Rachel Gemara grew up listening to her grandparents’ stories of the Holocaust. All four grandparents are alive today, and each survived a monstrous time by luck, fate, perseverance, accidents…
Rachel Gemara grew up listening to her grandparents’ stories of the Holocaust. All four grandparents are alive today, and each survived a monstrous time by luck, fate, perseverance, accidents of timing and simple acts of grace. Gemara’s maternal grandmother, Miriam, was in Auschwitz; a girl, barely in her teens, separated from her parents and terrified of what might come next.
Arie Even, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, was among Gemara’s first patients. He was a widower who loved classical music, Hungarian cooking, historical books and socializing with friends. He had four children, 18 grandchildren and a great grandchild. He walked with a cane, and he understood the implications of a COVID-19 diagnosis for someone his age, but he exuded a sweetness, nonetheless, that drew people to him, including his nurse.
In the unit’s early days, when COVID-19 still felt strange and new, Gemara would get anxious during her 12-hour shifts. An ill-timed touch, a misstep, the fear of contamination in the ward was omnipresent. But with Even her anxiety was both present but also at a remove. In a way, he was family. The other patients in the unit were all significantly younger than Even and likewise watched over him, connecting with his relatives over Facetime so the elderly man could see some familiar faces.
Gemara notified Even’s family, sketching his last moments for them, and then she and a colleague pulled on their protective gear and entered the unit. Even was the first person in Israel to die from the virus, a strange distinction. In death, in the Jewish tradition, a body is washed and wrapped for burial by a specially appointed group of men and women known as “chevra kadisha.”
“I cried and asked Arie for forgiveness — that it had to be this way,” Gemara says. “In Judaism, even though he had already passed on, we believe that the soul can still hear and feel what is going on.” Gemara has another story, about a patient named Koby, a 51-year-old man who collapsed one night on her watch. She was alone. She saved him, but she couldn’t stop his continued decline and was soon wheeling Koby to an ICU unit for intubation.
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