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Though both my parents were part of the pioneer generation, my mother, unlike my father, actually arrived as a pioneer, part of a Jewish youth group from Poland that came directly to the kibbutz. In addition to being more naturally outgoing than my father, she came to see Mishmar Hasharon has her extended family and spent every one of her one hundred years there.

Esther Godin, as the then was, grew up in Warsaw. Born in 1913, she was the oldest of the six children of Samuel and Rachel Godin. Poland at the time was home to the largest Jewish community in the world, more than 3 million by the time of the Holocaust. While the Jews of Poland had a long history, the Godins did not. Before the First World War, my mother’s parents made their way from Smolensk in Russia to Warsaw, which was also under czarist rule. When the war was over, the Bolshevik Revolution had toppled the czars. Poland became independent, under the nationalist general Josef Pilsudski. The Godins had a decision to make: either return to now-Communist Russia or stay in the new Polish state, though without citizenship because they had not been born there. No doubt finding comfort, community and a sense of safety amid the hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Polish capital, they chose Pilsudski over Lenin. They lived in what would become the Warsaw Ghetto, on Nalewski Street, where Samuel Godin eked out a living as a bookbinder.

My mother came to Zionism as a teenager, and it was easy to understand why she, like so many of the other young Jews around her, was drawn to it. She saw how hard her parents were struggling economically, on the refugee fringes of a Jewish community itself precariously placed in a newly assertive Poland. She saw no future for herself there. Though she attended a normal state-run high school, she and her closest friends joined a Zionist youth group called Gordonia, which had been founded in Poland barely a decade earlier. She started studying Hebrew. Each summer, from the age of 13, she and her Gordonia friends would spend deep in the Carpathian Mountains. They worked for local Polish landowners, learning the rudiments of how to farm and the rigors of simple physical labor. Late into the evening, they would learn not just about agriculture but Jewish history, the land of Palestine, and how they hoped to put both their new-found skills and the Zionist ideals into practice.

She had just turned 22 when she set off for Mishmar Hasharon with 60 other Gordonia pioneers in the summer of 1935. It took them nearly a week to get there. They travelled by train south through Poland, passing not far from the little town of Oświęcim which would later become infamous as the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Then, on through Hungary and across Romania

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