Meadmaker
Unregistered
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2004
- Messages
- 29,033
If our local holocaust deniers and historical revisionists can stand another question, I would like to ask for an explanation of the following situation.
I married a Jewish woman. Her grandmother had immigrated from Poland to America as a little girl shortly after World War I. Her home town was Lesko, in Galicia, which had been the Austrian part of Poland. We didn't know much about her family history. She didn't talk about it much. She did tell a little bit about her family to her daughter, my wife's mother. In particular, she had a photograph. It was taken at her wedding. In America, she had met another Polish immigrant Jew, fell in love, and got married. He was fairly wealthy, and decided they could afford to travel to their homeland for the wedding. So, in 1937, they travelled to Poland, and took the photo.
Late in her life, she was asked who those people were in the photo, and she identified them. She said that it was her Uncle Chaim and his wife Tzipura. There was her Uncle Noosin, and his wife, whose name she couldn't remember. They didn't live in Lesko, but had moved to a nearby town. There were Chaim's sons. There was her aunt Rivka. And there was the happy couple themselves. Her mother, who lived in America, did not go to the wedding. (The father was dead.) Her grandparents, Mordecai and Esther, were not in the photo. They were at the wedding, but were very old fashioned and some Orthodox Jews would not pose for photographs. The family name was Mandel.
My wife's grandmother died, and at some point my mother in law wanted to know more about the family. Enlisting my help, since I was more computer savvy, I started researching. Since they were Jews living in Poland in 1937, I figured the archives of Yad Vashem would be a good place to look. There, I found some entries made by a woman named Tatianna. She had grown up in Lesko. Her parents were named Chaim and Tzipura. She had an uncle Noosin, who lived in a nearby town. She had two brothers. She had an aunt named Rivka. Her grandparents were Mordecai and Esther.
All of those people died, during the same year, during the war. According to Tatianna's testimony, all were victims of the Nazis. She survived.
So, what I want you to explain, is how those people died? How did I know to look in Yad Vashem to identify them? Did the Israeli authorities convince Tatianna to make this all up? Her son, who lives in Israel, agreed that all of that information which my wife's grandmother left in the family history agreed with what he had learned from his mother, Tatianna.
It seems to me that the best possible explanation is that the Nazis carried out a program of mass extermination, and that the survivors did everything they could to keep alive the memory of the dead. This was well known, so I knew that if we could match the memories of my wife's grandmother to a family of victims of that mass extermination, we would know, for certain, who those people were. It worked. We found a family in the archives of Yad Vashem that matched on several different points of similarity, and we used that information to locate a living person in Israel whose mother had told him a nearly identical story.
But...is there some other explanation?
I married a Jewish woman. Her grandmother had immigrated from Poland to America as a little girl shortly after World War I. Her home town was Lesko, in Galicia, which had been the Austrian part of Poland. We didn't know much about her family history. She didn't talk about it much. She did tell a little bit about her family to her daughter, my wife's mother. In particular, she had a photograph. It was taken at her wedding. In America, she had met another Polish immigrant Jew, fell in love, and got married. He was fairly wealthy, and decided they could afford to travel to their homeland for the wedding. So, in 1937, they travelled to Poland, and took the photo.
Late in her life, she was asked who those people were in the photo, and she identified them. She said that it was her Uncle Chaim and his wife Tzipura. There was her Uncle Noosin, and his wife, whose name she couldn't remember. They didn't live in Lesko, but had moved to a nearby town. There were Chaim's sons. There was her aunt Rivka. And there was the happy couple themselves. Her mother, who lived in America, did not go to the wedding. (The father was dead.) Her grandparents, Mordecai and Esther, were not in the photo. They were at the wedding, but were very old fashioned and some Orthodox Jews would not pose for photographs. The family name was Mandel.
My wife's grandmother died, and at some point my mother in law wanted to know more about the family. Enlisting my help, since I was more computer savvy, I started researching. Since they were Jews living in Poland in 1937, I figured the archives of Yad Vashem would be a good place to look. There, I found some entries made by a woman named Tatianna. She had grown up in Lesko. Her parents were named Chaim and Tzipura. She had an uncle Noosin, who lived in a nearby town. She had two brothers. She had an aunt named Rivka. Her grandparents were Mordecai and Esther.
All of those people died, during the same year, during the war. According to Tatianna's testimony, all were victims of the Nazis. She survived.
So, what I want you to explain, is how those people died? How did I know to look in Yad Vashem to identify them? Did the Israeli authorities convince Tatianna to make this all up? Her son, who lives in Israel, agreed that all of that information which my wife's grandmother left in the family history agreed with what he had learned from his mother, Tatianna.
It seems to me that the best possible explanation is that the Nazis carried out a program of mass extermination, and that the survivors did everything they could to keep alive the memory of the dead. This was well known, so I knew that if we could match the memories of my wife's grandmother to a family of victims of that mass extermination, we would know, for certain, who those people were. It worked. We found a family in the archives of Yad Vashem that matched on several different points of similarity, and we used that information to locate a living person in Israel whose mother had told him a nearly identical story.
But...is there some other explanation?
