http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/nyregion/21yitta.html WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants. Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.
Sounds like a friend of Lazarus, no? Can you imagine the ability to claim over 2,000 living descendants? My gram can claim, today, 24. She is 83 years old. I imagine if we were an orthodox family that number would be much, much higher, but we’re not. Some of her children had four children, some only had one. One of her children is deceased, one grandchild is deceased, and can claim four great-grandchildren. She will have no great-great-grandchildren in her lifetime unless she lives to see 92, at minimum (my son will be 18 when she is 92, so 92 assumes that he starts breeding earlier than I want him too).
I just can’t imagine being able to look out and be able to essentially found or populate a town with my descendants alone. What a daunting thought!
At the shiva last month, another Bergen-Belsen survivor recalled her own mother dying at the camp; Mrs. Schwartz took it upon herself to prepare the body according to Jewish ritual, dig a grave and bury the woman.
What an amazing woman. What a blessing she must have been to every life she touched.
“We didn’t feel even one minute that she was a widow,” Mrs. Mayer said. “She used to say, ‘When there are so many problems in life, I should put myself on the scale?’ ”
What a wonderful outlook to have. One I might have to adopt.
