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Every year at Chanukah, the same call goes out to my daughter, "Don't forget to bring the big frying pan along!"

What is so special about this large, heavy, old-fashioned pan with its long handle? If the pan could talk it would tell you itself. This pan traveled from a comfortable, unpretentious house in an industrial town in Germany to a super modern kitchen in a house in the hills of Berkeley.

I grew up with this pan. It had been in my parents' home as long as I could remember. I can still seem Mama in the kitchen clothed in a checkered apron, her cheeks flushed, frying latkes while the maid peeled and scraped potatoes at an incredible speed. With seven hungry children waiting, a pan even that large was not big enough.

So it happened for years, and then Hitler came and the maid went. But mother still made latkes for Chanukah, just as she had always done. Then one day in 1938, everything came to an end as we had known it.

What a day it was. The house had been "sold" to the first taker. There were big crates in the front yard, and Gestapo men supervised the packing. Our neighbors stood around us mute, picking up what we had to leave behind. The furniture and bulky housewares had been given away.

Everything, except the big iron pan. Mother hesitated; it was heavy, and she was not so young. What would she do with it in a small New York apartment?

All of a sudden, a Gestapo man snatched the pan out of her hands. He swung it wildly over his head like a banner, crying, "Who wants this pan? Must be cleaned, of course. You never know what a Jew cooked in it. Ha, ha, ha."

The crowd roared and swept down in an effort to take all the household goods, even those that had been crated.

"Let's take it all," they said. "They should be glad to get away alive."

There was a moment of silence. Mother was used to being insulted as a Jew, but to be insulted as a housewife was more than she could bear. She swung her tiny frame around, grabbed the pan from the stunned Gestapo man, and put it resolutely in a nearby crate.

A few weeks later, the crates and my parents arrived in New York and the pan landed on the bottom of a closet, too big to go anywhere else. The children were all married by this time and had households of their own. There was no need to fix latkes any more.

After a full life, my father, my father died. Mother followed two years later. We children assembled at the New York apartment and sorted things out. I ended up with the great iron pan.

By now I was a grandmother. Our house was small and I really did not know where to put it. When my husband and I moved to Berkeley, I presented the pan to my daughter and it hangs on the wall of her spacious kitchen to this day.

Thus it happens that when Chanukah comes, I make the annual call, "Don't forget to bring the big pan."

Now it is I who stands flushed-cheeked, frying latkes for children and grandchildren and assorted relatives. I even understand why Mama insisted on taking the big pan with her; it sort of grows on you.