Keeping memory alive: a family remembrance of persecution and the Holocaust

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day sparked not only reflection and commemoration, but also rising concerns about the persistence of memory. As the decades pass, the ranks of survivors dwindle. The Holocaust will soon move beyond living memory. And, with antisemitism once more on the rise worldwide, there are fears that denial will gain ground as the witnesses die. There is no question that Holocaust denial has become markedly more “mainstream” in recent years, creeping with growing confidence into politics and culture in many parts of the world.

All of this set me thinking about my own family background, Ashkenazi Jews in Poland and Byelorussia – what we know about their experiences of persecution, flight, and the Holocaust. My direct ancestors escaped to better prospects in the United States, before the restrictive 1924 Immigration Act slammed the door. Of those that remained behind, all faced drastic hardship. Some survived. Many did not.

There is a vast amount about my family history that, sadly, I do not know and can never recover: records of the Jewish shtetls are poor or nonexistent. My parents gleaned fragments from their families, but there were questions their parents would not answer, and questions my parents did not think to ask until it was too late. My mother’s older sister was the greatest gatherer of lore on her side of the family – but she died in her 40s, and took it all with her.

We know least about my father’s mother Gertie, and my mother’s father Israel. Neither was prone to talk about their early lives. Gertie (1909-1987) came to the US around 1920, still a child, together with her widowed mother and her siblings; at least one cousin was already here. Gertie was born in what is now eastern Poland, near the endlessly-disputed Russian border – an area overrun first by the Soviets in 1939 (the zone assigned to them by the secret provisions of the Nazi-Soviet pact), and then by the Germans in 1941 as they drove east into Russia. There must have been a whole network of cousins left behind who fell victim to the Nazi death machine… but we know nothing about them.

Israel (1893-1967) was born in the Mogilev region of eastern Byelorussia. In his later years, he ranted constantly about his radical politics; but he rarely talked about his past. He was the youngest of twelve or thirteen siblings, and the only boy. His parents wanted him to become a rabbi – instead, he became a communist. Somehow, he managed to escape the chaos of World War I, reaching America in 1916 with his first-cousin Sam. One sister also came to America and settled in Chicago. At least some of Israel’s many sisters survived the Holocaust, but in dire poverty: his sister in Chicago, wife of a successful dry cleaner, answered their appeals for money after the war. We do not know how many died in the Nazi genocide, nor do we know how many cousins and extended relations perished. But prospects for Jews in Byelorussia were poor even before the Nazis: that was the reality my grandfather fled.

Despite the vast amount of knowledge we have lost, we know a good deal more about Israel’s wife Fannie, and Gertie’s husband Joe – and about their families’ fates.

My mother’s mother, Fannie (1896-1973), was born in the large Jewish community of Vitebsk, Byelorussia – then part of Russia’s Tsarist empire. This was the Jewish world immortalized by Vitebsk’s Marc Chagall, my grandmother’s cousin. (She reported that her mother and Chagall’s mother were first cousins, though the details are regrettably impossible to track down. Chagall was nine years Fannie’s senior. Before he left Vitbesk in 1906, when Fannie was ten, the young Chagall would sometimes visit her family; Fannie disliked him because he ignored her.)

Even at the best of times, Jews rarely felt safe in Eastern Europe. My grandmother’s family had ample reason to feel insecure. The long-established Jewish population of Vitebsk was still vulnerable to pogroms. Fannie’s maternal grandfather was kidnapped as a child into the Tsarist army, and lost all knowledge of his family. Her mother and father were leftist activists who drew the ire of Russian authorities by seeking to educate the peasantry. Fannie grew up in an atmosphere of constant fear. Every knock at the door sparked a scramble to hide incriminating books and papers. And their fears were not idle. At some point before Fannie left for America, her father was chased down by the secret police and forced off a roof to his death. Fanny was left with a lifelong fear of authority, and a constant conviction she was being watched. Finally, she would find out that she was right… even in America. (See my earlier blog post, A Red Scare in the Family.)

Fannie escaped Vitebsk in 1913. Just seventeen years old, sponsored by her father’s sister in New York, she made her way to America alone, finding a steerage berth on the Cunard liner Mauretania – a technological marvel that must have stunned her. She had not left danger or hardship entirely behind. Exotically beautiful in her youth, Fannie was approached at the dock by a recruiter from a New York brothel. (She sent the woman flying with a shouted torrent of broken English.) Until her marriage, she worked in dismal sweatshops, and followed in her parents’ footsteps by joining leftist labor organizations. But she had escaped the world of open persecution and pogroms.

Her family had not. At some time not long after 1913, they posed for a photo that was sent to Fannie in America, mounted on tin as a precious keepsake. They stare out at us still, a small group of tenuous survivors. Her mother Sophie sits, prematurely aged and gaunt, gazing outwards with a look of resigned defeat. The youngest, Fannie’s sister Dinka, self-conscious about her plain looks, stands and looks away, avoiding the lens. Fannie’s younger brother Wolf, dapper in suit and tie, stands behind his mother, looking out with dark eyes hauntingly reminiscent of the young Chagall’s, his expression angrily intense.

