For the Neiger family of Kraków, Poland, the world before 1939 was a tight-knit Jewish community filled with relatives, tradition, and a sense of freedom. Hanka Neiger, who later wrote a book titled "The Red Hat" about her experiences, recalled a childhood surrounded by dozens of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
Her father, Herman Neiger, had been a professional soccer player who represented the Polish national team. Her mother, Sara Neiger, ran a vegetable store, waking early each morning to work alongside her husband. Hanka remembered her mother as a sociable, funny, and determined woman with strong principles.
The family lived in three rooms with a large kitchen in the Jewish quarter of Kraków, a neighborhood with deep roots. As Basia, one of the daughters, explained, Jews had come to Kraków since the end of the fourteenth century, and Poland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been a welcoming place for Jewish settlement because the kings were tolerant.
It was a very Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. There were no cars, only the occasional horse. There were no streetlights, and children could cross the street freely. Hanka described it as a free life — in the morning they dressed, were given a piece of bread, and sent out to the street.
Ben, another sibling, recalled being sent alone across the river to his grandparents because his mother had no time to care for him. He would walk for two hours through the streets and over the bridge, rain or not, only to be told his grandparents had no time for him that day and to come back another time. He would walk home again, a boy of four or five with a stick in the street.
Education was central to the family. Hanka said her parents believed strongly in learning, calling it an essential part of Jewish upbringing. Ben remembered his older sister Sesia as the authority in the family when their mother was away. She once took him on the tram for the first time in his life — a single stop, and the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him. They did not pay, because they had no money.
Ben described it as a life like something out of very old films. Then the war began, and everything changed.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler began his attack on Europe, starting with the invasion of Poland. The Polish army surrendered within two weeks. Ben remembered the first planes flying over their homes from Germany, dropping not explosives but something like tear gas, intended to frighten people. The smell was terrible, like sulfur.
Tusia, another family member, recounted that the first time German warplanes flew over the city, her aunt Hanka gathered all fifty children in their grandfather's cellar and covered them with feather quilts, as if that could protect them from the bombing.
One dark day, Nazi soldiers came to the family's home. They took everything of value and told the family to prepare to leave. Each person packed an extra pair of shoes in a small bag as they were forced out.
Once the ghetto was established, everyone had to leave their homes and move into it. Basia remembered the sound of boots. German soldiers patrolled the ghetto in tall boots, and she learned that the clicking sound was not a good sound. She would run and sometimes hide in a garbage can, covering herself so they would not see her.
Ben recalled being moved from their apartment to a poor district. The Germans occupied certain streets, built a wall around them, and all Jews had to go into the ghetto. If you did not go, you were shot.
Tusia described being driven to the ghetto gates. The ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire to imprison all the Jews of the city. Nazi soldiers in shiny black boots lined the gates as a large crowd gathered. The Nazis pointed their rifles and pushed the crowd through the gates.
They were told not to get comfortable because they would not stay there long. Tusia began to cry bitterly, and her mother tried to comfort her. Her mother saw a vendor selling hats from a handcart at the edge of the ghetto gate, took change from her pocket, and bought her a red hat. As the gates closed behind them, her mother placed the red hat on her head, pulled it down over her ears, and pulled her along. Tusia wore that red hat from that moment on.
Once inside, no one was allowed to leave. The family was placed in a single room in an apartment with other families they did not know. Many Jewish prisoners were taken out daily to work as laborers at a camp called Płaszów. People in the ghetto starved, and some tried to sneak out to find food. If caught by SS guards, they were put in the ghetto prison or shot on the spot.
Hanka remembered a boy named Marcel. She would sit in the doorway of their home and watch him ride his bicycle up and down the street, showing off tricks because he knew she was watching. She would wave. One day he did not come. He was gone. She knew what happened to people who disappeared — they were deported to the camps.
Ben estimated there were perhaps twenty thousand people in the ghetto, with no shops to buy food. His mother had owned a food business outside the ghetto and brought in two large bags of food each day, sharing it with people inside. There was a prison where young people needed for labor were held in something like garages. There was no water there. The situation was terrible.
His mother could not bear it. She had food, so she cooked large pots of leftovers, pieces of meat, whatever had not sold. At night they carried food to the prison. One day, as they dragged a pot, it made noise. A German guard heard it, took his rifle, and began shooting in their direction. They left the pot and ran home.
