Margot was a Ringel cousin from Berlin whose family fled east when ours went west—a big mistake. Following September 1939, she endured ghetto life, Gestapo encounters, clandestine involvements, imprisonment and forced labor, concealment in bunkers, and more. But for fortune, this might have been our mother's life.

This is a test

We Refuse to Be Enemies: How Muslims and Jews Can Make Peace, One Friendship At a Time, by Sabeeha Rehman and Walter Ruby, is a manifesto for tolerance, dialogue and friendship—but it is more than that. It is also a memoir of a surprising, sometimes challenging friendship.

Besides Hirsch Ringel in Nisko and Jakob Ringel in Hamburg, Schija had one other brother, Juda Leib Ringel, who like him lived in Berlin. 

Juda, a butcher, was married to Pessel Apfelbaum, originally from Rzeszow. They had seven children born between 1880 and 1898. Juda died the following year, in 1898, at age 40, when most of his children were still minors. 

It may be that Juda's brother in Berlin, our great-grandfather Schija Ringel, played a guardian role in the lives of the children.

As I mentioned, at least four of the children of Hirsch Ringel and Perl Jacoby were Holocaust victims, including Anna Chana Ringel, married to Leon Lazar Lieblich, who perished in Krakow.

However, Leon and their daughter Margot managed to escape together with Margot's husband Jerzy Dränger, and they were sheltered by a Polish gentile family. Margot lived in Antwerp after the war and in 1998 provided testimony about her experiences to the Shoah Foundation. 

An Australian Ringel cousin defends her research about the family presence in Nisko

The oldest Ringel brother, Hirsch, raised his family in Nisko on the River San, 50 miles north of the family base in Rzeszow, before he later joined the family exodus to Berlin. Nisko was the namesake location for an early Nazi deportation plan to settle Jews on a land reservation stretching from Nisko to Lublin.