The Germans sent her on a 1,000+ mile train trip in the depth of WW II

[yankeedoodle]

So, this 90+-year-old jewish woman living in New York meets a jewish author, and suddenly she decides to talk about a train trip the Germans sent her on in July 1944, a time in which the war was turning against Germany. 

This woman - just a girl then - was living on the Greek island of Rhodes, and the Germans decided to send her on a train trip.  Any guesses where?  If you guess they sent her to Aww-shitz, you are right.

Aw-shitz is in Poland, and the distance between the capitals of Greece and Poland by train surely is more than 1,000 miles (1,600 k), and this would approximate the distance between Rhodes and Aww-shitz. https://www.distancecalculator.net/from-warsaw-to-athens

So, with war raging throughout Europe, and Germany's resources stretched to the limit and being devoted to the war effort, they decided to send a young jewish woman on a long train trip to Aww-shitz, where she was able to survive the war and end up in New York, where she could live into her 90s, and meet a jewish writer and the two of them could cook-up a total bullshit story and put it into a book so both of them can make a lot of money.   

Wasn't it wonderful that Germany sent her on that train trip! 

A Holocaust survivor from tiny Rhodes shares her story in a new book
https://www.jta.org/2022/12/01/ny/a-holocaust-survivor-from-tiny-rhodes-shares-her-story-in-a-new-book

Auschwitz survivor Stella Levi chose not to tell the story of what she endured during the Holocaust until she was well into her 90s and met the author Michael Frank.

"I didn't want my identity to be fixed in that way. I didn't want that number to be tattooed on my arm," she explains. "I didn't want to be a victim."

On Wednesday evening, Frank read that passage from "One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World," his new book based on the conversations he and Levi had over the course of 100 Saturday afternoons spent together at her Greenwich Village apartment. The New York Jewish Week hosted the live conversation with Frank and Levi — glamorous and whip-smart at age 99 — at B'nai Jeshurun in Manhattan. The New York Jewish Week's former arts and culture editor, Sandee Brawarsky, moderated.

The book — a moving, personal account of the once-vibrant Sephardic Jewish community that had thrived on Rhodes, an island in the Aegean Sea — was just named one of the 10 best books of 2022 by the Wall Street Journal.

During the conversation, Frank and Levi shared a lighthearted rapport, occasionally speaking to one another in Italian, the language in which Levi was educated. (Her family, along with the rest of Rhodes' Jewish community, spoke Judeo-Spanish.)

Some 350 guests filled the sanctuary at the Upper West Side's B'nai Jeshurun to hear Levi share memories of her childhood in the Juderia — the Jewish quarter — of Rhodes; her harrowing, three-week journey to Auschwitz in July of 1944 and what she endured there; how she arrived in the U.S. and eventually built a life for herself in New York City.

Of the approximately 1,700 members of the island's Jewish community who were deported by the Nazis, only some 150 survived.

And yet, despite the horrors she witnessed, Levi, from an early age, lived life to the fullest — moving to New York, learning English at Columbia University, serving on the board of Centro Primo Levi NY and helping keep the memory of the Rhodes Jewish community alive.