When they told their mother what happened, she began assigning them work. "You are afraid someone will shoot you? People are dying of hunger," she said. She had been cooking for hours, and now the food would be cold. They went back for the pot and dragged it to the prison. That was their last trip to the prison. It was around that time that things began to change in the ghetto, and people started being deported slowly to the concentration camp.
Hanka said they always knew how to run and hide when they saw the shiny black boots coming. They knew the Germans wanted to kill Jews. The soldiers marched, and if they felt like it, they shot people at random.
She remembered looking at the orphanage in the ghetto. They threw children from the window — infants — before loading them onto trucks to take them away. They were already dead by the time they fell from the windows.
Ben described a hospital in the ghetto where about twenty or thirty old men were kept because the International Red Cross would come to check. It was the Germans' display that they were very humane, keeping the elderly in a hospital. That is how his grandfather stayed alive.
One day his mother received a call from a doctor who was a friend of the family. She took Ben with her. She told him his grandfather was very sick and might not live until tomorrow. At the hospital, she was crying heavily and told Ben to go say goodbye in case he did not survive. Ben went to his grandfather, held his hand, and they talked. His grandfather told him to take care of his mother. He was sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette. Ben thought this man was not so sick that he would die tomorrow, but something was not acceptable there. He never saw his grandfather again.
Years later, his mother told him the story. The Germans came and said they would eliminate the hospital. The elderly would be shot. The doctors negotiated with the Germans that they would care for them, that they would give them an injection. They were told they had a choice: be shot by the Germans or simply go to sleep. He decided to go to sleep.
Their mother used to say she walked through the ghetto, walking beside a pile of corpses and seeing her two-year-old niece on top of the pile with a bullet through her forehead. There was no doubt about what was happening.
Tusia recounted that at the beginning of the German occupation there were sixty thousand Jews in Kraków. There were schools, markets, and synagogues. There was life. Now there were only a few thousand starving Jews left suffering.
A truck came to the front of their house one day, and soldiers jumped out. Among them was a butcher from Kraków whose specialty was shooting small children. He was responsible for eliminating everyone who was not of working age. The family had been warned not to leave the house because if children were found in the street, they would be killed.
They heard the truck stop in front of their building, closed the door, turned off the light, and sat quietly. There was nothing they could do. The building had four floors, with apartments one above the other. They heard boots on the stairs, one after another. Soldiers smashed doors with their rifles, and the shooter went in. Anyone alive was shot.
They heard screaming and shooting, then silence, floor after floor. Above them were friends, children Ben had played with. They heard the door broken there and heard those children scream, but they were shot. Then it was quiet.
They were last because they were on the ground floor. The man entered, his uniform covered in blood like a butcher, holding a pistol. He stood there very calmly, put his hand in his pocket, and pressed it. A magazine came out. He loaded bullets one after another — one, two, three, four, six, eight, Ben could not remember exactly. They stood watching him do it. Then he put the magazine in place and pointed the rifle.
Ben was very scared and did not want to die. He thought, "I am twelve years old," and knew a bullet would come to his head at any second. His mother said, "Close your eyes."
The door opened and a soldier entered. He said something to the shooter in German. The shooter looked, then put the pistol in his holster and left. Ben never knew what the soldier said. He could not imagine what was said that stopped him from shooting them. This man had killed hundreds of people. Why did he stop at them? They do not know.
Then the Germans decided to eliminate the ghetto entirely. That was the end of Jewish life in Kraków.
The family reached a stage in the ghetto where people were made to dig their own graves, were stripped of their clothes, entered the pit, and then the Germans threw hand grenades.
Hanka said their mother told them, "This is it, we are going. What can we lose? Either we survive, but we do not want to end this way." Their father said they would die, but he would not stand by and wait for them all to be killed and shot. He would go and try to get out.
Their father had been a very famous soccer player. There was a Christian team, and he had Christian friends who lived in Kraków outside the ghetto. Their mother had owned a food business outside the ghetto. People with food businesses received special permits to leave the ghetto in the morning and had to return at night. The German soldier at the ghetto gate knew their mother well because she left and came back, and she would bribe him well with food and other things.
