For most of her life, my mother didn’t call herself a Holocaust survivor. In her mind, the term was reserved for those sent to concentration camps. My family was part of the Holocaust that people didn’t know about or understand at the time. Of the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust, somewhere between one and a half and two million were rounded up from their homes in Eastern Europe and taken to open pits, where they were shot by Einsatzgruppen—German mobile killing squads—sometimes with the help of local collaborators. This is often referred to as the “Holocaust by Bullets.”
From shtetl to shtetl, there were small variations in how the murders occurred. Sometimes Jews were first herded into ghettos and into forced labor. Some were led into synagogues that were then set on fire. Some were beaten to death, or raped, or forced to walk into open pits, or transported to their grave sites in trucks. Sometimes the graves were already dug; other times the Jews were required to wield the shovels themselves. The narratives differ in detail, but all end on the same unspeakable note.
So, yes, something bad was indeed coming, and my then-twenty-one-year-old mother was not relying entirely on her gut on the day that the Nazis invaded her shtetl. In addition to the parachutes, there were trucks rolling into the village, with soldiers in uniform. You might think others, even if they lacked my mother’s intuition, would look at these signs and flee, as well. There was some warning—the incursion onto the Soviet territory had begun two weeks earlier, on June 22, at 4:00 A.M. on the dot. And yet, as we know from the tales of survivors, from our knowledge of history, from our understanding of human behavior, it was not easy to abandon a home, to spontaneously pack up and leave behind all that you had ever known. And even more difficult to imagine the fate that awaited if you did not.
My mother had another reason for knowing that it was best for her to leave. As a teenager, she had been involved with a local Communist group, and she suspected this affiliation would not serve her well when the Germans arrived. She had once even been arrested, dragged out of her house in the middle of the night, taken to the police station in a horse and buggy, and thrown into jail. Her widowed mother had to send her son-in-law and a lawyer to get her out. When my mother finally came home, her mother wouldn’t talk to her. That was her punishment and presumably part of what contributed to their steely farewell.
My mother would tell her grandchildren that she wasn’t really a Communist, that she just believed in “equal rights.” Nevertheless, we know that she went to meetings. Who knows—some of that might have even been self-protection, because whether it was the Russians or the Germans or the Ukrainians who were worse to the Jews had a fluid answer, dependent on the moment in time. And for a while at least, during the Russian occupation of Kolki from 1939 to 1941, she was rewarded by the Russians, first with a job in an office and then as a manager in one of the larger regional stores.
It’s also possible that my mother’s political leanings had to do with her resentment of her paternal grandfather. Shtetl life is rendered idyllic by Marc Chagall and turned into fable by Isaac Bashevis Singer, but one thing I have learned from piecing together my family narrative is that the place was just as full of drama—family tensions and divorce and unwanted pregnancies—as any modern-day soap opera.
Nissan Tzvi Bronstein, my mother’s paternal grandfather, was one of the richest men in town. In addition to owning the flour mill that stood behind his large multigenerational house, he was an exporter of dried mushrooms and bristles for brushes. He was so wealthy that he even had a piano, which was quite a luxury at the time. He built up an international business, and about every six months he traveled to the United States for work and to visit his two children, Necha and Max, who had settled in St. Louis.
My mother and her sisters, Pesha and Lifsha, had been living in Nissan’s house with their parents, Srulach and Esther, while their own house was being built. Then Srulach contracted tuberculosis. He hoped to travel to a sanatorium in Italy for a cure, but a visa was denied, so he and Esther headed west to a sanatorium somewhere near Warsaw, which is where he died.
When Esther returned from burying her husband, she and her father-in-law had a dispute; apparently, it had to do with the inheritance for her and her children now that her husband, Nissan’s son, had died. The argument turned sufficiently bitter that my grandmother and her two daughters moved out and into their unfinished house. Lifsha, Srulach’s daughter from his first marriage (his first wife had also died of tuberculosis), was sent off by her grandfather to live in another town with one of her aunts.
This resulted in such bad feelings that for the rest of her days in Kolki, my mother would cross the road when she walked down the main street so that she would not have to walk in front of Nissan’s house. She tended to see the world in black and white and did not forgive easily.
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Even when it was still difficult to get my mother to talk about the war, she would open up about Kolki, and detail by detail I was eventually able to construct a version of the shtetl in my mind. I could envision the houses, the animals, the stoves, my grandmother, and my aunts. I knew where everyone lived. I could see my mother in a fashionable dress that might have been sent to her by one of her American cousins, walking down to the river for a shpatzir, a stroll, with friends. Or she might have come down to the sandy banks, near the canoes, to wash the dishes before Passover.
Other stories began to emerge, often toggling between harrowing war stories and the minutiae of everyday life. The horrors become familiar with time, but the banal details can take on an almost magical quality, which might account for the instinct of artists to make the shtetl into a fairy tale.
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It was a wonderful little town with nice people. Plain people. Hardworking.
