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Sep. 20th, 2006 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingThose who knew San Francisco's Elfriede Rinkel never found it remarkable that the German immigrant would marry a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, or attend synagogue with him, or plan to be buried next to him at a cemetery run by a Chevra Kadisha, a Jewish burial society that performs ritual purification.
On Tuesday, though, came a jarring twist: The U.S. Justice Department said the 84-year-old Rinkel had been deported to Germany, nearly half a century after she emigrated to the United States, because she had been a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in World War II where an estimated 90,000 people, many of them Jews, were exterminated.
[Her husbnad] Fred Rinkel's past and Jewish heritage were important to him, according to those who knew him. He belonged to B'nai B'rith, one of the world's largest Jewish organizations.
He died of a heart attack Jan. 21, 2004, and was buried at the Eternal Home Cemetery in Colma. Elfriede Rinkel planned to be buried beside him, the cemetery said. It's not clear now whether that will still happen, although under an agreement with the Justice Department, she can be buried on U.S. soil.
An employee at Sinai Memorial Chapel, which owns the Colma cemetery, said those who met the Rinkels while they prepared for the end of their lives are in shock at the news.
"It's so easy to hate her and want to beat her up," said the employee, who asked that her name not be published. "But we were not there. We don't know what happened. Why did she marry a Jewish man? Maybe she loved him.
"The human soul is much more evil and good than it appears from the outside. There's a Russian expression that says you have to eat a kilogram of salt with someone before you begin to know them. There's just so much we don't know."
Synchronicity:
This is the third time in two days this post has come to mind.
On Tuesday, though, came a jarring twist: The U.S. Justice Department said the 84-year-old Rinkel had been deported to Germany, nearly half a century after she emigrated to the United States, because she had been a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in World War II where an estimated 90,000 people, many of them Jews, were exterminated.
[Her husbnad] Fred Rinkel's past and Jewish heritage were important to him, according to those who knew him. He belonged to B'nai B'rith, one of the world's largest Jewish organizations.
He died of a heart attack Jan. 21, 2004, and was buried at the Eternal Home Cemetery in Colma. Elfriede Rinkel planned to be buried beside him, the cemetery said. It's not clear now whether that will still happen, although under an agreement with the Justice Department, she can be buried on U.S. soil.
An employee at Sinai Memorial Chapel, which owns the Colma cemetery, said those who met the Rinkels while they prepared for the end of their lives are in shock at the news.
"It's so easy to hate her and want to beat her up," said the employee, who asked that her name not be published. "But we were not there. We don't know what happened. Why did she marry a Jewish man? Maybe she loved him.
"The human soul is much more evil and good than it appears from the outside. There's a Russian expression that says you have to eat a kilogram of salt with someone before you begin to know them. There's just so much we don't know."
Synchronicity:
This is the third time in two days this post has come to mind.