“I Said to My Mother, ‘Did You See the Blood?' She Said, ‘I Hoped You Hadn't Noticed.'”

Marga Griesbach was sent to Stutthof concentration camp in 1944. This past February, she left Washington State to take a cruise around the world.

- By Rebecca Traister

IN EARLY FEBRUARY, Marga Griesbach took a fall as she was packing for a cruise. In her home in Silverdale, Washington, across the sound from Seattle and the Kirkland nursing home in which COVID-19 was then silently spreading, the 92-year-old twisted too quickly while reaching for some T-shirts. As she fell, she felt her ribs crack and, for a split second, could not breathe. Though the pain was tremendous, Marga was determined not to let anything keep her from the cruise that was to take her, along with her longtime German companion, Dieter, and next-door neighbor Selma, around southern Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii through early May. So she just kept filling her suitcase. On the 15-hour flight from Vancouver to Auckland, Marga passed out as she was exiting the bathroom. When she deplaned in Auckland, she was greeted by a welcoming committee: airline employees who told her she could not fly on to Brisbane, where she was to board the boat, without first getting checked out at a hospital. At a local hospital, she received a battery of tests, though not one for the coronavirus; it would be another nine days before New Zealand reported its first case. The doctors proclaimed that her blood work showed no reason that she couldn’t fly on. But when she returned to the airport, she was told by an airline representative that her sodium levels were still too low to make the trip. She was put in a hotel, and the next day taken back to the emergency room, where the same tests were performed; again, the doctor said she was fit to fly; again the airline representatives told her she couldn’t board the plane. For a third morning, she received the same battery of tests, which she passed, and was told by airport staff for a third straight day that she could not board.