It was a reunion seven decades in the making, bringing together a one-time refugee from pre-war Austria and the two Highland Park, Ill. sisters for whom she served as beloved governess. Marjorie Nath Ettlinger and Laurie Nath Reinstein are in their 80s now, but the years peeled away as they embraced Susan Pisker Graham, who came to live with their family in 1939 as an 18-year-old sent from Vienna by parents all too conscious of the dangers that lay ahead for the Jews of their country.

“They were very good to me,” Graham, now 93, said of Bernard and Ruth Nath, who took her under their wing while she struggled to learn English and adapt to the challenges of her new country. “They were always encouraging me to use their piano and their ping pong table.” Bernard Nath was a prominent real estate lawyer in Chicago and a Jewish communal leader long active in the Anti-Defamation League.

Graham, who now lives in a retirement community in Voorhees, N.J., would stay in the Naths’ Highland Park home for the next five years, serving as governess for young Marjorie and Laurie. Even after the sisters no longer needed a nanny, the Naths made her feel welcome in their home, she recalled. And when she met John Graham in St. Louis, Mo., through a HIAS connection, they offered to pay for the wedding.

In 1945, Graham moved to New York, where her new husband lived. None of them knew it would be the last time in 70 years that the three women-one now a great-grandmother, the other two grandmothers-would be together under the same roof.

On a humid morning this summer over arugula salad and spinach omelets at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pa., they relived their time together, with Graham filling in the gaps for her former charges, now 86 and 82. “We knew she was from Austria, and we knew there was trouble back home, but as a child, the details were not discussed in front of us,” said Reinstein.

Ettlinger was 10 and her sister was 6 when the young woman she and her sister called Susie arrived.

After Graham’s father was allowed to return home from a concentration camp, he and his wife, owners of a dry goods store, insisted that their only child accept the offer of a maternal uncle to act as her sponsor for immigration to the United States. Stephanie and Franz Pisker promised they would follow right behind her. That never happened.

Only after the letters from Vienna stopped coming, after Bernard Nath had used his considerable influence to help track the Austrian couple’s journeys, after Graham had a child of her own, did she learn their fate. Both died in Sobibor, a death camp near what is now the eastern border of Poland.

“I would never have left if I’d known my parents wouldn’t follow,” Graham told the sisters at the reunion.

She survived a turbulent ocean crossing on the Italian liner named The Rex, only to learn on her arrival in Chicago that the arrangement with her uncle had fallen through.

Ruth Nath went to meet the young refugee at the offices of a Jewish organization in the city. Graham believes the organization was Hadassah, but the years have dimmed her memory, she said.

At the reunion luncheon were members of Graham’s family: her daughters Carrie Chein of Cherry Hill, N.J. and Brenda Silver of White Plains, N.Y., as well as Carrie’s husband, Orin Chein. “I grew up hearing the stories about my mother’s time with the Naths,” Carrie Chein recalled. “I still have a silver cup with my name engraved on it that the Naths sent when I was born.”

Also present was Nancy Goldberg, formerly of Moorestown, N.J. and now of Highland Park, who played a pivotal role in arranging the get together. A longtime friend of both, Carrie Chein, whom she knew from her time in New Jersey, and Ettlinger, whom she knew from the League of Women Voters Highland Park/Highwood, Goldberg decided to propose a “girls’ jaunt” to Philadelphia for a reunion.

“She totally lit up,” Goldberg said of Ettlinger’s reaction. “It felt like her smile went around one ear and got to the other.”

At a Shabbat dinner at the Cheins’ Cherry Hill home, the sisters met Graham’s grandchildren and great grandchild. During the multi-generational dinner, the women exchanged family pictures and exclaimed over photos of their former home on Hazel Street in Highland Park–including the guest room, which the sisters still refer to as “Susie’s room.”

“We talked about how the years have gone by and how we all changed,” Graham said later. “My memory of them is when they were young children, and now they are grandparents. I was shocked that they got older–like I did.”

In the weeks following the reunion, Ettlinger and Reinstein said they hope to keep in touch with Graham. Both added that they were grateful for the opportunity to re-create those earlier years.

“For me, the most exciting thing was to see how well she is,” Reinstein said. “She is a beautiful woman, and I’m glad there was a happy finish to a life that didn’t begin so well.”

Fredda Sacharow is a freelance writer and former editorial page editor in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Penn Law Journal, and Rutgers Today, among other publications.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Jewish Voice of Southern New Jersey.