A Family Secret
My late cousin Suzane on the right in the white blouse.
A Family Secret – a Memory on Holocaust Memorial Day in Jerusalem
Holocaust Memorial Day again here in Israel. Another day of moping and moaning and not knowing how to deal with the heavy presence of all that loss in our lives. I light a yahrzeit candle and place it on the windowsill as I do every year. I stand for the siren, but we have had so many sirens and so many such candles lit this year in this country. The new pain sits on the old, perhaps deepens the heaviness of the day.
My father, Boris and his only surviving brother – there were nine siblings alive before the Germans came – had secrets. Neither of their wives, nor we, their children, knew what they were holding back from us, perhaps to protect us but perhaps also for other disturbing reasons. Now that they are gone, we will never know.
Over the years my brother Jack and I dug up information, but we were left with mystery and conjecture. Brother Sam, trained as a watchmaker and collaborated with Dad in his shop for years. He might have known more, we suspect. He had an incredible memory, but he was reluctant to share what he’d heard from our watchmaker father or our watchmaker uncle. Sam had a psychiatric condition, so we felt the need to protect him from those memories rather than press him to tell more. In any case, Sam, too, is dead now. He is immortalized in the film, and it is clear it wasn’t easy for him to share what he did share there.
At least we have the documentary that Danny Ben Moshe made about what might have happened in Australia during their early years after their migration there from Europe. “Revenge – Our Dad the Nazi Killer” it’s called.
My mother, Chana, also a survivor from Warsaw, on the other hand, never stopped talking about the past. She kept no secrets. That’s probably why she knew nothing about what Boris and Fima might have done in Australia during the fifties.
All those dead Nazis who had suicided in strange ways like the one who blew his head off with explosives won’t be telling us either. No tears shed for them.
I will never forget my only cousin on my father’s side, Suzanne, who was four or five years older than me and a bit like an older sister when we were little. She went on Aliya six years before me and married an Israeli. I will never forget what my dad told me about his brother on the afternoon of her wedding here in Jerusalem in 1970. It was my first visit to Israel to which I returned on aliya three years later. My dad warned me not to tell her what he was about to confide in me, certainly not on that special day. He looked at me in a strange way, breathing heavily and after a long pause said:
“Suzanne is not Fima’s first child. He was married before the war and had a son, a beautiful boy. His first wife and their son were murdered by the Einzatzgrupen in 1942. He did not name them and I didn’t ask.
Of course I was shocked. It crossed my mind that my uncle Fima was a much more morose type than my dad. He worked hard and kept to himself, never involved in the community or much of a party goer. My Dad on the other hand was no workaholic. He knew how to have fun, to tease, to kick up his heels with my mum and tell occasional jokes, and he was very involved in community affairs. The two brothers were always very close. They’d survived so much, kept each other alive through their years in the Byelorussian forests. I imagined they shared other heavy, maybe shocking, secrets like this one. After reading descriptions of the partisan warfare they were involved in, including testimonies of other survivors, I suspect they might have been involved in a massacre of a Belorussian village in an act of revenge.
Years later, in conversation with Suzanne before she, too, died of cancer as her first husband had, I broached the subject of our father’s past. She had been with her husband Shaul to the Naroch forest where the two brothers spent the war years and had travelled to their shtetl Diszna where our grandparents, aunts, uncles and little cousins were massacred. Unlike I, who had studied Holocaust history, she had not previously wanted to relate to the subject. She was now open, finally, to sharing thoughts on our mutual family past there. I already knew my Mum’s story about escape from the Warsaw ghetto, being hidden by Polish families and crossing the border into Soviet held territories where she and her immediate family had survived Stalin’s slave labour camps only to return in 1946 to Polish antisemitism, to find nothing of their former world left and moving on to DP camps in Austria. My mother was always very open and spoke freely about the past. Suzanne, like my father and her parents, was often circumspect, but this time she was willing to talk.
During that post trip conversation, she asked me:
“Did you know that my dad was married before it all started and that he had a child?”
I admitted I did and that my dad had told me on the day of her wedding back in 1970.
“I was shocked” I told her, “And the look in my dad’s eyes was spooky”, I added.
Suzanne nodded, smiling sadly.
“But how did you find out, Suzanne?” I asked.
“My aunt Chana, your mother, told me, at my bat mitzvah party. You know what she was like. Always blunt and honest. She just blurted it out at me. I could never forgive her for telling me when and how she did. It really spoiled the party for me. I was just girl after all. Now that she’s gone, I’ve let go of that anger.”
“Quite a story. I knew nothing about it. I was just a little kid and I’m not even sure whether I was there at all.”
“I want to ask you a favour, Jon” (my English name at the time).
“Of course. What do you want?”
“You’ve got connections at Yad Vashem, don’t you? You worked there for a while.”
I nodded.
“I’m too sick to go there anymore. Can you find out their names? I’d like to finally know that.”
I did as she asked and researched the issue until I managed to find the names in a Yizkor book for the town of Danielewitz where Fima and his family were living just before the war. It was on the shelf in the Yad Vashem research library where a librarian friend worked.
I returned to Suzanne with the information. Suzanne was dying at the time, was in a home hospice with an accompanying nurse and her second, journalist, husband who was also helpful in the search for that information. She had lung cancer, the same disease that had killed Shaul years before. She was terribly thin and frail now.
“Her name was Rysia” I told her, “Her maiden name Skiranski. She was a pharmacist, and had a shop in her town Danielewitz, aged 33 when executed.” I read this from the notes I’d taken.
She was silent, serious, waiting I suppose for the boy’s name.
“Your half-brother’s name was Isia, maybe a Slavic version of Isaac. He was 7 years old when shot in the massacre of the Jews of Danielewicz.”
“Thank you, Jon. I needed to know that. And now could you please go back to Yad Vashem with the filled-out forms of testimony after I write in that information. I’ll do that now.”
She didn’t cry, neither did I.
I did as she wished.
She’d died not long after that.
A novel by Yehiel Grenimann 