Survivors found love amid loss

He was a Czech fugitive from a slave labor unit in the Hungarian Army. She was a Romanian orphan who had found her way from a camp in the Ukraine. They first crossed paths in December 1944, on a boat heading to Palestine from Romania via Istanbul, and three days later were married on a train clattering across the Turkish countryside. Joshua Szereny and Isadora Rosen had no common language -- little connected them, really, but that they were both Jews who had lost almost everything and everyone in Hitler's crusade and had used wiles, will and luck to get to this point.

That they forged a loving and lasting union, documented in "Joshua & Isadora: A True Tale of Loss and Love in the Holocaust" (Lyons Press, 154 pages, $24.95) was of particular interest to author Michael Benanav, who owed his existence to that chance meeting aboard the Toros -- he is their grandson.

He thus grew up with a benevolent world view that held that even the most unspeakable events could result in beauty, as evidenced by the happy ending for his grandparents. "I'd been taught that the Holocaust was the zenith of senseless human hatred, the ultimate moral evil, and I believed it," he says. "Yet I struggled with condemning it unconditionally. I grappled with trying to reconcile my gratitude for being born with my abhorrence of the circumstances that brought my grandparents together. The workings of the world, I concluded, were not so simple."

Trying to understand this "ultimate evil," Benanav traveled to the Eastern European villages and countryside where his grandparents had spent some of their darkest and most desperate days. These modern-day interludes are a bit jarring and add little to the reader's understanding; of more interest is his meticulous reconstruction of Joshua and Isadora's separate, parallel paths on "cobblestones paved by chance." Some of their stories have a distinct I've-heard-this-before ring: families herded together in barns and subsisting on straw over the harsh winter, escaping certain death through sheer circumstance -- or killed indiscriminately. This familiarity risks an eye-glazing response, but ultimately doesn't lessen the story's power.

The exhaustive narrative leaves little room for details about the couple's marriage and romance, giving but a glimpse into their postwar life, including Joshua's role in the settling of the new country of Israel. There he took the new surname "Ben-Anav," a combination of the Hebrew Ben (son of) and anav, a translation of Szereny (humble). (Among those to whom Joshua and Isadora passed the name is the former St. Paul City Council member and mayoral candidate Jay Benanav, their son and Michael's uncle.)

Isadora, meanwhile, took a Hebrew first name -- Aviva, honoring Joshua's young sister, a victim of the camps.

As for Benanav, the process of writing the story helped alter his childhood picture of the essential goodness of the world. "To grant tragedy the dignity of having intention is to say that everything happens for a reason, and for the life of me, I can no longer imagine any reason that is worth genocide, war, and oppression," he concludes. All the more wondrous that he wrought such a tender story.

Cynthia Dickison is a features copy editor at the Star Tribune.