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‘A’kapura, Hitler’ — Edith Levy turned Holocaust horror into lasting lessons

Sometimes, you just have to laugh – no matter what.

That’s why Edith Rechter Levy was thoroughly enjoying herself in her First Ward living room that afternoon four years ago, getting one over on the  Führer, like that.

It was her final say on the Final Solution, even if the Holocaust survivor was grasping, just a bit, at the Yiddish that summed the deal.

A’kapura, Hitler.

“Kapura” means “sacrifice” in that all-but-gone language. Except, when it doesn’t.

Attached to the name of the architect of the Third Reich, the man whose decisions led to the deaths of 6 million Jews in World War II, the word, kapura couldn’t carry more weight.

Most of Levy’s family, including Yosef David Rechter, her blond-haired, blue-eyed father, perished at Hitler’s order.

The grim accounting would have included Levy, her mother and her brothers Leo and Lucien, were it not for the kindness and sheer fortitude of a Belgian war widow who secretly harbored the children in her apartment in Brussels — while doors were being kicked in all across Europe.

Levy emerged from it all in 1945, a 15-year-old roiled by emotional trauma and wracked with tuberculosis, but she was alive. And so were her siblings.

It was a long road to get there, but she even started smiling and laughing again.

Maybe that’s why, in her house years away and worlds away in West Virginia, on that snowy afternoon the day before Martin Luther King Day in 2019, such a workhorse expression, with such a horrible backstory, could be still be delivered with such chutzpah.

A retired WVU professor of languages, Levy smiled as she tried to sort it all out for a visitor with a notebook.

“Hoo-boy,” she mused in softly accented English.

“The expression carries so many meanings. ‘He is done.’ ‘He is defeated.’ ‘The sacrifices you made.’ Naturally, I’ll figure out what I meant to say after you leave. That’s how it always works.”

With a smile like her grandmother’s, Yaffa Elaina, visiting from Israel, offered an interpretation.

“Grandma, you got the last word. ‘A’kapura, Hitler’ means, ‘In your face, Hitler.’ ”

Yaffa paused for a beat, and added, with Borscht Belt timing, “Of course, that’s the redneck definition.”

Levy laughed. “I’ll take it,” she said.

She died on Veterans Day.

Girlhood, gone

Levy, whose memorial service is 1 p.m. today at the WVU Erickson Alumni Center, didn’t necessarily like telling war stories.

She did allow she was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1930, and that her parents were fairly well off before the war. She was “a little spoiled,” she admitted.

All that ended Nov. 9, 1938, when she was 8 years old.

That was when she witnessed the proceedings of an evening summed up in German that didn’t require any interpretive parsing.

Kristallnacht.

The “Night of Broken Glass” – the sanctioned shards of outright, unabashed persecution of Jews by Nazis.

No more pretty dresses. No more playing in the park. She actually remembered regarding Hitler himself  from a distance at a parade and rally she was ordered to attend.

Yosef and Yetta, her mother and father, tried desperately to avoid the inevitable.

Yetta paid someone to smuggle them across the border to Belgium as they raced the tanks and the jackboots.

Little Edith got tangled in a barbed wire fence in the middle of the night during the rushed passage.

In the urgency and confusion, she was left behind. She was too scared to move or cry out as she waited for her parents to double back.

The soldiers eventually got her father and several other friends and family members.

Auschwitz.

She never saw them again.

On, the remainders shuffled, to Brussels.

In the underground of the city, a ruined family shouldering terrible grief made their acquaintance with a woman who showed fierce love.

Elizabeth Hoolman scooped up Edith, Leo and Lucien, the sudden refugees.

“Obviously, it was at all the risk in the world to her,” Levy said.

“And she had lost her own husband to the Germans. She could have been bitter. But she always told us, ‘If the soldiers come for you, they’ll have to go through me.’”

‘I think we’re home’

Levy didn’t have a home to go back to in Austria or the means to get there even if she wanted after the war.