Their mother took all her savings. Because the permit was for leaving the ghetto, she contacted the Christian team where their father had played and told them their survival depended on them. They obtained Christian papers. When they escaped the ghetto, they would become Christians. As Christians, they would have a better chance of survival, because as Jews their chances were zero.
Their mother said, "Never say you are Jewish. Never do that. They will kill you immediately."
Their parents spoke to a Polish farmer who delivered vegetables to the ghetto in a horse-drawn cart every week. He had delivered goods to their parents' store before they were imprisoned in the ghetto. They called on him to help the family escape.
One dark night, he came, and they were all ready. They built some kind of platform under the cart, and one by one they slid into the cart and hid as they were told. Their youngest sister was sick at the time with pneumonia or a very bad cough, and their mother warned them: not a sound, not the sound of breathing, not the sound of crying.
A garbage cart came to take garbage out of the ghetto. They were placed in barrels — all the children, all the sisters, their father — and covered with garbage. They left the ghetto without being stopped, questioned, or interrogated. The guards thought the farmer had delivered his food and was going home. They left the ghetto. He risked his life to do it. It was amazing.
No one expected to survive. That was not even the motivation behind the decision to leave the ghetto. In fact, their father carried pistols with them. The agreement was that if they were stopped by the Germans on the way, they would kill the family and themselves. It was really about how they chose to die, rather than staying alive.
They stayed in an empty apartment in the city until forged identity papers were prepared for them, saying they were Polish, not Jewish. When they got their papers, they went to the railway station to take a train to the Czech border. It had been snowing for days, and the train was two hours late.
They arrived as snow fell. Police and Nazi guards waited and waited for the train. The train was late because of the snow, and after two hours the guards grew tired and left. The family stayed, the train came, they boarded, and they reached the Czech border.
In Czechoslovakia there were no Germans, so crossing the border meant freedom for them. They began walking on foot through the mountains, through snowy fields and small villages.
Their father carried the youngest sister in his bag, and Tusia carried her doll in her bag. She wore her red hat during the long walk in the snow as her shoes fell apart on her feet. She threw away her second pair of shoes and put her doll there, so after a short while, walking in the snow, she had no shoes — they had fallen apart. Her father took his shirt and wrapped it around her feet, and other people gave her more rags to wear around her feet. That is how she walked until they reached Czechoslovakia.
Hanka said they walked at night and tried to sleep in small hunting cabins or buried themselves under the snow when they heard dogs, because German guards came with their German shepherd dogs. The dogs frightened her more than anything.
Ben said they walked across the border, and that was the first breath of free air. Hanka said they reached the Czech border and were welcomed by a family of farmers.
Two days later, they took a train to Hungary. They finally crossed the border into Hungary and ended up in a small town on the border. Life was going on normally, people were doing their business. Synagogues, churches, shops — everything was working. They entered a synagogue where people were praying, and their father told them they had to make arrangements to escape because the Germans would come and take them too. The people looked at their parents as if they were crazy. They could not convince them.
They finally reached the railway station and took a train to Budapest. The family spread out so they would not be noticed. Their mother told Tusia to stand still, look out the window, and make no noise. As the train traveled through the countryside, a man in an official uniform approached her. He seemed very friendly and began chatting, but he spoke Hungarian, which she did not understand.
She only shook her head. He went to her mother, who also could not speak Hungarian, so they were all gathered and taken off the train. In Budapest, they were placed in a prison. They were transferred to prison because they had crossed the border illegally.
They had forged papers. They had left Kraków with forged papers saying they were Catholics and Poles, not Jews. So if the Germans came, they had to maintain that pretense.
Tusia and her three-year-old sister were allowed to wander in the women's prison outside their cells. Sometimes, while they were playing, prison guards stopped them and took them to the office for questioning. In the office, the guard took a pistol from his belt and pointed it at them. He asked their names and said he would shoot them if they did not tell the truth.
"What is your name?" "Our name is Nosal." Her sister said "Nosal." They were allowed to return to their cell. They could not break them. Finally they were released.
The Jewish community in Hungary, in Budapest, began caring for Jewish refugees. Their father tried to warn them: do anything possible to escape, because the Germans will come and take you. And then they came.
The German army invaded Hungary, and the family was sent to a German labor camp for Polish workers in the village of Markali. In the camp, their father played chess with the village priest every day, and they became good friends. The priest protected the family by confirming to the SS guards that they were Catholics.