Within a few short years, two of these three would be dead. At some point before or during the 1917 revolution, Wolf was gunned down by Tsarist troops amidst a Bolshevik crowd; we know he was dead by 1920, when my uncle Walter was named for him – Jews do not name children after the living. During the privations of the First World War, Sophie, who already looked wan and ill in the earlier photograph, died of starvation. Only Dinka was left. Never married, she continued to write to my grandmother. Somehow, she survived the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia. But her hard life took its toll. Her Yiddish letters continued to arrive into the 1950s; then a message came from a surviving cousin, informing a shattered Fannie that Dinka had died, only in her 50s. There is a vast amount beyond these basic facts that we do not know… including the more distant relations that may have perished in the Nazi genocide, or those who might still be left in Belarus or beyond. (Fannie’s cousin Marc Chagall, though out of contact with her since 1906, narrowly escaped the Nazis and their French collaborators with the help of American activist Varian Fry.)

We do however know, with tragic certainty, how the Holocaust destroyed another branch of our family: that of my father’s father, Joe.

Joseph Stern (1906-1985) was born in the town of Rubishov in eastern Poland, then Russian territory. The town’s venerable yet ever-vulnerable Jewish community dated back to the 15th century, and it had an established clan of Sterns; the Rubishov-born mathematician and inventor Abraham Stern (1762/69-1842) was likely a relation in some degree. Joe and his older brother Sam were the only boys amidst nine sisters. Around 1917, Joe – still a child – left with Sam amidst the devastation of the First World War. The two of them walked more than 800 miles to the Dutch port of Rotterdam, where they secured passage to America. Sam was drafted shortly after arriving, and served in the US Army tending horses.

Joe did not greatly prosper (Sam did better); he ended up doing piecework in a men’s cap factory until his retirement. But he was wise to flee his homeland, nonetheless.

When the war ended, Joe had no way of knowing what had become of his many sisters. There was reason for any Jew to worry about their families back in Europe. Word of the Nazi extermination campaign had begun to filter through during the war – but few could accept its true scope until the evidence built into a torrent. The very concept of such large-scale, mechanized slaughter was new. The word “genocide” was coined by 1944, but did not achieve widespread usage until its adoption by the UN in 1948. The unfathomable catastrophe would not be defined as “the Holocaust” for another twenty years.

With the liberation of the Nazi camps in the final months of the war and the inception of the Nuremberg trials in late 1945, the full horror began to force itself upon the public consciousness. Jews who had left relatives behind in the Nazis’ path – and many had, whether parents, siblings or cousins – saw the appalling spectacle of the camps in regular newsreels. But few could hope that family news would reach them through the chaos of post-war Europe, with whole nations devastated and millions displaced. My grandfather had left nine sisters in Rubishov. He had no way of knowing what had become of them.

Word finally came not by mail, but in person. My father, then six years old, vividly remembers the scene. One of Joe’s European relations – a cousin, though we otherwise do not know exactly who he was – arrived at the door of their Brooklyn apartment. His coat made a particular impression on my father. It had once been splendid and elegant, sporting an expensive fur collar. Now it was a tattered rag, full of holes. Clearly this cousin, now a refugee, had himself made a narrow escape from Hitler’s Europe.

The news he brought was unthinkable. All nine of my father’s sisters were dead. One had perished from natural causes during the war – perhaps during the hardships of the 1939-1941 Soviet occupation, before the Nazis came. The other eight, the cousin related with grim reserve, had been rounded up with their families and murdered. SS death squads carried out massacres in Rubishov; Jews that escaped that slaughter were deported to the death camp at Sobibór. Women were a particular target of the extermination camps, so it seems likely that most or all of the eight sisters were sent there to be gassed. We do not know if any of their husbands or children escaped, if any descendants might still be left. But the cousin told my grandfather that his sisters’ families had been rounded up with them, and my father does not remember any mention of survivors.

It was the only time my father had ever seen his father cry.

Antisemitism, like every other prejudice, never disappears. Growing up in a heavily Jewish community in a liberal part of a historically welcoming nation, I have still occasionally encountered it. (A middle school bully took to calling me “Jew boy.” When I complained to the guidance counselor, he lectured me about the bully’s rough life and told me I was being insensitive. I have, unsurprisingly, encountered repeated antisemitic attacks on social media… including one while I was writing this piece.)

For a time, the shock of the Holocaust shamed anti-Jewish prejudice into concealment. But as the immediacy fades and the climate shifts, it is seeping back into the open in many parts of the world. Similar bigotry targets many other groups, and the threat goes beyond mere words: the Holocaust may have been history’s most mechanized and systematic genocide, but it was neither the first nor the last targeted mass slaughter. From the attempted extermination of Armenians during World War I to the Rwandan atrocities to the massacres of Burmese Rohingya in today’s headlines, the persistence of bigotry and the risk of eliminationist violence are omnipresent. The risk of smaller-scale violence, perpetrated by individuals or small groups, is greater still.

I am deeply grateful to my grandparents for braving the difficult journey to a new life in an unfamiliar land. But even here, vigilance is essential. The current political atmosphere is encouraging bigotry to emerge from the shadows, giving hate a renewed sense of strength and legitimacy. Even as we lose the remaining survivors of the Holocaust and living memory fades into history, it is vital to record and remember the many stories like that of my own family. These and other remembrances of human darkness cannot safely be forgotten.