We had a library. We had a doctor. We had a dentist.
The houses were made of brick.
And of wood.
They were nice houses.
Next door to us lived two brothers.
They were butchers.
We had horses.
And wagons.
We had nice clothes and beautiful shoes.
On the Sabbath, there was chicken, beef sometimes, turkey maybe twice a year for the big holidays.
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Schmaltz was a big thing. Here, you don’t want the fat, you throw it away. There, when you go to the butcher—I remember this—they used to beg the butcher should give them a little bit of fat…
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And Trochenbrod, where I went once in a while, in the summer, because there was everything: fresh milk, fresh sour cream, like yogurt. Smetana. From the smetana you made butter…Very tasty…everything was fresh there, fruits…
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We continued to press my mother for details, sometimes conducting formal interviews. Frank decided to write about his grandmother for his high school senior project, and over the course of six weeks in 1992 he spent several days each week with her, a tape recorder running as he took her shopping, with all of those coupons in hand, in search of that week’s bargains. She has also been interviewed by volunteers from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, by writers and filmmakers, by other family members, and by an anthropologist cousin, who was interested in details on Kolki. I have hours and hours of taped interviews done during different stages in her life.
There were recurring motifs: the winter coat, the sister who ran after her, the pair of shoes. Beautiful Lifsha, my mother’s twenty-five-year-old half sister, and Lifsha’s two daughters, and her husband, David Shuster, who had been conscripted into the Polish army to fight the Nazis.
My mother remembered going with Lifsha and the rest of the family to see David off. “We all cried and cried,” my mother said, “because we thought we might never see him again.”
/> David survived; Lifsha and their daughters did not. Lifsha was killed in such a terrible way that my mother hesitated to speak of it, until she did, cryptically, referring to a million rapes. It’s not entirely clear to me when Lifsha died, but from what I have been able to piece together, she was one of the first killed in the initial days of the invasion, as was my mother’s maternal grandfather, Yosef Weinberg. He had been in one of the four synagogues in the village for morning prayers when the Nazis came. The doors were bolted and the synagogue set on fire.
Pesha and her mother, Esther, and her paternal grandmother Chava, along with Lifsha’s daughters, ages two and five, were taken to a ghetto set up for Jews, where they survived for about a year. Pesha managed to sneak out of the ghetto to see whether she could trade some silver spoons for food for the family and was shot on sight. Not long after, Chava and Esther, each holding one of Lifsha’s children in their arms, were shot over an open pit.
And then, amid the horror of these awful stories, my mother took a poignant detour:
Before the war, there had been a man. A dentist. He asked her to go for a ride in his canoe, but she did not go, even though she liked him. He came to visit her, but nothing happened—she seemed both intrigued and a little frightened by his attention. He was about ten years older—or maybe five or maybe twenty years older. The age gap seemed to vary with each rendering of the story, and once she opened up about it, I heard it many times. I might ask my mother a question about the river and it would lead her back to the dentist, the man who asked her to go with him for a ride in the canoe.
And here—in this man with his boat—it is possible to see the genesis of just about every sweeping wartime love story. Apparently, there was another, more serious boyfriend, who at some point later, after the war, after he enlisted to take revenge on the Nazis, after he was badly wounded, somehow managed to find Ethel’s address, to write, or have someone else write, a postcard with the message: “Don’t wait for me. Go and get married.” And she did. She married and she buried her husband and then she married again, and somehow, after my mother had been maybe fifteen or twenty years in the States, this man’s sister, remarkably, found Ethel and told her what had happened to him. “For two, three days I couldn’t eat,” my mother said.
What had happened to him? I don’t know. It’s one of many questions, another fragment of another story, that I’ll never have an answer to.
Even with just these sketchy details, I can still imagine the scene, my mother overcome with emotion, now remarried, living in suburban America, running a grocery store. She has children and stepchildren; she has a complicated and in many ways difficult life. And now this unexpected news from the past, information about a long-lost love. I can see the telephone receiver pressed to her ear, her fingers nervously playing with the long looping cord.
She communicates with the sister for a while, clandestinely. But then, whatever it is that is going on, she decides to let it go.
“This is what happened,” she says simply, years later. “You know, what a terrible war.”
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I would later learn this was only one of my mother’s postwar suitors. David Shuster, who had been married to Lifsha, asked my mother to marry him after the war. This is an old Jewish shtetl tradition—a widower marries the unmarried younger sister. But my mother refused him; she told me she couldn’t marry her sister’s husband. David seemed to understand and was respectful of her answer—he even gave her money for a new coat.
They saw each other years later in Israel. By that time, David had remarried and he now had another daughter and a stepson. He told my mother that he always kept a hidden picture of Lifsha with him.
Kolki. It was a wonderful town, with nice, plain, hardworking people, my mother said.
In the prewar years, there were few cars. If one came through, everyone ran after it, because it was such a wonder.
There was no indoor plumbing and no electricity, except in two or three homes, including my great-grandfather’s—the one with the piano.