The priest was a very good friend of their father and mother. He knew they were Jews, but he said nothing at all.
Hanka said they were told the Germans were coming, that everyone would be evacuated and all male members of the labor camp in that village would be checked. The priest said they would not ask the father because he would say he was a friend, but they had to hide the young son because they might check and discover he was circumcised.
Their father was circumcised, and so was Ben. The priest said he could vouch for the father, that he had been sick or whatever, that he had to do it, but when they saw the son and father together, they would not believe him. So they had to get rid of the son.
Their father took Ben and hid him in a cabin in the forest. The family stayed in the village. Their father decided to take him to a large forest called Szabonyipuszta in Hungary, completely abandoned. The Germans were on one side, the Russians on the other. They kept shooting at each other, but neither went into the forest. It was too dense for tanks to enter.
There was a barn in the forest. It was a good place to hide. There was a Jewish couple in their twenties who were waiting for the Russians to liberate them. Their father left Ben there with these people and said he would come the next day or the day after with the whole family, and they would wait there for the Russians to liberate them.
A few days later, the Russians did come, and the young Jewish men decided to join the Russians. But Ben was waiting for his father to come, so he did not join them. They all left, and he remained alone in the barn.
Every day he sat outside and waited and waited, watching to see if his father would come. He was alone in a giant forest because everyone had left.
Tusia recounted that her brother was still hiding in the forest when they were moved from the village. When Russian forces approached the village, the Nazis began preparing the prisoners to move further west.
Hanka said they were all packed like a group of animals and rushed west, away from the Russians. Their father had a sled, and he took her and her youngest sister on the sled, and they were moved on foot to Austria.
Tusia said their father pulled them on a sled. Whenever he heard gunfire, he would throw his body over them to protect them from bullets.
After a few days, they boarded a train. The train stopped, and their mother ordered Hanka to get off. She got off and stood there, unable to move. She was paralyzed. She was afraid. She felt she could not believe she was alone in that snow that reached her nose. Her mother told her to run, and she could not move, could not move. Her father got off, took her, and brought her back to the train. He asked her mother, "How could you do that? How could you do that, she is a little girl!" She had tried to save at least one child.
Tusia said the most horrifying image was always that of Hanka standing on the train platform as the train pulled away. That image was the most horrifying for her. It said everything that was horrifying at that time. Who knows what the decision was? They were going to take her off the train, out of despair. Who knows if it was not, "Well, maybe someone will survive separately?" Their father, when he saw her there alone on the train platform, decided that if they were going to die, they would die together.
Ben was alone for three months. Every day he decided, "This is it, I do not want…" Then he said, "Maybe my father will come tomorrow. And where will he find me if I leave?"
The people had a little food left because they did not know how long liberation would take, so they had prepared some food and a barrel of water. They had some cooked fruit, so he had something to eat. But when his father did not appear, the food ran out.
He went to the pond and caught fish, and cooked the fish when he had some matches. He used up his matches. Later, he had nothing to cook the fish with. But hunger is a very strong thing, so he ate raw fish, or anything he found, some eggs from birds.
There was a dog that came to the barn and stayed with him. Sometimes, when it was very cold, it would stay with him and keep him warm.
One day, in the middle of the night, there was a big explosion. Some kind of rocket flew into the barn, and the whole roof collapsed. He realized he could not stay there anymore. He said, "If my father has not come for several months, he is not coming." He knew that if he stayed there, he would die. He did not know if his body weighed fifty pounds — he was just bones.
So he decided to leave. He gathered all his things and the dog, and they left. Before he went into the forest, his mother had bought him a pair of shoes, but they were too small. She could not get his size, so he had to cut part of them so his feet could fit. But later, even that did not work. So he took some rags and made himself shoes from the rags.
They began walking in the forest, in a direction he had never walked. Down the path, about half a mile from the barn, there was an abandoned village. There were small pigs running there, and chickens running there, but no people. People had run so fast they left everything.
He began searching around the village and smelled sauerkraut, a strong smell of cabbage. He followed it and found a pickle factory. There was a large barrel, perhaps twelve feet long, and there was a ladder. He climbed the ladder, jumped inside the barrel, and began eating the cabbage. He was so hungry that he ate until his stomach hurt, but it did not matter. He just ate the cabbage.
