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Friday March 7, 2008

Feisty survivor, writer, volleyball champ dies at 95

by stacey palevsky
staff writer

Esther Kemeny lived nine decades on two continents before she ever sat down and wrote a word of her remarkable life story.

“She was not a writer, but she wanted to have a book to let her grandchildren know her story,” recalled daughter Judy Kemeny of San Francisco.

Esther Kemeny was a Holocaust survivor, and then an author at age 90. But before that experience framed her life, a different picture developed: one of strength and audacity, as the first girl in her Czechoslovakian town to attend a college preparatory high school and also earn a law degree.

Kemeny died Feb. 27 in her apartment at Rhoda Goldman Plaza in San Francisco. She was 95.

Born in Michalovce, Slovakia, she met George Kemeny, a medical student who had seen her around town, at the age of 24. They fell in love and were married within days.

They were both sent to Auschwitz in 1944. At the time, Kemeny was pregnant. She lost the baby at five months. After the miscarriage, she forced herself to return to work the following day, peeling potatoes and doing manual labor, because she didn’t want to be beaten for being weak.

“Esther refused to be the victim of her circumstances. She was a fighter,” said Heather Haller, editor and publisher of Kemeny’s memoirs.

When the camps were liberated in 1945, Kemeny had no idea if her husband was alive. But she assumed that if he was, he would be working in a hospital. So she started looking for him and eventually ran into his uncle, who told her that George was alive, and how she could find him.

“My parents were a big love story — they loved each other totally and completely,” Judy said.

The couple moved to New York in 1949. Shortly afterward they settled in Wellsville, Ohio, a small steel mill town near the Pennsylvania border. The town needed a doctor, and the job earned George solid employment.

They had a daughter, Judy, and the couple raised her to embrace the same generous spirit of her mother.

“The town was so poor that in second grade we didn’t have school pictures because so many kids couldn’t afford them,” Judy recalled. “But often my mom would have me bring a few kids home after school, where she’d feed them homemade meals. There was always enough for everybody who showed up.”

After her husband died in 1986, Kemeny moved to San Mateo to be closer to her daughter and two grandchildren.

She got involved in Congregation Or Shalom in San Francisco, where Rabbi Pam Frydman Baugh became friends with the sweet, feisty, elderly woman. They talked about Judaism and the Holocaust, often poolside at her apartment in San Mateo.

At Baugh’s suggestion, Kemeny typed a small piece of her survivor story so Baugh could use it in a Holocaust lesson at the synagogue’s religious school.

Those two pages evolved into “On the Shores of Darkness,” which was published in 2003 and was the result of twice-weekly recorded conversations between publisher Haller and Kemeny.

“I fell in love with her from the beginning,” Haller said. “She had a warmth, grace and dignity about her.”

Kemeny was physically and mentally active until she died. She kept her mind sharp by reading, speaking one of the many languages in which she was fluent (her first language was Hungarian, but she most recently learned a bit of Tagalog so she could talk to her Filipina caregiver), and most often, playing Rummikub and Scrabble, a game for which she had an expert reputation.

She kept physically active by walking; even into her 90s she walked several blocks a day. She was a skilled volleyball player as a young girl, a talent that didn’t diminish with age.

Her daughter recalled that one spring, her mother visited her at Oberlin College. When she arrived, Judy and her friends were playing volleyball outside on the quad.

“My mother was this little old lady, she was in her 60s, and she wore a black dress with a white collar and stockings and high heels — which she always wore — and she took off those shoes and stockings and walloped everybody,” Judy said. “No one could even return her serves.”

Esther Kemeny is survived by her daughter, Judy Kemeny, son-in-law Paul Feigenbaum and two grandchildren, Sam and Susan Feigenbaum.

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