Posted on 04/14/2020 11:19:41 AM PDT by nickcarraway
You can save the sentimental claptrap on turning 100 for some other centenarian. Hedi McKinley, who hits triple digits on Wednesday, is not interested in any sort of triteness.
She is a Holocaust survivor and a woman who has looked evil in the eye and never blinked.
“I didn’t expect to make it to 100, but here I am,” she said. “I don’t know why anybody wants to live this long. The world isn’t such a wonderful place, but I don’t know what the alternative is.”
She spoke by phone Saturday from her apartment in Beverwyck, an independent senior community where McKinley lives with a full-time caregiver. Given her age and heightened health risk to COVID-19, she is abiding by shelter-in-place guidelines and Beverwyck’s strict no-visitor policy.
Quarantine makes her cranky. She’d much rather be choosing a stylish blouse and high heels and adjusting her signature oversized red-frame glasses before joining friends for dinner or a concert.
Being grounded by the coronavirus pandemic is tough on a social butterfly and fashionista.
“It feels crazy because I can’t go where I want to go,” said McKinley, whose first name is pronounced HAY-dee. “I don’t want to start complaining, but I am very impatient and I wish this was over with.”
Her caregiver, Barbara Quant, understands her unrest.
“Hedi is very active. This is hard on her not being able to go out to meet her friends,” Quant said. “She is very stylish and doesn’t look or act 100. She lives life to the fullest at all times.”
One thing McKinley misses terribly these days is being able to visit high schools to speak with students about the Holocaust as part of the Holocaust Survivors & Friends Education Center’s outreach.
“She’s an inspiration. She reminds us never to forget how prejudice led to genocide,” said Shelly Shapiro, director of the Albany-based center. She has been arranging McKinley’s school visits for two decades.
They met when McKinley attended an Anne Frank exhibit Shapiro organized and she convinced McKinley to tell her Holocaust story publicly for the first time.
Students write McKinley notes after her talks. One student, Mayfield High School student David Servelle, wrote: “Your inspiration is something I’m going to carry with me for as long as I live. You showed me how everything is possible no matter how hard and no matter what the situation is.”
Born Hedi Faludi on April 15, 1920, she grew up in Vienna an only child. Her mother died when she was young and her father and stepmother ran a small corner store and struggled financially. In March 1938, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and German troops moved into Austria and annexed the German-speaking nation for the Third Reich. Hitler appointed a new Nazi government.
“Jews became hunted,” McKinley said. The Nazis seized her family’s store and left the impoverished family in desperate straits.
She was 18 years when she witnessed the terror of Kristallnacht on Nov. 9, 1938.
During the “night of broken glass,” Nazis smashed windows of Jewish businesses, burned synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes and killed nearly 100 Jews.
Late that night, two teenaged members of the Hitler Youth in brown shirts pounded on the door and ordered the family to vacate their apartment.
“Jews, out!” they yelled.
As her parents were forced into the street on a bitter cold night, their quick-thinking daughter managed to slip the apartment key into her bra before being locked out. She later snuck back in and retrieved their winter coats.
Their daughter stayed with a friend in the city and her parents found refuge with a relative. Her boyfriend, Heinz, who was half-Jewish, brought her to the Gildemeester organization – a group that helped Jews escape Nazi-occupied Austria.
McKinley traveled by train to Belgium and by ship to England on a ticket the Gildemeesters provided. The group also helped her get work as a maid with a family in London. Her parents escaped the Nazis by crossing the Austrian border on foot. They reunited in London after McKinley found a message they left at a clearinghouse for refugees.
“They never talked about what happened,” she said. “It was too painful.”
The three booked passage to the United States with the help of a Catholic uncle, who owned rooming houses on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. McKinley worked as a maid and later as a waitress. She learned English by going to movies in the theaters that lined 42nd Street.
She learned toughness from her father, Karl Faludi, who was wounded in World War I, captured by the Russians and held in a POW camp in Siberia for nearly four years until he was released when the war ended. He walked more than 1,000 miles to reach his home in Vienna.
“He had a huge, infectious laugh,” his daughter recalled.
Movie theatres in Vienna hired him to laugh at appropriate times during funny films to prime the audience -- a forerunner of the laugh track.
McKinley’s fondest memory working as a waitress in New York City was serving First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
“I was thrilled beyond belief,” she said. “I remember she had beautiful hands.”
McKinley’s chutzpah got her into Columbia University. “I told them I had graduated from college in Vienna, which was like high school in the States but I didn’t explain that,” she said. She was accepted into graduate school and earned a master’s degree in social welfare. She was one of the first faculty members hired in 1969 in the new School of Social Welfare at the University at Albany. She created the community and public services programs for students at UAlbany and retired from the faculty in 1985. She continued a private marriage counseling practice into her 90s.
McKinley has inspired people on both sides of the Atlantic.
“I learned from her that even in the most terrible times of your life you can do something, you can help others and you can overcome,” said Hannah Lessing, secretary general of the National Fund for Victims of National Socialism in Austria. The women forged a friendship a decade ago during McKinley’s annual trips to Vienna.
Sixteen years after the death of her first husband, Will McKinley, she met Joseph Levinger, a distinguished physics professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The two widowers lived in Altamont and married in their late-70s. McKinley wrote a column for the Altamont Enterprise and they entertained often at their Leesome Lane home. They were world travelers who spent 20 years as a couple until his death in 2018 at 96. The house was too much for her to keep up alone and she moved to Beverwyck.
McKinley has no secret for longevity, other than inheriting good genes. He father lived until 93. She eats an egg or two each day – scrambled, fried, poached or hardboiled – and drinks a couple cups of strong black tea with a slice of fresh lemon.
Her life philosophy is unsentimental. “Live peacefully and gratefully,” she said. “Teach your children not to hurt others. Be kind.”
That’s a wise comment. I’m half her age, but at times I already feel like “I’ve seen enough of this world and humanity, so any time you are ready, God....”
You would think that’s a negative/pessimistic comment, but I see it actually as optimistic.
One thing McKinley misses terribly these days is being able to visit high schools to speak with students about the Holocaust as part of the Holocaust Survivors & Friends Education Center’s outreach.
I hate to quibble, but she and her family managed to slip across the border, escape to England, then America. None of them wound up in the camps. IOW, she's a survivor of the purges including Kristallnacht. They endured persecution and hardships, but are/were not Holocaust survivors. I'm glad she's still around to share the message about the ****ing Nazis (the real ones, not the imaginary ones of the Demagogic Party) to new generations. Once the ****ing Demagogic Party gets complete control, they'll get the Holocaust erased from history books.
http://www.google.com/search?q=the+holocaust+survivor+project
http://www.google.com/search?q=man’s+search+for+meaning
free audiobook version, it’s around somewhere, because I’ve downloaded it:
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