Torn from family, Israeli F-15 pilot's mom kept Holocaust past secret

In the office of practically every Israel Air Force officer hangs a photograph of an F-15 fighter plane flying over Auschwitz in 2003. But for Brig. Gen. Itai Reis, the commander of Palmahim air force base south of Rishon Letzion, the picture hits particularly close to home.

The three sons of Rama Reis-Kremnitzer knew almost from birth that the woman they knew as their grandma on their mother's side was not their biological grandmother, but a cousin of the woman who took care of their mother during the Holocaust.

Three years ago, their mother finally found the strength to tell them the full story.

'Being Jewish meant death'

Rama was four years old when she last saw her mother and father, Berta and Munio Kremnitzer. Then, she was too young to know who was fighting whom. "I knew only that a Jew was somebody they killed. That being Jewish meant death," she says.

She was born in Lvov, eastern Poland (today Ukraine), in 1937. Her first memory of the war is the uprooting from her childhood home, as Ukrainian collaborators forced her family to move to the Jewish ghetto. Every Jew was allowed to take along only one suitcase. Her mother even prepared a small package for her in which to carry her toys.

After a few months in the ghetto, her parents sat her down for a talk.

"They said these were bad times, and that I needed to be a good girl because they were going to give me to other people," she remembers.

That night, her mother took her to the ghetto wall. On the other side stood Mr. Knyzewski, a Polish physician, and his wife. "My mother told me, 'You're going with auntie, that's what you'll call her.' I don't remember her face at that moment, just her voice, but I'm sure she didn't cry," she recounts.

Waiting by the window

Rama does not remember the names of the Knyzewski couple, to whom her parents gave their remaining possessions as compensation for taking their daughter. To her they were always "auntie" and "uncle," even though relations with them were cold and distant. "I only knew that I had to be good and quiet. Trucks full of people passed by the house and I heard them say 'They're taking the Jews.' I always stood by the window waiting for my mother to come get me," she says.

Mrs. Knyzewski would occasionally bring food from a factory outside the ghetto where the girl's parents worked, and Rama begged her to take her along. Finally "auntie" accepted.

"I told them I wasn't going back to the Knyzewski family. Dad sat me on his lap and said, 'If you want us all to live, you have to go back to auntie.' I wasn't angry. Mom didn't say anything, she just stood there crying, and I hugged her," she says.

Rama never saw her parents again. According to documents at Yad Vashem, they were killed on May 31, 1943.

Later, Knyzewski family relatives moved in - Lusha, nine years older than Rama. Dr. Knyzewski feared the Germans would search the house and that Rama would reveal she was Jewish. He instructed one of his sons to take the girl to a snowy field outside the city and leave her there.

Lusha, who was employed as a servant in the house, said if the girl went, so would she. They remained in the home for two years, until word of their whereabouts reached the authorities. At that time, they moved in to the home of an elderly man who knew nothing of their real identities.

After Lvov's liberation in July 1944 they bounced between the displaced persons' camps of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy and Germany before immigrating to Israel in 1948. Rama was raised on Kibbutz Ginegar in the Jezreel Valley, became certified as a teacher and married Kfar Sava-born Benny Reis.

'Only scraps of information'

For years, only her husband knew of her past. "In the first years of the state people didn't want to hear, and survivors didn't want to tell. I put all my effort into assimilating, being like everyone else," she says. They settled in Ashkelon, where they raised three children and eight grandchildren.

Itai Reis, their eldest son, says in his youth he received "only scraps of information." The absence of his mother's family growing up he describes as "an issue which wasn't talked about."

Still, he admits the horrors his mother underwent in the Holocaust loomed large in the home, even if they were not openly acknowledged.

"The experience of the Holocaust was there in my decision to fulfill myself in military service. It was clear to me I'd be an officer, even though as a child I never dreamed of the air force," he says.

"The Israeli people aren't at the edge of the cliff," he says. "Because we have an army, they can sleep soundly."