Name In The List OF Memory

Name In The List OF Memory

18 августа 2018 1064

The history of the nation consists of the fate of the people, the history of each individual family. To find their roots and see the place where their ancestors were born is the cherished dream of almost every Jewish family that survived the Holocaust. The people, who was subjected to slaughter and mass expulsion, is reviving its history and teaching the younger generation the most important thing – to remember. To remember about death, suffering and great desire for freedom of the Jews who survived the bloody years of the Great Patriotic War.

 

Roads of life.... Interesting, unpredictable, sometimes heavy and sometimes happy. One of such roads will lead residents of distant Israel and America to Novogrudok. The families of cousins David and Mel Silberklang have always remembered that their roots are in the far-away and little-known Dyatlovo.

And this summer the dream to see their ancestors’ homeland came true. In July they came to Belarus together with other relatives. Our meeting took place at the Museum of Jewish resistance. The Museum curator Tamara Vershitskaya told about the tragic fate of prisoners of Novogrudok ghetto, about those who escaped from the ghetto, survived and once returned to Novogrudok. Elderly people and the youth listened carefully with bowed heads. They saw terrible pictures of their relatives’ suffering and pain: executions, tortures and inhuman conditions.

IMG_2645

- We have always wanted to visit the land where our relatives lived before the war, - David Silberklang said. - Our big family – my cousin, our children, cousins, relatives – came to the homeland of ancestors. My mother is from Dyatlovo, and we want to visit our native city, to visit partisans’ sites in the Naliboki Forest. We could not but come to Novogrudok, where many Jewish families lived before the war. Our uncle studied in the Mir/Mirrer Yeshiva, our great-granduncle studied in the Slonim Yeshiva. My mother studied in Tarbut school before the war. When she was already sixty years old, and I was a teenager, she recited the works by the Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, who studied in the Volozhin Yeshiva and did not become a Rabbi, but became a poet. She also recited “Pan Tadeusz” by Adam Mitskevich in Polish. Many Jews from Dyatlovo were prisoners in the Novogrudok ghetto. Among those who were able to escape from the ghetto through the tunnel, there were our relatives. So we have a lot of links with these places.

IMG_2633

On the wall of memory in the Museum of Jewish Resistance in Novogrudok David Silberklang found his great-grandmother’s surname-Belous.

– My great-grandmother came from the village of Morozovichy in Dyatlovo district, -continues David. - And all Jews who lived there and had a surname Belous had family or kinship links. Before marriage my mother had the surname Senderovska. She was in the Bielski partisan  group with her grandmother. Like most Jews, they were in the Dyatlovo ghetto during the occupation t. But, fortunately, they were able to escape.

IMG_2668

- Mother told me that after escape, they roamed a long time, the woods. And one day they saw a woman, Galina by name. Nobody knew her last name. The woman promised that partisans would come soon and she would transfer them into the wood. When the partisans came, the mother was surprised to see that the commander of the group was Levin Yudel.  She asked, "What are you doing here?" “And you? What are you doing here, Rivka?"- answered Yudel. They were relatives and knew each other well. Grandmother was rather old to make any contribution to fight, but she spent two years together with partisans in the wood.

IMG_2647

In Israel, David Silberklang works at Yad Vashem. It is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. He is sure that if we want the tragedy that happened to the Jewish people not to happen again, we need one thing – we must know and remember. Today's generation and young people need to be told about the Holocaust, about terrible crimes against humanity, about millions of victims.

IMG_2638

***

"Yad Vashem" is dedicated to preserving the memory of the dead; honoring Jews who fought against their Nazi oppressors and Gentiles who selflessly aided Jews in need; and researching the phenomenon of the Holocaust in particular and genocide in general, with the aim of avoiding such events in the future. The Yad Vashem archive today is the world's largest collection of documents on the Holocaust. 125 million pages of original documents, films, 420000 photos and over 100,000 certificates are irrefutable proof genocide and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis and their assistants. The Yad Vashem library is the largest in the world on the subject of the Holocaust, with more than 112,000 publications in 50 languages. It has about 4,000 Newspapers and periodicals, many of which were published during the Holocaust.

***

IMG_2659

– When I saw the name of Menachem Senderovski on the wall of the Museum, I was so excited – said Mel Silberklang. - My name is Menachem, too. Mel is an American variant. Our ancestor Menachem Senderovski founded a public library in Minsk in the early XX century. Besides, he was at the forefront of the Zionist movement in the town. My mother, like many others, was a prisoner of the Dyatlovo ghetto. She was lucky, she was able to escape to the forest and was in the partisan group. A family from Poland helped her to escape and then it moved to France. We have not found the family yet. I would like to meet this family and thank them. The only thing we know is the name – Boliek Zhukel.

IMG_2688 IMG_2608

Unfortunately, the tragic events of history forced many people, not only Jews, to leave their homeland and emigrate to other countries. Today it is time to restore lost ties.

By Helen Gantsevich

Translated by Helen Chal