Wednesday, March 19, 2014

They Just Don't Make 'Em Like this Anymore: Must Read

What a tremendous life.

 G-d rest her soul.

"Gisela Kohn Dollinger tricked death twice."

"Soon after Kristallnacht, when she was 36, Dollinger persuaded the Gestapo to release her husband from the Dachau concentration camp, and the two of them fled Austria for Shanghai, where she almost died of typhoid. After that, death seemed to forget all about her — until last week, when Dollinger passed away peacefully at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Hospital. She was 111 years old."

"When they received reparations money from Germany for a relative who had been killed in the Holocaust, they put the entire sum into a scholarship fund at an Israeli university. (Vogel was not sure which one.)

"Despite their relatively modest circumstances, Dollinger, whose father had sold men’s and women’s clothing in Austria, was a sharp dresser, Vogel said.

“By touch she could tell a fabric and its quality,” she said.

She was a size 6 all her life except near the end, and all her clothes were absolutely, completely fitted.

She was a very elegant lady, very concerned about the appearance she gave. She wasn’t vain, but she had just been taught that when you go out, or even when you’re at home, you get dressed and present your best foot forward.”