Yom HaShoah 2015

By thousands, by millions, all of them were denied their humanity, were crushed by the dreadful Nazi death machine. Each of them, however, had a name, a face, had dreams; each of them loved, laughed, cried, hoped… Golda and Jacob, my paternal grandparents, Esther, Sala, Adela, David, Lajbek and Azyk, my aunts and uncles, who lived in Poland, were massacred at the end of 1942, a few months after my birth...

In April 1946, my father, who had settled in Belgium, received news from Poland by a distant cousin: “According to word-of-mouth information, all the members of our families were massacred by the Germans. In September 1942, an epidemic of typhus occurred in Losic, and Fradla, the mother of David B., my cousin Hindla M. and many other people from Blaszki died. At the end of December, the women, the children and the old people were massacred on the spot, but the young people were transferred to heavy work or death camps. And, according to the information received to this point, no one of your family nor mine asable to escape that city or save themselves in another way. All were killed like innocent sheep”.

Our memories are their graves.

Fiodor