Letters

At times, the frail among us feel overwhelmed by the amount of corruption and evil we see around us: We allow despair to drown out hope, we let frustration conquer our energy, we crawl back into our “me-only cocoons” and we give up.

And then, miraculously, a person walks into our lives who reignites that dying ember, that spark that is within each of us. And that person can be of any religion or no religion; from any country or stateless; from any culture or race or mix of cultures and races from anywhere in the world.

Helena Weinrauch, our neighbor in Sag Harbor, is such a person, a person with the unconquerable human spirit [“Holocaust Survivor Finds Solace On The Dance Floor,” 27east.com, November 13].

Born in Germany some 95 years ago; torn, while still a small girl, by the brutality of the Holocaust from the family she never saw again; robbed of her childhood while witness to all the evil of the world in three concentration camps — but what she remembers is the kindness of the Swedes who welcomed her when she was thrown on their shores after being rescued from a concentration camp.

Helena Weinrauch came to the United States. She found love, marriage, motherhood, and, again, painful losses.

She could be facing old age alone. But what has Helena found instead of loneliness? She has found friendship, and she had found joy, and she has found it in dancing, ballroom dancing. And so this woman, so beautiful in body and spirit, dwells not on the losses of the past but on the joys of the today.

We want to dance with her through our own lives, and we thank her for giving us back the belief that we all need to go on, the need to believe that the human spirit can and will survive, and that someday, perhaps soon, truth will again chase away darkness, as long as we keep striving to make it so.

Evelyn Konrad

Attorney at law

Southampton Village