Then suddenly he realized he had not pulled the ladder in with him. There was a wall like this, nothing in sight, only cabbage. He said, "I am going to die here. My father will never find me." The worst thing for him was not death, but that his father would not find him. He was desperate.
The dog was barking outside. But there were no people for miles and miles. Screaming would not help because there was no one there. He began touching the bottom of the barrel. There was a peg there, where they used to take it out to drain water from the cabbage, or something — a large wooden thing. He took the shovel and began hitting it. The water came out, but the cabbage remained.
He fell asleep. When he woke in the morning, the cabbage was dry. He began stacking the cabbage as much as he could using the shovel. He gathered enough cabbage, put the shovel on top, stepped on the shovel, jumped, and caught the edge of the barrel. There must be something for people in desperate situations that gives you strength you do not think you have. He pulled himself up and got out. He jumped. He did not even go to the ladder — he just jumped out.
He began walking back to the barn. He decided to wait for his father anyway.
Hanka said there was a transit camp in Austria that was horror upon horror. They had to go for inspection when they arrived, take off all their clothes, and stand naked while men walked by and looked at them with contempt and hatred.
Finally they went to a more sustainable labor camp, Strasshof. They were given a kind of small space in a family barracks. Her sister and mother worked in the kitchen, and Hanka essentially stole food. She was very good at it.
One day her mother took her. There was a train stopped and full of food and other things. She went with her mother and climbed up, and her mother was throwing potatoes to her when a guard saw them. He came with the butt of his rifle and hit her mother with all his strength. Blood was flowing down her face. Because he saw Hanka, he saw that she had given birth to a child, otherwise he might have killed her. Killing someone was nothing.
Their father became ill when they were in that camp. He suffered a kidney attack and had to go to the hospital, and they were afraid they would discover he was circumcised and Jewish. The doctor treating him said, "Do not worry, no one will know."
On the way back to the barn, Ben and the dog began walking along the road. He was not thinking, just following the dog. The road to the barn was on the left, but there was a small path to the right, and the dog went there.
Suddenly he saw a house. He went there, and a woman opened the door — a young woman, very beautiful. He remembered her as very beautiful. She must have been about twenty-five. There was a small boy near her, and she was holding the boy's hand. Ben thought, "Maybe I died, I am in heaven. No, that cannot be."
She became like a mother to him. Her husband had been taken into the army and never returned. She was there alone with the boy.
Then the Russians came. Ben used to go at night to see if his father had come to the barn. He would check, maybe his father was there. He was thirteen years old and missed his father and his family. So he used to go there with the dog, and when he returned, this senior officer came, one they had not seen before. In short, he raped the woman.
After what happened, she became very depressed. She no longer spoke to them. They were provided with a cart and a driver, and they went to her family. They traveled for long hours, and they were taken out of the forest. Ben lived with her family there. He slept in the barn and chopped wood. She said she would only feed him if he did some work.
After living there for some time, he decided to go look for his father. He did not want to go through the forest where he had been living, but there was a road around the forest. That road and the fields — because there were Russians there, Germans there, Russians there, Germans there, they kept changing and planting mines.
He passed through a minefield. At the beginning of the minefield, he smelled a very strong smell. When he got closer, there were large pits full of dead soldiers that had never been covered — horses, dead horses, dead soldiers, Germans, all Germans. Perhaps the Russians had thrown them there, but they had never covered them.
He said, "Well, I will not go where there is grass. I will go where there are pits. There, there are no mines, because people are already dead." There was pit after pit, and there were millions of flies. Sometimes he had to walk literally on the bodies of the dead, on the dead soldiers. The smell was unbelievable, terrible. You could not breathe.
He walked and heard mines exploding where people were trying to clear the fields because they needed to plow. Finally, when he reached the village, a friend he knew because he had lived there for about a year asked him what had happened to his parents. He said, "They were shot. They were killed by the Germans."
He realized then that he was an orphan. So he walked back to Kaposvár. A few months later, a man who had been in the same village where his parents lived moved to Kaposvár. The woman he was with knew him. In some way, she said, "Look, take the boy, because he has no future. Here, he will chop wood for the rest of his life." In Budapest, there was an orphanage for Jewish children, and they gave him some money to take him to the orphanage in Budapest.
