My mother-in-law, Rachel Blum, was one of the happiest people I ever met.
That’s a strange thing to say about a Holocaust survivor. A girl who lost her entire family. A girl who, at fourteen years old, was taken in by a gentile family after everyone she loved was gone.
But it’s true. She was the most vibrant, most helpful person in every room she walked into — like a magnet that friends and strangers naturally gravitated toward and opened up to. Her motto — the words she actually lived by — was: “Nothing bad ever happened to me.”
And yet this was the same girl who, at fourteen, pulled off an act few adults would have dared. She persuaded the gentile train driver whose family was hiding her to derail a train carrying approximately 1,000 SS soldiers. She killed a thousand Nazis. Yes, a thousand Nazis!
One of the things I tell people when I speak about her: so many children today walk around with a sense of entitlement. My mother-in-law had none. Zero. When you face what she faced and come out the other side, everything you have — no matter how little it might look in the eyes of others — is amazing and valuable. I think that was one of the reasons she was so happy, so alive. She never took a single thing for granted because she knew what it meant to have nothing.
That motto became the title of the book I wrote about her — Nothing Bad Ever Happens — published by Menucha Publishers and available in Jewish bookstores. When we brought it to Amazon, we retitled it Run Rachel Run — and it now has over 1,600 reviews. Schools across the frum community use it as one of their primary sources for teaching about the Holocaust. Every year I’m invited to speak about it.
The story hasn’t changed. But the cover has.
We’ve given Run Rachel Run a brand new look — and I think it finally matches the power of the story inside. The same book. The same extraordinary woman. A cover that does her justice.
If you’ve read it, you already know. If you haven’t — this is the story of a girl who faced the worst the world had to offer and decided that nothing bad ever happened to her. And meant it.
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