The ovens provided heat.
Water came from the nearby Styr River or from wells. If you could afford it, water was delivered by a man who carried it in buckets on his shoulders.
Laundry was washed by boiling some of this water on the stove.
Wednesday was market day, when most of the shopping took place. My mother described it as a kind of bazaar or flea market, where you could see everything from horses and cows to blueberries and butter. There were little stores, usually attached to people’s houses—tailors, shoemakers, bakers, carpenters—and a doctor and, of course, the dentist.
There were a number of different synagogues in Kolki—at least four small synagogues that my mother could remember, some organized by profession. For example, there was the schneider’s shul (the tailor’s synagogue) and one for the more prosperous merchants, like my mother’s rich grandfather, and there were synagogues based on the rabbi’s orientation. My mother, when asked, couldn’t remember ever actually going into one of the synagogues, although she recalled playing outside during the Jewish High Holidays.
My parents were born in the same region—in what is now western Ukraine and was then eastern Poland—but not the same town. Trochenbrod and Kolki were only about thirteen miles apart, and there were lots of family overlaps and visits between the towns.
There really is such a thing as Jewish geography. If you are a member of the tribe, you learn not to express surprise when you realize that your next-door neighbor is related to your best childhood friend or that his daughter has just married your cousin. Or that the boy in your son’s fourth-grade class is in fact a distant cousin.
“This town is a shtetl,” you might say. Except it’s more than just one town. It’s the world.
My mother had an anecdote she liked to tell about a visitor from the United States who was walking down the street in Kolki when a woman stuck her head out the window and yelled to him: “Do you know my Benjamin? He lives in New York.” As if America were such a small place that everyone knew everyone the way they did in Kolki. No punch line survives, but the answer could very well have been yes.
Like me, my mother had a confusing birth date. She knew that she was born in 1920 in Kolki on Lag B’Omer, a minor Jewish holiday that is considered a “happy day” in the middle of a period of sadness between Passover and Shavuot, a day for parties and bonfires. In the shtetl, dates were easy to mark if they coincided with a Jewish holiday. In 1920, Lag B’Omer fell on May 6. All of my mother’s official documents from the displaced-persons camps and her U.S. citizenship papers, however, show a birth date of June 15, 1920. When I pressed her on why the mix-up of dates for her and for me, she said that my father did it—that he scrambled all of the dates. In retrospect, since he clearly changed my birth date intentionally, my guess is he decided to mix up the others, as well.
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Stories handed down from one generation to another change our behavior, but whether that leads to a desire to learn more or to silence the past, who can say. This question is central to a body of thought called postmemory, a term first introduced by writer and Columbia professor Marianne Hirsch. The idea is that traumatic memories live on from one generation to the next, even if the later generation was not there to experience these events directly. She suggests that the stories one grows up with are transmitted so affectively that they seem to constitute memories in their own right. That these inherited memories—traumatic fragments of events—defy narrative reconstruction.
Like so much else in our family story, scrambled birthdays seem to me one more detail, one more traumatic fragment of events that defy narrative reconstruction.
And yet piling fragment upon fragment is the best I can do, in the jars that line my mantel and in the story of my family, and it does add up to a picture that is something of a whole.<
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Like the recitation of names at a Yizkor service, a prayer for the departed, I am compelled to recite these fragments of my family history, to simply list the names, because sometimes that is the best we can do. There are no tombstones to mark the graves, so at least on these pages, the names reside.
There is my maternal great-grandmother Rose, or Reizel as she was called in Kolki, who would sometimes take my mother to Trochenbrod to visit her sister-in-law Sara Weinberg Bisker, who happened to be married to my father’s cousin.
And my mother’s older half sister, Lifsha, who was married to David Shuster. They met when he came from Trochenbrod to Kolki on business. Apparently, it was love at first sight. I have a number of pictures of Lifsha, with groups of friends, playing a balalaika, pictures with her husband and with one of their daughters, and a beautiful picture of her walking elegantly down the main street of Kolki with two of her aunts, her husband, David, her grandmother, and some cousins. “Shabbat walk in Kolki 1937” is written on the back of a photograph of a group of my female relatives, all of them wearing black, looking glamorous and carefree. If not for the inscription, I would have thought they were in Paris.
My mother’s parents were Esther Weinberg and Srulach Bronstein, or Braunshtein, depending on who is doing the spelling. They were both widowed, their first spouses having died of tuberculosis.
My widowed grandmother Esther had a son in her first marriage who died and whose name I don’t even know. My grandfather Srulach had a daughter, Lifsha, who became part of their new family.
Ethel, my mother, was the firstborn of my grandparents’ second marriage. Her life was a new start for this fractured family.
Four years after my mother was born, Esther and Srulach had another daughter, Pesha—she of the shoes. Pesha was the quiet child, which is about the most I could get out of my mother, who almost never talked about her younger sister, other than to keep going back to the shoes.
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