It is our privilege in this newspaper to meet people of courage and to let our readers meet them too.
Fawn Neaman and her family are such people and while the may be embarrassed by the appellation they are brave or as Spencer Neaman said: “You just do what you have to do.”
As much as we admire him our 30 years in the newspaper business has taught us the lesson that often people don’t do what the have to do.
We are honored to count in our family and friends many veterans most of whom served in war time and many in battle.
However the bravest person we ever met never wore a uniform. When we met her she was a 60 year old grand mother and mother-in-law to our two brothers-in-law who married her daughters.
Fanny Smolenski was just 14 years old when the Germans marched into Paris. She was the sole surviving member of her large Jewish family and she survived at first because one morning shortly after the occupation she was sent to buy a loaf of bread.
She returned home to find her building cordoned off as the Gestapo aided by the French police. They arrested her mother, father, sisters and brothers for the capitol crime of being Jewish.
She never saw them again.
Fanny spent the night at a friend’s house.
She grieved for her family that night.
And in the morning she went to war.
Blonde haired and blue eyed she could have passed as Aryan or she could have hidden dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Instead she joined a resistance cell and went to kill Nazi’s.
And for the next four years Fanny did it very well.
The bravest thing about Fanny was that after the liberation of Paris she hung up her pistol, put away her home made bombs and returned to normalcy.
She married a fellow partisan opened a clothing store and lead a perfectly respectable, some would say boring, middle class bourgeois life.
Occasionally on November 11 if she felt like it, she would put on her Resistance medal and attend the local ceremony for the dead soldiers of France but only occasionally.
The war and her role in it was just another chapter in her life of no less and no greater importance than all the others and certainly not as great as those with grandchildren in them.
Fanny did what she had to do and then got on with her life.
We did not know her story when we first met her coming home from the army on a week leave.
She appeared to us a nice old lady but she did say something that struck us as odd when we unslung our AK-47.
She said, “Such a beautiful gun.”
We have no idea if she ever woke up at night in terror of the war.
We doubt it but we could be wrong.
We do not remember ever seeing her sad.
Instead we remember her laugh.
It was loud and long and filled with joy.
“Khayes iz sheyn” she said.
Life is beautiful.
That dear readers is courage.