Holocaust survivors penned memoirs of their hometowns so future generations would know about them
“I am an old man of 88+ with trembling hands and health status leaving much to be desired,” wrote Mendel Halpern. “Besides I don’t have much to write about regarding the Holocaust since I didn’t suffer nearly the way others did.”
Still, he had read a 1997 newspaper article by Elie Wiesel who won a Nobel Peace Prize and encouraged other Holocaust survivors to document their experiences, so Halpern did.
“My most memorable recollections are that I was at shotgun point five times and like a miracle didn’t get shot,” recalled Halpern, whose Holocaust experience included being forced to leave his birthplace of Radauti, Romania.
His stories were published by JewishGen Inc., which collects and translates accounts of Jewish communities whose inhabitants were murdered by the Nazis. Some 200 of these Holocaust “yizkor” books — yizkor is Hebrew for “remember” — were written by survivors.
Some cover larger districts. Others tell the story of a single “shtetl,” whose translation as “village” can’t capture the love embodied in the Yiddish word. Transcriptions can be read on the website jewishgen.org, which also lists titles available for purchase in book form.
The authors of the yizkor book of Kovel, Ukraine, no doubt expressed the motivation of others who recorded the fate of their hometowns:
“This book is a permanent memorial to the soul of our town. It will never be forgotten. The embers of our town will remain until the coming of the Messiah. The book will be handed over to our descendants and to all coming generations as a memento of our town.”
The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Educational Center was born of the same urgency, “never to forget.”
“As survivors found each other in Skokie after World War II, they’d have informal get-togethers, in a restaurant or each other’s homes,” explained Arielle Weininger, the museum’s curator. “So when a small museum opened in a storefront, they’d present a copy of their shtetl’s yizkor book.”
The books were transferred to the museum’s permanent quarters when it opened in 2009. The authenticity of their accounts is witnessed by the donor’s inscription.
I had only experienced yizkor books as footnotes, which assured me that a historian had done his or her homework, until I recently happened to open one, and realized: Here was the tragedy of 6 million murders told shtetl by shtetl — the kinds of stories that I’d heard in bits and pieces from an aunt and two uncles sent to America by a great-grandmother before she was murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp. They in turn had heard the final chapter from a brother who stayed behind. He survived as member of the underground resistance movement and went to Israel after the war.
The stories told in yizkor books are especially poignant on the eve of Yom Kippur, which starts at sundown Wednesday. It concludes with a yizkor service at synagogue, where prayers are said for Jewish martyrs and family members. Congregants whose parents are deceased stand and recite their names, suspended between a sense of loss and fond memories.
The Holocaust yizkor books walk a similar line, as those who loved their previous homes preserved memories for future generations.
“I loved to listen to the ringing of the church bells, to look at the storks building their nests in the spring,” wrote Vardah Kusht, who left Antopol, Belarus, for what later became Israel, before the Holocaust. “I didn’t accompany you on your last way and I am sad because of this. I will always carry your image with love in my heart, and when I hear your name, Antopol, a trembling will pass in all my bones.”
The books recount lost traditions. Yehiel Meckler recalled in a yizkor book about Rachow, Poland: “On the night of the wedding, the residents fashioned some kind of illumination — lamps, lanterns or candles, which they put in their windows, so that when the groom and bride walked to the wedding canopy, their path would be strewn with light.”
In some yizkor books, the martyrs’ names — or nicknames — are recorded.
A book about Oshmana, Belarus, for example, notes that “Reb Shimon’s family name was never used and it is probable that the old man, himself, had forgotten it.” Because he ran a rotary printing press, he was called “der Dreher,” Yiddish for “turner.”
Yehiel the cobbler was renowned in Bender, Moldova, for his love of the printed word. Craftsmen who couldn’t read would come to his workshop, a yizkor book recounts, and the cobbler would read the newspaper to them. He’d also tell stories to children. He told Leah Steiner about Theodore Herzl, who taught that Jews would never be free of anti-Semitism until they had a country of their own. He said, “If you wish it, it is not a legend.”
Herzl died before Israel was born, as did Yehiel. But Steiner was in Tel Aviv, Israel, when she wrote the cobbler’s story for the Bender Holocaust yizkor book.
For every cherished memory, there are countless terrifying sentences in Holocaust yizkor books:
“The Germans and the Lithuanians returned to town in cars decorated with flowers and within them there were machine guns.”
“If you take the road from Butrimantz to Klidzenys, you will find two large mass graves. You should know that almost everyone who participated in these murders was also born in Butrimantz.”
When the Nazis occupied Gorodenka, Ukraine, they divided the Jews by their profession or trade: doctors, bakers, etc. In the town’s yizkor book, Reuben Prifer recalled that inhabitants tried bribing their way into the groups they thought Germans considered most useful.
“But as people soon found out, nobody was spared, not even the people from the ‘good’ groups,” Prifer wrote.
He was taken to a series of forced labor camps. Russian tanks and troops captured the last one on March 24, 1944, Prifer reported in the yizkor book. “And when they found out we were Jews, and that we had somehow remained alive, many of them had tears in their eyes because they had never seen anything quite like this before.”
Survival was bittersweet, as Aliza Gofstein noted in a memorial book for Oshmana, Belarus. She was born in an obscure village on the banks of an insignificant stream. She restarted her life in New York, an ocean-side metropolis with piers and harbors where ships from around the world tie up.
“What memories,” she wondered, “will leave the sirens and whistles of all the various vessels in comparison with the memories left by the strokes of the oars which sometimes disturbed the silence of the Oshmanka?”
The generation that wrote the Holocaust yizkor books is vanishing. Many fear that their stories will die with them. Yet that won’t happen as long as the book of Bagaslaviskis, Lithuania, remains on a library shelf so a young person can benefit from Raisel Michel-Berzak’smemory:
“The sun is setting and the congregation is already there in shul, at the pulpit was my father in his Sabbath robe, deep in prayer. On the faces glimmer the soul of Sabbath. When the shoemaker, Shimin Yosel, stands at the pulpit to honor the Sabbath with his glorious tone, all the Jews join in with great joy and delight.
“Bagaslaviskis had dear Sabbaths.”
