She survived a bout with COVID-19. Piece of cake. Not nearly as harrowing as her wartime North Atlantic crossing, when rough seas and a seasick stomach buried her in her cabin for days.

At 15 years old, she was on her way to be reunited with her family, all of whom she had left in Vienna at 13. That world seems unreal to us today, when it appears through our limited point of view that the pandemic is the worst ordeal.

She has lived a life in the spirit that the past is gone. Her vivacious personality has carried her through. One would think she had seen it all. But last week, the past burst from the mist as the Statue of Liberty did that gray November dawn in 1940 when her escape from the Holocaust tossed her up on our shores.

Perhaps politicians and pundits unsympathetic to those now separated at the Southern border will take note here of what it is like to risk your very family to make it to America. My cousin Wendy heard a podcast by Julian Borger of Manchesters The Guardian recounting the classified ads his paper had run in the late 1930s, placed by Jews desperate to save their children by relocating them from areas in Europe overrun by the Nazis. Wendy contacted Borger, because family lore had it that her mother Lori, beautiful and brilliant wife of my uncle Marty, had been sent to London from Vienna during World War II. We knew little else, beyond that Loris mother had placed an ad, as my aunt would have it, for her blue-eyed girl.

Following a tip from Borger, Wendy found for the first time the actual personal ad from Oct. 14, 1938, reminder of an era before the internet, when even a long-distance call was out of reach. The power of this particular newspaper ad to save a life turned out not to be from The Guardian. In fact, it had been intended for The Times of London. But after the Anschluss, when the Nazis annexed Austria, Loris mother Irma Beller inspected the classifieds at the Times Vienna bureau, and worried that the text was too tiny and the plea for her daughter would get lost.

Irma walked over to the Vienna bureau of Londons Jewish Chronicle, then almost a century old. She preferred the size of the type in its classifieds. So she placed the ad: 13-year-old intelligent, pretty, healthy Viennese girl asks for a new home in Jewish family. One solitary letter reached her in response. That familys arms stretched out from England to rescue this child. They corresponded by mail. They never spoke.

In January 1939, Lori embarked on a dicey border crossing by train, then hazarded the English Channel on her own, the number 61 taped to her blouse to identify her to the occupants of that house number, the Steinberg family, who would embrace this companion for their daughter Stella.

Young Lori spoke little English when she arrived, but picked it up quickly. She had to. Nobody spoke German. A kind teacher helped. The family endured the nightly terror of the Blitz, sleeping underground.

Loris father traveled to Shanghai, hoping to transit from there to America. Her brother went to Holland, thinking to ultimately find a new home in Palestine. Her mother made it to New York. One family strewn across four countries and three continents in a world aflame. Lori learned to knit and ride a bicycle, and also endured her first period frightened out of her wits without her mother to explain it. A girl grew to womanhood.

After life in what my university professor Lore Segal described as Other Peoples Houses, my aunt boarded another boat alone, troopship RMS Samaria, bound from Liverpool. To this day, Lori prizes the wire puzzle crafted for her by a sailor who took pity on her loneliness.

In a Bronx apartment, where time and tide finally reunited the family, she found her old bed, shipped from Vienna by her thoughtful mother. Lori slept in a cocoon of two worlds.

Some years ago, my aunt reflected, I look in the mirror and I see my mother. When I asked her about this recently, she pooh-poohed it as just a physical resemblance. Did she wink? They share the same bravery, and I hear in her voice more spirit than most anyone I know. When I inquire what she gleaned from her terrifying and magnificent journey, she remembers the Steinbergs, the good Samarian, other kind folks she encountered along the way. She sums up for me: There are good people everywhere.

My dear aunt, widowed 19 years, survivor of COVID, stroke, wolfpacks of the North Atlantic and an Austria overwhelmed by evil, beams at me. Her mother called her Sunshine.

Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards for his work as a television producer.

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Dalton Delan | The Unspin Room: From Nazi occupation to COVID, she's endured it all and survived - Berkshire Eagle