In Memoriam: Tante Laura

My Tante Laura was an amazing woman. Not only was she, like my Oma, a woman who was born in a German speaking Mennonite in a Yiddish village in the Ukraine, Russia at the start of the 2nd world war (a bad place to be) but she was a woman who, having lived through unspeakable horrors, managed to hold historical perspective on it all. When I talk to my Oma the stories of tragedy always seem to jumble out and tumble up together to the point that a) one can't tell what's real or not and b) it seems as if there has never been any peace in her life. My Great-Aunt (Tante) lived through many of the same horrible events but she remembers the name of every person in the village and everything that happened to them afterwards, if it was known (which is not altogether often), and also was able to chronologically sort these memories. She had an amazing photographic memory and an insatiable desire to read. She went blind many years back due to reading. She had at least 4 children, two of which she fled across continents with and the wide Atlantic to the safety of Canada's shores. She died of a stroke, just shy of her 90th birthday.