By DAVID IZRAELEVITZ
Los Alamos

Genealogists talk about family trees. I believe a more accurate metaphor for family relations is that of a roughly crocheted blanket. Bits of lore or documents link relatives together: a birth certificate ties parents, children, and siblings; a marriage certificate ties together groom, bride and newlywed’s parents, and so on. More strands are tied together as documents are discovered or people interviewed, yielding more distant relatives and relationships, until the genealogist decides that enough is enough and returns to a more central part of the crochet. Maybe he will next attack holes in the fabric that were produced, not by moths, but by documents to be found, or maybe by the tragedy of history. My crochet has many holes of both kinds.

When I began developing an interest in genealogy, I was already in my forties, and my grandparents were all gone. My parents could produce little but the name of their own grandparents. I was frustrated by how little they had inquired about our roots in Lithuania before emigration to Uruguay. Why didn’t they ask more questions about the old country, about their families and their day-to-day lives? But the details of Nazi Europe as it involved our family was forbidden, or even uttering the word Holocaust. It was just “La Guerra.” But as I got older,I understood that each recollection about those times is also burdened by the pain of loss and the guilt of survival. Ninety percent of the Jewish population of Lithuania was annihilated in the three years Germany occupied the country. I suppose that most if not every Jew of Lithuanian descent has their genealogical crochet torn apart by those events.

I want to share one such tear in my family blanket with you. It relates to a book I received unexpectedly a few months ago in the mail. The original Yiddish version written in 1948 is called Umkum Fun Der Yidisher Kovne, or “The Destruction of Jewish Kovno.” Many such memorial books were written after WWII recalling towns and their residents annihilated during the war. It may be decades before they become available in English, and hundreds are still to be translated about large and small towns in Poland, Ukraine, and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe. I was fortunate that this project was completed in time for me to read it. Fortunate is a strange word to use since it describes the horrifying details of how two of my great-grandparents, Musha Leah and Isaac Leib Mikhles, died on the same day on 27 March 1944.

I knew their date of death quite a long time before I received the book, about 15 years ago, when I discovered by happenstance testimonials written for them by a distant cousin who, as a 12-year-old, had survived the war and emigrated to Israel. Yad VaShem, the Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, has collected  the names, documents, or other assorted details of over 4 million Jewish victims. I found out from this testimonial that my grandfather had been one of eight children. Most crucially, this testimonial gave me my great-grandparents’ middle names and year of birth, and most touching to me, it included their photographs taken in the 1920s. Musha looked like the prototypical Eastern European housewife of the time, austere and stern, but Isaac sported a well trimmed goatee, carefully combed-back hair, and the three-piece suit that befits his profession as a tailor. Middle names and  birth years were enough to uncover much, much more about their lives. I found the names of most of their children and even some grandchildren. Each time I found a new name, I felt my family grow.

I have not had the emotional stamina to read, from cover to cover, that heavy book I received in the mail. Maybe like my grandparents, I don’t want to bear the burden of knowing too much.  The Soviets occupied Lithuania at the same time the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, but the Nazi Army arrived in August 1941, and the Jews who had not already been exiled to Siberia, were moved to the Slobodka sector of Kaunas. For the next three years, the Kovno Ghetto was used as a labor camp. As the Soviets were returning to Lithuania, the German command decided to curtail operations at the labor camps, so on March 27 and 28, 1944, three months before the Ghetto was liberated, almost all children under 12 and adults over 55 were deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp. I presume Isaac and Musha were among them. The final irony of my research is that I don’t really know whether they died on March 27, or the march to Auschwitz, or in the gas chambers.

I don’t want to continue to dwell on the details of what happened to my family, but to a Jew with roots in war-torn Europe like me, the word genocide brings to mind the Nazi butchery and subsequent systematic singling out and annihilation of subpopulations, and is a special, very personally charged word. I understand and share the frustration of those who witness innocent lives sacrificed for land or ideals that seem of little value compared to the price paid in death and destruction. However, the word genocide for me, and for many others whose families where killed specifically because of their ethnic or religious status, is not the same as the death of innocent civilians in a war zone. 

Society has developed a specific vocabulary and conceptual framework for different circumstances when a person kills another, from first-degree murder to manslaughter. This is purposeful in order to highlight that different motives and actions may have the same result, and yet have different moral and ethical implications. Even though it has certainly happened many, many times before WWII, there was no word to specifically describe the massacre of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the singular aim of their decimation, and  it is because of the story of my great-grandparents and 6 million others that this word was added to the lexicon of slaughter. We should use this word in the right context or the differentiation that it evokes will disappear. It definitely applies to the story of the ancient Amalikites, or to Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, or Rwanda and Kosovo and too many other times when people were systematically singled out, killed and/or their culture destroyed, not because they were in a war zone, or wearing the wrong uniform, or from disease or malnutrition or even bombs, but just because of who they were. There have also been many instances where millions of people were killed, like 3 million Soviet prisoners-of-war worked to death by the Germans, or 30 million Chinese killed by their Japanese occupiers, which are not labeled as genocides although a horrendous loss of life.

My mother’s family saga in Europe was a mystery hidden from her by silence and sorrow. Yet, when these sad details came to light, there didn’t seem much point in sharing them with her. She was already widowed and in declining health. I wonder whether the crochet analogy came to me because, in thinking of her, I remembered that crocheting was one of the hobbies she retained as she aged and dementia set in. There was no point in adding such memories as she was losing others. She should continue to crochet her little potholders, and I would crochet my own.

Holocaust Remembrance Day begins this year on the evening of May 5th, 2024.