back to in Austria or the means to get there even if she wanted after the war.
So she stayed in Brussels, where she caught the eye of Marcus “Mark” Levy, a U.S. Navy radioman who had re-enlisted and was serving out his hitch there.
Mark Levy grew up in Brooklyn in comfortable circumstances. His father was a successful businessman and his mother, Ethel Levy, was an accomplished classical pianist.
As a kid, Mark loved the cultural duality of his life.
He would sit under the family’s grand piano while his mother played Rachmaninoff. Then he’d scoot to the raucous atmosphere of Ebbets Field to catch his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers.
Edith Rechter became Edith Rechter Levy in 1955.
A young bride journeyed with her husband to the U.S. and New York, and when a job opportunity presented itself in Morgantown, of all places, the newlyweds took it, thinking the hills of West Virginia might be a nice place to raise a family.
Both were struck by the hospitality and almost angry refusal when Mark offered $20 to the two men who pulled their car out of a ditch on U.S. 119 during the drive down. “Put that back in your wallet,” they said.
They learned Morgantown had an active Jewish community. When they discovered a number of downtown businesses closed for High Holidays, Edith turned to Mark and said, “I think we’re home.”
Mark Levy, who died in 2014 at age 88, retired from his job at the Morgantown Municipal Airport. They raised their three children — David, Laurent and Lynn — in the house they bought not long after they moved here.
Edith Rechter Levy got back in school after all her children were out of diapers. After earning her doctorate in education, she was on the WVU faculty for years.
In 1998, she founded the West Virginia Holocaust Commission. She crafted a curriculum, authored a series of textbooks and began educating children across the state not much older than she was on the night she got snagged in that barbed wire in Belgium.
Zolst leben un zein gezunt (“Live and be well”)
The Levy house, meanwhile, is a delightful hodgepodge of a dwelling.
“Good grief, four rooms when we moved in,” its co-owner said, drolly.
As the family grew, so did the house.
“We kept adding on. I told Mark we were going to end up in everybody’s back yard if we didn’t watch.”
A dining room one year. A sun room the next. Additional bedrooms and an expanded living room, with a fireplace and bookshelves full of tomes in English, German and Dutch to go with it.
Family, too.
David, a rabbi who divides his time between New Jersey and Israel was in with his daughter, the aforementioned Yaffa, who makes her home in Israel.
Joining them on the trek was Yaffa’s daughter, Yiska, who is 11 and switches back and forth between Hebrew and English in her conversations.
The Levy ladies made bread and David took them around his hometown. Such experiences aren’t foreign to Yaffa. He moved his family to Israel from Canada when his children were small.
Ten years ago, David’s son, Noam, a medic in the Israeli Army, died in a skirmish on the West Bank.
It was just one of those things, David said. His son, he said, was compassionate and empathetic and probably would have become a physician after his military service.
But that was that. On this particular Sunday before Martin Luther King Day, David Levy wanted to talk about his mother, instead.
“Her family is the ultimate triumph over Hitler,” he said. “I couldn’t have asked for better parents or a better childhood.”
Like his mother, he is also in possession of a droll delivery.
“I saw Uncle Leo last week on Long Island,” he told her.
“Really? How is he?”
“Old. Like you.”
“Thank you for the compliment.”
In the midst of the happy tumult, there was a certain presence keeping witness. It came in the form of a photograph on the mantel.
Look closely and you’ll see a stout Belgian woman who wasn’t going to let any harm come to three children of war.
“Madame Hoolman,” Edith Rechter Levy said, as the years melted for a moment.
“I don’t have to tell you she was … everything. A’kapura, Hitler.”
