Because these days are the anniversaries of numerous massacres in towns in Lithuania and Belarus, i spent too much time on zoom today and have passed on one of my favorite towns, Zhedtl.  My aunt, who lived in Zhedtl but joined the partisans when she escaped the camp where the Nazis imprisoned the Jewish inhabitants, was killed in the forests.  I have long tried to find someone who knew her, or could identify her, but she faded into anonymity and that hurts me as much as her loss.  

So I went to the memorial for Lida, where I know there is no one who remembers my family and everyone wants to tell about their own family.  And at the end, this guy comes on who acquired a bunch of files of photographs, lists, and a variety of information that would be very basic to tracing all of our families. He didn’t know where to place these files – and has been sitting on them for 5 years.  I was left speechless.