Her second husband gave her the nickname Nessa, the Hebrew word for “miracle.” Earlier this month students at the Solomon Schechter Day School in Williston Park got to hear Nessa tell the terrible story of Kristallnacht – the night of broken glass.
That night marked the beginning of Hitler’s genocide targeting the Jewish people.
Nessa was Sylvia Tylbor, a 15-year-old Jewish girl living in Warsaw on that frightening night, Nov. 9, 1938, when the windows of Jewish synagogues and storefronts throughout Germany were shattered.
Much of what Nessa Ben-Asher shared was horrific. She watched as her uncle was hanged and as local residents were lined up by the Nazis, who killed every fourth person. She told how she came home one day to find that her sister and mother had disappeared. She never saw them again.
But part of her story was a testimony to the human spirit and the courage of those who helped her survive. Her father’s old business partner gave her money and false papers identifying her as his Polish Catholic niece.
The Polish resistance convinced priests to give birth certificates of deceased Catholics for Jews to use and the Home Guard found them homes of those called “righteous gentiles” to conceal them.
In the face of certain death, she too was courageous. Over a two-year period, she said she helped rescue more than 100 people.
Incredibly, Nessa insists she has been “fortunate” in her life. After her first husband died, she moved to America in 1967 where she met and married her second husband, Jerry Ben-Asher.
Today, Nessa spends time with her eight grandchildren, plays bridge with friends and goes to the theater in New York. And fortunately she also spends time teaching children about Kristallnacht.
