Vera is 89 and dances every day
It’s 10 a.m. on a Wednesday when I arrive at Starbucks to meet Vera Schwartz Palmieri.
She’s easy to spot. She’s the one in exercise togs, having just come from a workout. She’s the one paying for her latte with the Starbucks app on her Apple Watch.
She’s the one who is 89 years old and always smiling and always, always, always surrounded by people.
I learned about Vera from Sandi Hicks of Phoenix, who thinks the world should know about her friend.
“I met Vera at Jazzercise class,” Hicks told me “She goes every day. She wears a tutu. To many of us she is our mother, our sister, our friend. She is an inspiration and motivates us to push on. She embraces her age and dispenses wisdom. Just to be in her presence makes us remember to be thankful for life, for life in America.”
Vera is something of an expert in what it takes to be happy. Maybe it’s because she has seen firsthand what horror looks like. Maybe it’s because she knows you have to lose everything before you can understand that, really, you have everything.
Vera was born in Berlin, the only child to parents who pampered her with lovely things. She danced the ballet and played with porcelain dolls.
She was 4 years old when Hitler came to power. She was 10 on Kristallnacht. She recalls walking to school the next morning on glass from the shattered windows of Jewish-owned businesses, seeing jewelry scattered onto the streets and not understanding why. Her father worked for one of those Jewish-owned businesses.
It wasn’t long after that that the SS pounded on their door in the middle of the night, there to take away her father to serve in the German army.
It would be years before the Vera would know what became of her father, who was captured in the Battle of Stalingrad. He was force marched to a work camp in Siberia, where he was held for several years after the war.
Vera talks of life under Hitler. Of brainwashing and bombings and Nazi salutes mandatory even for the littlest children. Of being constantly hungry and standing for hours in line to get a loaf of bread or jug of water. Of crawling beneath trains to scavenge scattered pieces of coal, or onto them in search of a few potatoes.
She was 12 when the first bombs hit. “Every night, the air-raid sirens would go off, sometimes two or three times a night,” she said.
Each time, she and her mother would lug suitcases and gas masks down three flights of stairs to the basement. She describes the panic she felt at the sounds of the propellers as planes approached, and how the ground would shake and dust would fall as bombs landed nearby.
And the dread of gruesome sights that awaited a little girl once the bombs
stopped falling.
Vera spent a fair amount of her childhood pondering which would be worse, being blown to bits or buried alive.
She lost her home to bombs, her father to the war. And her mother? She was eaten up by the bitterness of living too long in a war zone.
Vera was 13 when her mother asked if she wanted to make a suicide pact. Vera got help in time to save her mother’s life.
Eventually, the war ended, but the worst, for Vera, was still to come.
“I still can hear the tromp, tromp, tromp of the horses,” she said, recalling the day when the Russians arrived.
I’m guessing she hears more than that. It’s been 72 years, but still she cannot talk about the day she was raped by a Russian soldier. She was 17. “I can’t,” she says, as tears briefly well. “I ... I can’t.”
Shortly after that, she escaped to the American-occupied territory. She married an American, had three children and eventually settled in Arizona.
Her husband is gone now, as are two of her three sons. It can be lonely, getting old. But for Vera, laughter remains, and so do friends and new experiences. And there is joy, she tells me, every day.
Every day.
“She really, really appreciates the moments of every day, the moments when we are together,” said Edie Close, one of her Jazzercise friends.
Close is part of a posse of younger women who meet Vera three mornings a week at the Starbucks at Seventh Street and Thunderbird Road, where the older woman serves as part mentor, part counselor and full-time friend.
If they complain, she will remind them that their worries are minor, really, when compared with what so many in her generation experienced. One of those friends published a book about Vera, titled “Nothing Is as Bad as the Second World War.”
“Still today, that’s my slogan,” Vera told me. “I say this to myself. Nothing can be as bad.”
These days, 89-year-old Vera is on Facebook and drives a Kia Soul with a picture of a grinning mouse on the tailgate — a remembrance of her mother, who called her “mäuschen,” or “little mouse.” And every day, she dances.
Life, Vera would tell you, is good. That loss happens, but happiness is a choice.
“Every morning, I have to push myself,” she said. “But I can walk, talk, my mind is strong. I’m just grateful for these things.”