Tusia recounted that one day they woke up very early, and the camp was frighteningly quiet. There were no orders and no shooting in the yard. No sound could be heard. It was as if the entire city had died.
Hanka said they saw Russian tanks stopped in front of them. There were Russian tanks everywhere around their camp. They did not dare go out. They did not think it was real or safe. They waited and waited. The Austrians had all fled, and the prisoners began crawling out of their barracks and looking. Finally, finally, the war was over.
Tusia said the war ended. They had survived. But they did not know where their brother was. Their father decided to go look for him in the town of Markali, where they had all been together last. Their father stole a horse and cart loaded with sacks of brown sugar. They used the sugar sacks to barter for food along the way.
Hanka said their father stole a horse and cart. They were going back to Hungary to look for their brother. It took a long time, but they got there. They reached the village, and no one knew where he was.
Tusia said their father took the train to Budapest, where the Red Cross was working to reunite families separated during the war. No one there had seen the brother either. On his way back to the railway station to return to Markali, their father spotted a group of orphaned children walking on the road. And there, among them, was the brother.
Ben said he stayed in the orphanage and began learning to write and read, because he had never gone to school. He had a book, A-B-C-D. He was walking in the street, raised his head, and found his father there. His father knew he was alive. He had discovered in the village that Ben had been there looking for them. He knew Ben was alive and went to search for him at the shelter. Ben did not know he was alive. When he saw him, he thought, "I am dreaming." He said, "This cannot be true."
It was a joy beyond anything heard of. His father grabbed him and ran to the train to bring him to them. The noise, the screaming and crying, was unbelievable, incredible joy. How could they be so lucky?
Ben found his father. His father and family survived the war. Of course he hugged him. But to be honest, he never forgave. He would never forgive his father for leaving him in that forest. When you are thirteen years old and abandoned in the forest by your parents, it is painful.
He never forgave anyone for leaving him, even to this day. Ben said they made a very painful decision: him or the family. If he returned, the Germans would find them, send them to a concentration camp, and that would be the end. So the only way for them to survive was without him.
Tusia said he always felt he had been deliberately abandoned. It did not matter whether he was or not. What mattered was that he believed he was, and he believed it.
To tell the honest truth, over the years — the war ended sixty or seventy years ago — Ben thought time would heal it. And it is true, he does not think about it every day anymore. He goes on with his life. But at night, sometimes he wakes up, or has nightmares, and dreams of those times. His mind will not let him go.
Basia said what the Holocaust does is make you lose your home, your language, your background, your family. You will never be at home again. All your life you search for it somewhere, somewhere, with someone. That is how it was for her. She believes it is almost the same for her family — when she talks to her sisters, they feel the same, that they are homeless.
When you hear the whole story, it is unbelievably heroic, and it is a kind of reminder that very ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things under horrifying conditions.
Basia said when she really thinks about them being young, in their thirties, with four small children, going through something indescribable, with death at every corner — wherever you went, wherever you turned, you could be killed, shot, gassed, or discovered for who you were — it is a feeling of awe. Their parents, she believes, were the ones who made the miracles. We are here.
Ben said he attributes their being together to the war. Because of the war, the constant fear that they would die tomorrow, that you had only a week to live, or maybe a month, because everyone around them was dying, being killed, being shot — they knew their time was counted only in months, weeks, or days. That may have kept them together more than it would have otherwise.
Basia said if she had to think of a reason, it is very clear: what they went through. They have these parents and those experiences, and no one else in the whole world has those experiences. That is one side of it. They also enjoy being together. They have the best times together when they gather.
Ben agreed. Basia said no one is like them. They can laugh and carry on and tell jokes like anyone else. Sesia added that they can cry too. They can also cry together. The family laughed. They really care for each other, and that is what their mother always taught them — to care for each other.
Tusia said they were not allowed not to care for each other or not to be with each other.
Basia said she thinks the sense of humor, when you think about it, may not be entirely conscious, but what else could happen to them? What is the terrible thing that could happen to them? So they always look at things with a sense of humor. They went through the worst, so at least let them enjoy a little.
Hanka said that is what binds them, she believes, tightly for life. They always tended to gather in one place where they lived, whether married or with children, or their lives changed greatly — they ended up in one place, all of them. She really feels unafraid because they are there. They will come to help. It has always been that way, and they can be relied upon.