As a daughter of Holocaust survivors I am often asked how did my parents meet. My reply: they met after WWII ended in ruined Europe.
In 2014 I penned the story of my parents' rendezvous that ended in matrimony. During the last Passover, I was asked again about my parents' post-war get-together. When I referred to the 2014 story I saw a note I made to myself about a book, in Hebrew and Yiddish, titled, These We Remember: Yizkor Book of Ivenets, Kamin, and Surroundings; A Holocaust Memorial Book, about the shtetl Ivenets, where my mother – born in 1922 – lived until she was 13 years old. The note indicated that my mother's story is scripted on page 394 of the book.
When I conducted an online search I found the book's PDF version, in it a wealth of information about the shtetl where my maternal family lived.
Today's Ivenets is a small town some, two-three hours drive from Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
Growing up in a home where post-Holocaust reminiscence of despair sentiments was common it was always my plan to follow my Polish roots. I traveled to Poland in pursuit of my late father's family and their troubling Holocaust finale in Warsaw. I visited a few Nazi death camps' remnants in order to get a sense of what took place there. In 2019, I traveled to Minsk, Belarus. Destination: Ivenets. Accompanied by a knowledgeable local Jewish tour guide we drove to the shtetl Ivenets in pursuit of gathering information about the life of my mother's family and the Jewish community in that town.
At the town's entrance, there is a memorial for a mass grave. In 1942 the Nazis murdered 600 children and 200 elderly Jews from Ivenets ghetto, Kamin, and nearby towns. They shot them at the brink of the open pit, or just in it, so their bodies could fall into it and pile up. Cynically this was called the "sardines' method."
The memorial stone reads: "In this mass grave 800 Jews from the Ivenets ghetto, Kamin and the surrounding towns were murdered and or their bodies were thrown in by the German Nazis, may their name be erased. 09/06/1942. Land, do not cover their blood and let there be no place for their cry."
The town appears poor. The ghetto compound's wooden buildings – some shabby and some received a new coat of paint – remained standing only the dwellers are no longer Jews. Most of the narrow roads were muddy, the Jewish cemetery very neglected and tombstones destroyed. In the synagogue building, turned hardware store, the place of the ark is very visible.
I walked the ghetto streets with an eerie sense of the past running through my veins. I tried hard to imagine my family's life there. It was to no avail, just emptiness surrounded me. Not one Jew remained living in Ivenets. It is a small Jewless Belarussian town.
I left Ivenets cogitating and with a heavy and empty heart; deep in my soul something was amiss. It was a visit I will not easily forget.
I am a post-Holocaust human product. The Holocaust is still vivid with me but already in a distance from my son and blearing away. As generations come and go, the memory of the horrors that European Jews lived through in the 1930s through the 1940s, move farther into the past.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" – Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with this aphorism.
And so the slogan "Never Again" must reverberate louder, to stop those who prefer not to remember the past from being destined to relive it.
Experts from Rachel-Katz-Gringer Z"L story in the book Ivenets, Kamin, and Surroundings:
"We were left remnants …
"My parents left Ivenets and moved to Vilna in 1935. Our contact with Ivenets continued strong. After all, my father's sister and family moved into our house and remained living there. We traveled to Ivenets very often."
"Soon political darkness spread all over the world. The Nazis conquered country after country; the newspapers were filled with horror reports no one inclined to believe because they were so incomprehensible.
"In 1939 the war broke out, Vilnius was bombed and the Russians occupied the city but not for long. The Russians handed it over to the Lithuanian government and the city was filled with refugees fleeing western Poland.
"In 1941, the Germans invaded Russia, leaving behind destruction and devastation. We were imprisoned in the ghetto and the extermination began. Before we were ghettoized, an owner of a large estate near our Ivenets, was willing to take all the risks to help us. He offered my father to come with his family and find refuge at his place. Dad hesitated and we stayed on in Vilnius.
"Two years of ghetto life was full of fear, despair and hunger. When the ghetto liquidation began, some Jews were sent to Nazi forced labor camps and some were deported to the Death Camps.
"My sister Chaya and I were separated from our parents to never see them again. We spent the rest of the war time in concentration and forced labor camps where hunger and torture were our lot."
"My sister and I survived the war. We returned to Poland – orphans, homeless, physically and mentally injured - hoping to find someone from our family alive. These were hopeless hopes. We now had to start building an independent life knowing that everything has been ruined. No parents, no family, and no friends. It was difficult to get used to the idea that from our large and extensive family no one survived.
"The earth was burning beneath our feet. Poland was no longer our home. Every stone yelled, run away, run away. We left Poland, our destination, the Land of Israel, the only place where we could rebuild our lives and be safe."
