Hi, everyone. Welcome to Thanks for being here. A short weekly pod to remind us of the many essential and beautiful ways we affect one another.

Every Sunday, I'll read a submission from a listener of Kelly Corrigan Wonders. Could be wedding vows or about mitzvah toast, a eulogy or retirement speech.

We believe this is the loveliest way to tap into our better selves and remember our highest values.

We encourage you to share this podcast each week with one person you love. Maybe someone you miss or need to bring closer.

Someone you want to feel your appreciation or admiration or both. This is Thanks for being here.

Hi guys. This week's Thanks for being here was submitted by Joy Thompson and she says hi Kelly and team.

I've been loving. Thanks for being here. Wanted to share this tribute. I wrote to my grandmother Zelda after she passed away in 2021.

She was a Holocaust survivor and one of the most joyful, open-hearted people I have ever known. Thanks Joy for sharing.

Really proud to share this eulogy with everybody today.

I was 10 years old when my mother queued up Schindler's list on our VCR. To my sisters and me, she said you need to know what your grandmother went through.

But the film's images of suffering didn't match what I knew of my paternal grandmother Zelda, her joyful greeting of mine.

The way she piled our plates with her homemade blinces and left vivid red lipstick kiss marks on our cheeks.

She never talked about losing her sister and her parents never spoke of surviving multiple concentration camps as an orphan.

She had a bustling social life in her West Hollywood neighborhood. She danced at every opportunity and vast in the presence of her grandchildren like we were sunshine.

When on our wedding day, my husband smashed the glass under his foot and our guest shouted Mazeltov.

Zelda told me afterward that the moment was like the heavens opened.

Maybe you have to understand my dad said she survived the ghetto, the camps.

And now she sees her youngest granddaughter get married. You know what it all means? She won.

You're her revenge against Hitler.

As an adult, I wanted to know more about Zelda's past. So I poured over a transcript of her testimony, which she gave in the 90s.

Just like after watching Schindler's list, I was astonished that she could endure so much suffering and still throw her arms wide open to life every day.

She was on my mind when my water broke on Zelda's 87th birthday, a marathon labor followed by an emergency C section made for a difficult postpartum recovery.

...