by Susan Schnur
Remembering the early years with Dina
“My son Shioimehleh, he was just a boy, he first saw Dina in a restaurant in Poland and he made an anti-Semitic waiter serve her. He wouldn’t let Dina go until she promised to write his mother in America. Dina sent me a letter from the orphanage: ‘I want a mother, a father and a dakh [roof].’ At that moment, I knew I would be her mother. You see, I was a child in Poland during a war, too, living with my grandmother. We starved, and my sister and my brother died from eating poisonous mushrooms.