Читать книгу LOST AND FOUND, A Family Memoir - SARA APPLEBAUM - Страница 2

I’ve heard that, according to Jewish tradition, a person dies two deaths.The first is the death of the physical body, the second is when he is no longer remembered. Who will keep the memories of my ancestors when I am gone?

The first time I remember seeing a number tattooed on a person’s arm and thinking of what it meant, I was thirteen years old. Mr. Zilber and his wife were dear and loving family friends. It was sad that they never had children, I thought. They would have been wonderful parents.

I remember the shock I felt when the reason for their childlessness and the tattooed number were explained to me; a Nazi concentration camp and medical experiments there.

I was too young to remember the horror of World War II. Lucky for me! My brother was much older…not so lucky for him.

My parents are long gone now. They can’t answer the questions nagging at me. What was it like? What happened to my family? What about the grandparents I never knew, the cousins and uncles and aunts I should have had as part of my life? Who could tell me my own early history?

I was watching the television series, “The Holocaust” and was frozen by images of the horrors as they flashed before me. Memories emerged which I had been too young to understand, or make sense of before. The Second World War was spoken of only rarely, never purposely, in our home. Like so many survivors, my parents “protected” me from the painful memories.

As I watched the episodes, it evoked some of those rare conversations. I started with my brother, Mark, who is nine years older than I am. I asked if he had any recollections of the beginning of the war.

He was almost seven on that September day in 1939. I was amazed at the vividness of his description and the power of his account. I started to campaign in earnest for him to share his memories but he found it painful and didn’t want to remember, much less talk about it.

With encouragement from my water aerobics buddies, who are heavily into genealogy, and other “mavens”, I took my first steps in the search for answers. There were moments of wonder and moments of complete frustration, when I hit brick walls.

There were funny moments too. I contacted a distant cousin at his medical office in Orange County and left a message with his receptionist explaining the reason for my call. I briefly explained our relationship and said that, as the family genealogist, I was inviting him to sign on to Geni.com, which is a web based genealogy database. I asked him to call me back if he was interested.

I eventually got his call. After chatting a while, he asked me what a family gynecologist was exactly? I guess the receptionist was used to medical terms more than genealogy and took the message down as she understood it.

There were days and weeks when I worked as one obsessed. At other times, frustration made me shut down. Other moments were sublime. At our last Passover Seder we recited the names of 27 family members whose fate I found described in Yad Vashem’s “Pages of Testimony”, the database of the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. At the Seder, as our family called out their names, they were remembered once again!