So many memorials lately, and the mourners speak in such detail about their beloved children, their parents, their friends. In a few days I too have another memorial coming up and I will have to say a few words about the uniqueness of our connection. A memorial service to me means remembering loved ones.
So when I participated in a memorial of the town in which many of my family were murdered, I felt a strangeness – I never knew them. There are only a few photos from before the war. That is all that was left. So I wrote about what I could reconstruct from the marketplace where both families of my parents lived.
But sometimes there are details that can be pieced together, reconstructed, made into human beings.
Here’s one example.
My mother would sometimes sadly intone, “Three lay down in a bed, only one arose.” My mother was the survivor of typhus that killed one sister. She herself slowly lost hearing in one ear as a result, and once she told me that the sister who did not die of typhus had become totally deaf and rattled, in need of assistance for the rest of her life.
The other day I looked at the photo that said Bluma, 1915 on the back, and asked Ezi to sharpen it for me, and began to connect with her beauty and depth. She must have been about 17. How beautiful her long hair was, and how profound and intense her gaze. Her expression beckoned me and became fixed in my mind.
Now look at the photo taken a few years later that Ezi cropped from the engagement photo of her sister and sharpened. The features are the same but her gaze is tragic, and at the same time empty. Her hair is short, even though a bob wasn’t yet in style. It’s clear to me now that her hair was growing back after the post-typhus loss, but there was no attempt to glamorize the shape.
Now, the Lida Memorial Book says that my grandmother perished with two children. Since the youngest daughter, Malcah, was a partisan in the forests at the time, and Batya we know was married and perished in the camps, this leaves only Mira who could have been living at home, and that Bluma was one of those two children who perished with my grandmother.
Bluma must have been living at home because in the ’30s, when my mother had escaped to Danzig, she was called to come home and help take care of her sister. My mother couldn’t go – From what I understood she was taking care of my father who was constantly in danger as an ex-communist and couldn’t leave; she was the only breadwinner.
So Bluma must have gone to her death in the pit in Lida, a woman in her thirties, not knowing what was happening.
