About That Placeholder...

[howeird]

It's difficult for me to cry and type at the same time. Especially when I'm at work.

One of the side perks of my job is that since I test Google Play Movies and Netflix, being up on the current movies is helpful, so I visit IMDB.com almost daily. For the past couple of weeks a film has been at the top of their coming attractions, a Netflix production called "First They Killed My Father".

This happens to be the first line in the first book a friend wrote.

The friend was the mother of one of my favorite friends from BBS days. Dan Appleman is a handsome, outgoing, brilliant engineer with two masters degrees, founder and CEO of Desaware for 27 years, now co-founder and CTO of another tech firm. We were at a lot of BBS parties in the 80s, and somehow I found out his mother had written a book about her escape from the Nazis. I don't remember if we first met before I read the book, but we talked about the book more than once. I gave my copy to my mother, and it was passed around my family.

Her name is Alicia Appleman-Jurman, her book humbly titled Alicia/My Story.

Looking it up, not quite the same line:

First they killed my brother Moshe...
Then they killed my father...
Then they killed my brother Bunio...
Then they killed my brother Zachary...
Then they killed my last brother, Herzl.

Seeing the Netflix movie title reminded me of Alicia. I had lost contact with Dan except for a LinkedIn connection, so I did a web search for his mother, and was heartbroken to learn that she died last April, after heart surgery. She lived through the procedure, but died a few days later. She was 86.