The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister

by Bannister, Nonna

  * * *

  “DID NOT WANT ME TO GO” • Another interpretation of the Germans’ reluctance to let Nonna leave is that they needed medical personnel, and having been trained in their system, she was valuable to them.

  * * *

  It was then I realized that those very people sitting across the long table from me in Wiesbaden were trying to protect themselves. These were probably ex-Nazis who did not care for us and were trying to make a new Germany. After they failed to talk me out of leaving Germany, they told me I could only get the fund money if I remained in Germany and accepted their offers. Again I told them that they could never talk me out of leaving Germany and that I would never give up my visa (and perhaps any of my papers and letters). I was one of the few left that had such papers and proof of the horrors they had created. They finally pulled out a piece of paper, which they made me sign, and gave me $1200. They told me that this was restitution and that the money was to pay for the trip and my troubles in appearing before them. They also told me that by accepting the $1200 in German money, I would release my claim for further attempts to collect for my mother.

  By this time, I was somewhat angry, and all that I could think of was to get out of that place. I only had ten days left on my visa when I appeared before these men, and I had to get to Bremerhaven to catch the ship that would take me to America, where I planned to make a new life for myself. There was no money or anything that Germany could give me to not go to the country that my father had dreamed about for so many years to make his home.

  * * *

  REMEMBERING (EVEN NOW)

  I am acutely aware of all of it!

  I can hear the voices of those that I loved.

  I can see the faces of those who are long gone.

  I can travel through many places I have once traveled and see things as I saw them many years ago.

  When I am alone, I see fragments of my past played before me!

  * * *

  I have always known that, being the only survivor of my entire family, I had done the right thing by leaving Europe—and that it would have made my father very happy. All the members of my family who had been so brutally murdered by Hitler, Stalin, and other such monsters would also be happy. This piece of history that I was a part of I do not want to forget, nor let anyone else forget. I will do my best, before I cease to exist, to tell all of those who do not want such horrible things to ever happen again. The truth shall live forever.

  * * *

  “THE TRUTH SHALL LIVE FOREVER” • Nonna climbed aboard the USNS General W. G. Haan before it sailed from Bremerhaven on May 20, 1950. She faced a severe storm during the long voyage. The bad weather delayed her travel, but she arrived at the Port of Embarkation in New Orleans, Louisiana, on June 6, 1950, and Nonna set foot on American soil. Her father’s dream, for so many years, finally came true for Nonna.

  * * *

  OCTOBER 1989: AMERICANS

  We are Americans,

  You and I.

  The land we are sharing

  With its clear and friendly sky

  Is a gift from God

  For you and I.

  Though times have been changing,

  Nothing’s the same.

  The freedom is here

  And shall always remain.

  The clouds appear

  But move on in the sky.

  We are Americans,

  You and I.

  Afterword: Did It Really Happen?

  by Nonna Bannister

  Was it all as bad as what we learned from the ones who were there? Why is it so important for us—all of us—to know and remember what happened in the past? Perhaps our children and grandchildren will study the history of these things. All that is important enough to be put into the history books should be respected as the truth.

  Just as we read and believe in the Great God Himself and Christ, who we believe was crucified for the cause of salvation of all who were created by God, we must not forget what happened to those who were tortured, tormented, and murdered by the hands of evil men. They (the victims) did not commit any crimes except that they were born and were just there in those troubled times. As the philosopher Santayana forewarned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it!”

  However, I believe forgiveness is important. It is to forgive, as God teaches us, but never forget—rather, to apply the truth to our lives in such a way that we do not repeat our sins over and over again. If we learn our lessons from the Word of God, who was the Creator of all, and if we believe in His Word as God’s Word, we shall also be aware of all that happens while we are in His world.

  Since we cannot turn back, but live our lives now and tomorrow and after, we need to be aware of evil things, which may always be with us until death. Death comes quickly, and we all will die sooner or later. But it is the life after death that fills us with great hope, and we should never be afraid of dying. However, if we learn how to survive even when we are faced with death, we become stronger and can live until God is ready to take us into eternity.

  Appendix A: Life with Nonna

  as told to the editors by Henry Bannister, Summer 2008

  Henry Bannister met Nonna in 1951, after her ship from Germany arrived in New Orleans, Louisiana. They married shortly after her arrival in America, and their marriage lasted fifty-three years and fifty-three days—until Nonna’s last breath. Henry and Nonna had three children.

  Nonna was an intelligent, lovely woman. She was beautiful physically, emotionally, and spiritually. As brutal and horrifying as they were, her experiences in German-occupied Russia and subsequently in Germany in the midst of the Holocaust, only deepened Nonna’s faith in God. This faith saved her from the bitterness many Holocaust survivors developed after the war’s end. Love and compassion ruled Nonna’s heart. With God’s help she forgave those who purposely hurt her, as well as those—both Russian and German—who so cruelly slaughtered her family.

