Ella Yeivin was taught to play the piano

by her mother in pre-war Poland.

Her parents were musicians in what was then

Lvov, previously Lemberg, now Lviv.

They were active in the Jewish Labour Bund.

Ella survived Auschwitz. They did not.

She never spoke of it. Still in her teens,

in a DP camp in Schauenstein,

she organised a children’s choir.

They would sing in their many languages.

When her US visa came she was

reluctant to leave her little singers.

She lived first in the Bronx, with the family

of a distant cousin of her father.

She looked after the children, and began

to teach piano. With the reparations

she was able to buy a top floor apartment

with an upright in Brooklyn Heights,

long before it became fashionable.

She was a good teacher. Her young students,

and even their mothers, never complained

about the six floors they had to walk up.

She would sometimes think of their apartment

on Ruska Street in Lvov – always

imagining it sunlit and empty.

She never married. Briefly each day

she watched pedestrians on the wide walkway

crossing Brooklyn Bridge. She saw the Twin Towers

rising in Lower Manhattan – and lived

long enough to see them fall.