The Four Sisters

This page is dedicated to my grandmother, Esther “Essie” Drew, and her sisters, Jenny, Sally and Susan. Four extraordinary women who survived the unimaginable and chose, every single day after, to lead with love.

My grandmother Essie was born in 1926 in Łódź, Poland. She was one of four sisters raised by parents who loved them, Samuel and Doba, in a home full of the kind of ordinary moments every child deserves to take for granted. Then the world they knew was taken.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the family was forced into the Łódź Ghetto. Her father Samuel died of tuberculosis inside it. Soon after, Essie, her sisters, and their mother Doba were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival, Doba was separated from her daughters and murdered in the gas chambers. The sisters (still children) were left alone inside history’s worst nightmare.

Transferred to Bergen-Belsen, they held onto each other through starvation and fear and years of uncertainty. Their bond wasn’t just love. It was survival. In a system designed to erase their humanity, each other was all they had.

When the war ended, they miraculously lived to tell.

After liberation, Essie met my grandfather Marty in a displaced persons camp. They came to America. They built a family. They filled a home with so much love and laughter that it became the kind of place everyone wanted to be and nobody wanted to leave.

The Holocaust is discussed in numbers. Millions murdered. Families destroyed. Communities erased. But behind every number was a specific person with a specific laugh and people who loved them.

For me it is not history. It's my family’s story. It lives in what was passed down around our table, in what my grandparents, and my great-aunt and great-uncles carried with them every day, and in the responsibility I feel to make sure it is never forgotten.

This page honors Essie and her sisters not only for what they survived, but for who they were on the other side of it. Their strength. Their humor. Their refusal to let the worst chapter define the whole story.

Their survival made my life possible.

I share it in memory of those who didn’t make it out. In honor of those who did. And as a reminder that remembering is something every generation has to choose.

Never again.

Essie

Describing my grandmother in words has always felt inadequate. Essie wasn’t someone you could summarize. She was an entire experience. An essence. She had this rare ability to make everyone feel like they were her number one, and in return, she was everyone’s.

I always called her my magic person.

Because in the story of Essie’s life, she took what started as the scariest, saddest horror story imaginable and transformed it into the most heartwarming love story ever told, starring her and my grandfather Marty. That love story grew into a family. The family became a comedy, filled with the kind of laughter that makes your stomach hurt. It was the movie we all wanted to watch on repeat.

Essie's laugh was always the loudest in the room. It’s a laugh I know well, because it lives in me. It’s the laugh that comes out when I’m on the back of a jetski, or riding a roller coaster at my absolute happiest. My cousin once said... how amazing that in your most thrilling, joyful moments, Essie’s voice is the one that comes out of you.

She was right. That’s how Essie worked. She got inside you.

My son Miles once asked me why Essie always seemed so happy. He said she was the happiest person he had ever seen in his life, and he wanted to understand it. I thought about it for a moment and told him the truth as best I could: she was happy because she was grateful. She was never waiting for something to arrive or someone to save her. She was just grateful for every phone call, every visit, every grandchild, every great-grandchild, every ordinary Tuesday. She filled every single breath with love. Literally until her last ones.

Even near the very end, when her body was beginning to let go, she would open her eyes and the first thing out of her mouth was, "I love you." She never ran out.

The last New Year’s Eve of her life, we were all gathered around her... her children, her grandchildren, some of her great-grandchildren. My dad and his siblings were reminiscing about the years Essie worked at Saks Fifth Ave. Apparently the numbers in the designer department doubled when she was there. Her customers refused to shop with anyone else. My dad laughed and asked her directly: why does everyone love you so much?

And Essie, in the strongest voice she'd had all week, said:

“Because when you are nice to people, people are nice to you.”

That was it. That was the whole philosophy. She had survived the Holocaust. She had survived the ghetto and the camps and the loss of her parents and decades of a world that had tried to break her. And what she had landed on... what she chose to carry forward was that simple.

Be nice. Love people. Mean it.

She refused to let the darkest years of her childhood write the ending. Instead she opened her heart wider than most people would have thought possible and built a legacy out of pure kindness. That was the transformation. That was the magic.

Essie’s story reached its final scene. But the love she put into the world didn’t go anywhere. It’s in her children and her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren. It’s in everyone she ever made feel like her number one.

It’s in the laugh that comes out of me on the back of a jetski.

It’s in all of us, still going.