  Nonna was a loving and faithful wife, mother, and grandmother during her marriage of more than five decades. When she decided to tell Henry about her Holocaust experiences—a few years before she died—she spoke without hatred, bitterness, or anger. She held on to her grandmother Feodosija’s deep faith in God, and until her latest years she regularly worshiped in church. She was baptized in the Russian Orthodox church as a child and worshiped there; after the war, she became Baptist through the influence of American Baptist missionaries in Germany. The Napoleon Avenue Baptist Church of New Orleans, Louisiana, sponsored her emigration to the United States, and she worshiped in Baptist churches thereafter. Nonna also remembered her father’s words about forgiving others. She forgave much, and her forgiveness kept her from a long life built on bitterness and revenge seeking.

  But the Holocaust and the war impacted Nonna in several distinct ways not uncommon among Holocaust survivors. She became very private in her dealings with other people, wanting few friends. She was secretive about her life during the war years and about the fate of her maternal Russian and her paternal Polish families. Even Henry knew little about his wife until her final years. Only in the 1980s did she decide to share her experiences with Henry, to show him the diaries and photographs, and to describe the horrors and pain she and her family had endured at the hands of the Russians and the Nazis.

  Nonna’s habit of hiding this information was probably a combination of the natural reticence many Holocaust survivors experience and a carryover from the days when it was vitally important to hide valuables and personal papers from the Communists during her early years in Russia and from the Nazis during her Holocaust years. It is also likely that having experienced such harsh treatment, confiscation, and imprisonment at the hands of two governments, she no longer trusted government in general.

  Even after the war, she sewed private papers, photographs, and documents into the linings of her pockets and the hems of her dresses or stashed them in other clever hiding places. Henry would see her writing on the yellow tab
lets and sometimes look—in vain—for them while Nonna was away. She hid these in her trunk, and she locked that trunk inside a larger trunk. She kept other personal memorabilia hidden as well, inside the black-and-white-striped ticking pillow she had kept on her person throughout the Holocaust and postwar years, even hiding them from Henry again after finally showing them to him. Throughout her adult life, including hospital stays in the United States, Nonna slept with that pillow at her chest. She never went anywhere overnight without it.

  After Nonna died, her children and Henry eventually found transcripts, photographs, documents, personal papers, childhood diaries, postwar diaries, and many other things that belonged to Nonna. Though they had to break the trunk’s padlock, since Nonna had hidden its key too well, her family eventually found almost everything—official visa information, travel baggage-claim slips, her mother’s letters from Ravensbrück and Flossenbürg concentration camps, and photographs of her family and friends. But since Nonna’s burial, the original Holocaust diary scraps have not been found again.

  Henry knows that they survived the war and that Nonna kept them. She had translated and transcribed them word for word onto yellow legal pads in her later life, and Henry had typed that transcription for her. But though he and his family have searched everywhere for them, they have not been able to discover them. It is possible that Nonna sewed them into a secret pocket or lining of the ticking pillow, which was buried with her.

  What happened to Nonna’s family back in Russia, Germany, and Poland? Nonna’s mother, Anna, died at the Germans’ Flossenbürg concentration camp, probably in April 1945. Her last letter to Nonna was dated April 11, 1945. But Nonna didn’t receive the letter until four months after the war.

  Nonna last saw her maternal grandmother, Feodosija Nikolayevna Ljaschova, standing on the train platform in Konstantinowka, Ukraine, when she and her mother left for Germany on August 7, 1942. They never heard from her again. Nonna never returned to the Great House or to her home country.

  Nonna last saw her brother, Anatoly, at the family reunion in Konstantinowka, Ukraine, in the late summer of 1939. After Anatoly left for St. Petersburg, Nonna and her family never heard from him again. She spent a lifetime searching for Anatoly. If Anatoly is still alive somewhere in the world, he would be eighty-four years old in 2009.

  Most of Nonna’s remaining relatives—aunts, an uncle, and cousins—had boarded a Russian train headed to Siberian safety and died when the trains were bombed.

  Petrovich, caretaker of the Great House, went to the railroad tracks to pick up discarded coal during the spring of 1941. He never came home. Feodosija found his cart, still loaded with coal, abandoned by the tracks but saw no sign of him.

  Nonna never met her father’s family, who lived in Warsaw, Poland. Yevgeny lost contact with them during World War II, and they were never heard from again. Nonna never found out whether her father was Jewish.

  Anna’s good friend Taissia Solzhenitsyna died on January 17, 1944, from tuberculosis. Her son, Aleksandr “Sasha” Solzhenitsyn, became “Russia’s greatest living novelist,” winning the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Aleksandr joined the Red Army during World War II, achieved the rank of captain of artillery, and was twice decorated. For criticizing Joseph Stalin in a letter, he was imprisoned (1945–1953) in a Russian gulag—a prison in the Soviet system of labor camps. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. In 1984 he won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an active writer until his death during the publication of this book, on August 3, 2008.

