It was a normal Sunday morning and I was at a retirement home, telling stories of the Shtetl, the Holocaust, and then the story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.  At the conclusion of the story, I picked up my guitar and sang (in English and then in Yiddish) the anthem of the Jewish resistance fighters: When I was half-way through the Yiddish version, I was startled to hear loud moaning and cries from a member of the audience.  After I concluded the program, an elderly woman Esther, approached me and apologized for disturbing my program and said: When I hear that song, I go to pieces. 

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"I am a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto"

When I recovered from her statement, she unveiled this extraordinary story:  After the young German guard at the Jewish Ghetto factory smashed her forehead with his rifle because she would not leave with him, she ran home bleeding.  That night, her father and brother placed her in a potato sack and carried the sack on their shoulders to a previously arranged spot on the Ghetto wall, where they lifted and threw her over the wall into the hands of a friendly Christian who carried her to safety.  Two months later, Esther looked up and saw the ghetto on fire.  She was now the sole survivor of her family. 

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When Esther finished her harrowing tale, she surprised me by shaking her finger in my face and scolding me and said: “Mr. Sternthal, you are in the wrong place.  You should be telling your stories and singing your songs to young people who know little and soon will know nothing about these terrible events, not to us old people.  We know these stories because we lived them. I was stunned, but I soon found my voice, and I took her hands in mine, and vowed to spend the rest of my years, to address young people to relate these stories and sing these songs.