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.
By David Selzer