  Nonna Lisowskaja Bannister died on August 15, 2004. Her favorite flowers, lilacs, were out of season at that time of year, so Henry put roses on her grave, for she also loved roses. For her wedding, she had chosen pink roses for her bridal headpiece and worn a corsage of pink rosebuds.

  Inside Nonna’s coffin, next to her heart, Henry placed her black-and-white-striped ticking pillow—the pillow her grandmother had made for her and stuffed with the soft breast feathers of young Russian geese—the pillow that may still contain those tiny slips of soiled paper sewn together with a single thread—her Holocaust diaries. The pillow had been her constant companion in life. Henry knew she couldn’t sleep without it.

  Appendix B: “Is This It? Is This All?”

  by John Bannister

  As I reflect on my mother’s life, many things are revealed to me that make sense now that she has passed on. Momma’s attitude about life, especially challenges that she faced, was almost always positive. She had a very strong will to fight difficulties, a strong will to maintain her dignity, and a strong will to survive and move on. Reflecting on the kind of person she was makes it much clearer that her past had an indelible effect on what she would become. Why was she such a private person? Why did she not allow herself to get too close to people? Why was her family the most important thing to her? Why was she always such a realist regarding life and at the same time so compassionate toward others?

  It can be understood that after enduring so much pain at an early age—witnessing such atrocious behavior and lack of civility, having nearly her entire family decimated—she would hold all of these pains inside for over four decades. Privacy was her way of coping with the past hell she had witnessed.

  Although Momma loved being around people, loved doing things for others and giving of herself, she had very few close friends during her lifetime. I now believe that it wasn’t because she was so private but rather because of her fear of getting close to others and then having them taken away from her. I recall many acquaintances, but only a few people she truly confided in and to whom she became as close as a sister.

  To Momma, nothing was more dear or important than her family and her home. She worked daily to make sure we were cared for and loved. She was totally dedicated to serving her husband and creating the best home possible for her kids. Her home was the only place she could feel safe and secure, and it was her most important resource to draw on for true happiness.

  Momma was always willing to listen to what you had to say, and she always put logic and realism into any advice she rendered. We all know that realism can sometimes come with a bit of a sting, but she would wrap it in compassion and make you feel loved, no matter the consequence.

  Momma’s love and admiration for Daddy were always evident, even when she may not have been happy with him about something. I believe that feeling was mutual between them. She was proud of her husband, not because of certain successes or accomplishments he may have achieved, but more for the type of man he is. Daddy has lived a life based on a strong work ethic, strong moral fiber, and dedication as a husband and father. These are the qualities Momma saw in Daddy when they met in 1951, and Momma felt truly blessed that God had sent a man like that to love her. They shared fifty-three years and fifty-three days together.

  My mother would be very humbled and glad that her life story made it into a book. Once she decided to share her memories with her family, she was committed to the idea that no one should forget what happened to her and millions of others during a time in which, to those unwilling participants, a new level of horror was displayed. She wanted no one to forget that good always overcomes evil in the end. She hoped that the civilized world would never again allow hatred to spew so openly and then look the other way.

  On August 15, 2004, at noon, as the church bells were tolling in Jackson, Tennessee, my mother’s long journey on earth came to an end. She had lived through and witnessed more pain and suffering than any individual deserved. During the last few weeks of her life, she had mentally gone back in time and relived some of those terrible memories—back to the Nazi camps, back to the train ride to Germany, back to her father’s murder. It was as if these horrors were happening all over again for her, and all we could do was pray and wait it out.

  After about five days in that state, she came back around, and I will never forget her looking me straight in the eyes and saying, “Is this i
t? Is this all? Is this it?” I knew she understood that her time here was almost over and that she would finally be reunited with her Papa, Mama, Anatoly, and all her other loved ones.

  Many beautiful memories and precious times were shared with Momma at the end, and although she still fought hard to stay here with us, her body succumbed to the natural result. No more pain and suffering, Momma; no more.

  On behalf of the Bannister family, I would like to thank several special people who helped this project become a reality:

  To Denise and Carolyn, for the love and respect you have shown to Daddy and for being so diligent to bring Momma’s memoirs to life.

  To my wife, Kathy, for all the time and care you spent sorting Momma’s writings and pictures and for being supportive to Daddy.

  To Greg Johnson, for seeing the value in telling Momma’s life story to others and for your honesty with our family.

  Appendix C: Documents

  MAP OF THE WESTERN SOVIET UNION • Nonna included this map in her transcript, with her own handwritten notes indicating, among others: “Leo Tolstoy’s place,” “Grandmother’s birthplace,” “Konstantinowka dacha, Great House,” “Taganrog, Nonna’s birthplace,” “Rostov on Don,” and “Novorossisk, Mama’s birthplace.”