So, she stayed in Brussels, where she caught the eye of Marcus “Mark” Levy, a U.S. Navy radioman stationed there.

Mark Levy had grown up in Brooklyn in comfortable circumstances. His father was a successful businessman and his mother, Ethel Levy, was an accomplished classical pianist.

As a kid, Mark loved the cultural duality of his life.

He would sit under the family’s grand piano while his mother played Rachmaninoff. Then he’d scoot to the raucous atmosphere of Ebbets Field to catch his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers.

Edith Rechter became Edith Rechter Levy in 1955.

A young bride journeyed with her husband to the U.S. and New York, and when a job opportunity presented itself in Morgantown, of all places, the newlyweds took it, thinking the hills of West Virginia might be a nice place to raise a family, at least for a while.

Both were struck by the hospitality and almost angry refusal when Mark offered $20 to the two men who pulled their car out of a ditch on U.S. 119 during the drive down. “Put that back in your wallet,” they said.

They learned Morgantown had an active Jewish community. When they discovered a number of High Street businesses closed for High Holidays, Edith turned to Mark and said, “I think we’re home.”

Mark Levy, who died in 2014 at age 88, retired from his job at the Morgantown Municipal Airport.

They brought up their three children — David, Laurent and Lynn — in that First Ward house they bought not long after they moved here.

Edith Rechter Levy got back in school after all her children were out of diapers. After earning her doctorate in education, she was on the WVU faculty for years.

There were still some charred ruins around her rich tapestry of her life, however.

A yearning to set the record.

And to perhaps keep it from happening again – through awareness, awareness, awareness.

In 1998, she founded the West Virginia Holocaust Commission. She crafted a curriculum, authored a series of textbooks and began educating children across the state not much older than she was on the night she got snagged in that barbed wire in Belgium.

Zolst leben un zein gezunt (“Live and be well”)

About that house: It was a delightful hodgepodge of a dwelling, depicting wonder, whimsy, resourcefulness and iron resilience, all at once.

“Good grief, four rooms when we moved in,” Levy said, drolly.

As the family grew, so did the house.

“We kept adding on. I told Mark we were going to end up in everybody’s back yard if we didn’t watch.”

A dining room one year. A sunroom the next. Additional bedrooms and an expanded living room, with a fireplace and bookshelves full of titles in English, German and Dutch to go with it.

Family, too.

David, a rabbi who was dividing his time between New Jersey and Israel was in for a visit during that distant Sunday, with his daughter, the aforementioned Yaffa, who also made her home in Israel.

Joining them on the trek was Yaffa’s daughter, Yiska, who was 11 at the time and switching from Hebrew and English and back, in her conversations.

The Levy ladies made bread and David took them around his hometown.

Such experiences aren’t foreign to Yaffa. He moved his family to Israel from Canada when his children were small.

In 2009, David’s son, Noam, a medic in the Israeli Army, died in a skirmish on the West Bank.

It was just one of those things, David said.

Noam was compassionate and empathetic and probably would have become a physician after his military service, his father added.

But that was that.

On that particular Sunday before that particular Martin Luther King Day, David Levy wanted to talk about his mother and his growing-up years in the University City instead.

“I couldn’t have asked for better parents or a better childhood,” he said. “Her family is the ultimate triumph over Hitler.”

Like his mother, he is also in possession of a droll delivery.

“I saw Uncle Leo last week on Long Island.”

“Really? How is he?”

“Old. Like you.”

“Thank you for the compliment.”

A certain presence was keeping witness the whole time in the house that afternoon.

With a nod and with her eyes, Levy directed that to visitor to a photograph on the fireplace mantel.

Ornately framed, it showed a stout Belgian woman who wasn’t going to let any harm come to three children of war.

“Madame Hoolman,” Edith Rechter Levy said, as the years melted for a moment.

“I don’t have to tell you she was … everything. A’kapura, Hitler.”