in first person: High Holy Days alone in a balcony in Belgium

Erev Rosh Hashanah, Brussels 1956. I found a synagogue —  and congregants greeting each other. Ladies in their finery, gentlemen with their hats.

By comparison, I looked like someone’s maid on her day off: raincoat, my one good dress, low-heel shoes and no hat or gloves. Being on a one-year trip from San Francisco to Europe and Israel did not allow for extensive wardrobe.

Eva Hirschel in the 1950s

Switching to Yiddish, he ordered “Setz dich aweg oeben” (go sit upstairs).

I was all alone in the balcony. All others were seated downstairs, men on the left, women on the right. It reminded me of times spent with my mother in our beautiful synagogue in Breslau, Germany, destroyed on Kristallnacht.

Surely this balcony was once filled. But now it was empty, a victim itself of the Holocaust. I prayed, I cried. Services concluded, I mingled with the congregants.

No one spoke to me. No one wondered about the stranger in their midst.

“L’Shanah Tovah to all,” I whispered. Then I left.

Eva Hirschel lives in Rohnert Park. Now in her 80s, she was 12 years old when she fled Nazi Germany in May of 1940 with her 8-year-old brother and her parents.

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