We're Also Holocaust Survivors...

I had never really considered my family as being connected to the Holocaust, since all of my grandparents made it from Eastern Europe to the USA a couple of decades before World War Two. 

Both of my parents were born in Brooklyn, NY, just like me. I grew up in a neighborhood built after WWII for US military veterans. Our parents spoke native New York English. We didn't hear Yiddish at home. We were American Jews. I first heard about the Holocaust when the Anna Frank Diaries was being publicized, and then there was the Eichmann Trial. None of this was connected to my family.

My father had lots of aunts, uncles and cousins on both sides in New York. My mother had siblings, no aunts, uncles or cousins. When I was older I discovered that my mother's father had been born an orphan in the Ukraine. His father had been murdered in a pogrom, before he was born, and his mother died in childbirth. He was raised by grandparents. My mother didn't know which ones, and as a young man he went to America. My mother's mother left her family in Rogotshav, Belarus for New York, when married to her first husband. They had three daughters, but he died leaving her a poor widow. A few years later, she married my grandfather, who was widowed with two sons. Together they had four more children, including my mother.

My mother was never told much about all the family left in Rogotshav. My grandmother died before my third birthday, just before my brother was born, and I already had two children by the time my mother discovered that she had had an uncle in London. By then he had passed away, but with the help of HIAS my mother and her siblings discovered cousins in London and New Zealand.

Great-Grandfather
Vishnefsky

Great-Grandmother
Vishnefsky

After World War Two, neither my grandmother nor her brother ever discovered or heard from any surviving relatives. So, I guess you can say that my cousins, our children and grandchildren are the only SURVIVORS of the Vishnefsky Family of Rogotshov*. 

It's strange to think that it has taken me so long to realize that even though neither my parents nor grandparents suffered in concentration camps, death marches etc, we are part of the story.

Holocaust Memorial Day, 5772, 2022

*Honestly, I'd love to discover more Vishnefsky relatives.

That's where my Vishnefsky Family had lived

My Family's Lack of Holocaust Story is the Biggest Story

For most of my life, ever since I first heard of the Holocaust in Hebrew School and on television, when the The Diary of Anne Frank came out my reaction has been.

It's not my family's story. My parents were born in America, and my grandparents all immigrated to there in the early twentieth century, decades before the Nazis.

And yes, I've written it here too on my blogs.

The late 1950's and early 1960's were when the general public learned about the Holocaust, because besides the Anne Frank story, which was packaged perfectly, the very young State of Israel managed to capture Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann and bring him to public trial.

Even though all of my grandparents were from European locations, Rogotshov, Nasielsk and Kiev, that had seen its Jewish population decimated by the Nazis I had never ever heard a single story that connected my family to that major and unprecedented tragedy. In addition, I grew up in Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY, which was housing for American war veterans, and none of the parents although over 90% Jewish, had European accents or were Holocaust survivors. In the local Conservative synagogue, Oakland Jewish Center, where I went to Hebrew School, I don't remember anyone coming in giving a first-person story of the Holocaust or saying that their family had escaped or experienced it.

Actually, the easy fact that my mother had neither cousins nor aunts and uncles in America wasn't attributed to the Holocaust until the poem Babi Yar was published and publicized in America. That's when my mother said that her mother's family was probably among the Jews massacred in Babi Yar.

The Vishnefskys of Rogotshov, parents of my mother's mother. And above that is a small photo of my mother's family, Passover, most probably 1948 or 1949.

This morning when I was trying to decide what to write, I first rejected Holocaust Memorial Day, because I don't have a "story." My father's father's family all left Nesielsk, Poland over a decade before it was conquered by the Nazis, so they were safely in New York long before the Nazis came to power. And we have heard nothing about what actually happened to my paternal grandmother's two sisters who remained in the USSR, except that they were loyal communists.

The truth is that we don't know if there are any heroic stories from my family, because nobody survived to tell us. And just now I've realized that I do have a story. My story is that my family members who stayed in Europe were all swallowed up in the black hole of the Nazi Holocaust not even leaving enough clues to discover a story. We can't even add their names.

No Holocaust Survivors in My Family

Since moving to Israel in 1970, I've always felt rather fish out of water during this season. It's Holocaust Memorial time, and it has always seemed that I'm the only one who doesn't have a "Holocaust Story."

Especially, since moving to Shiloh in 1981, where there are large community commemorations, and so many of my neighbors have family stories that could even be made into films, I feel left out. I wasn't raised at all with any family awareness of the Holocaust. It was something I learned about in Hebrew School and on American television. It was "newsworthy" because of the play the "Diary of Anne Frank" and the Eichmann Trial, both which happened when I was still in elementary school.

I spent my childhood in Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY, which was a garden apartment neighborhood/public housing development built for United States army/military veterans. Also the private and two-family homes in my neighborhood were built as part of the same program. None of our parents, to my memory, had foreign accents; they had all been raised in the United States. Most grew up in the tenements/slums of Brooklyn, The Bronx and the Lower East Side. Moving to the new neighborhood in northeastern Queens was their escape from poverty and a chance to give us kids a new wonderful life.

I have friends of the same age, raised in very different sorts of New York, and other North/South American and European neighborhoods in which all of the parents were Holocaust survivors. You could say that we lived in parallel universes.

My grandparents were all born in Europe, my paternal grandfather from Neshelsk, Poland, my maternal grandfather from near Kiev, Ukraine, and both my grandmothers were from Rogotshov, Belarus. All of those areas were seriously affected (meaning that the Jewish communities were decimated) by the Nazis and their enablers during the Holocaust, so how could I have been so far removed from Holocaust awareness and stories?

All of my father's grandparents, almost all aunts and uncles, too, made it to the United States well before the Holocaust. He grew up in a large extended family on both sides. Only after I was married did I hear that two of my grandmother's sisters stayed in the USSR; they were great believers in their country, and since the war there hasn't been any contact.

On the other hand, my mother was raised without any aunts, uncles or cousins. Her parents were alone in America, and she has no idea what happened to the rest of her family.

Great-Grandmother Vishnevsky

 of Rogotshov, Belarus

Great-Grandfather Vishnevsky
 of Rogotshov, Belarus

After the war, no relatives searched for my grandparents on either side, and whatever searches they did for surviving relatives were unsuccessful. There may be distant cousins alive someplace in this earth, but I don't know them, at least not as cousins. When the big Russian FSU aliyah made it to Israel over twenty years ago, I told my family story hoping for some miracle to find long lost relatives, but I failed. My father's two missing aunts were called Milka and Nechama Brynien, born in Rogotshov, Belarus, and my maternal grandmother's family was the Vishnevsky's of Rogotshov, Belarus. From some old pictures, there probably were family members in Minsk, too, and other nearby cities. My maternal grandfather was Abraham Shankman, born an orphan, raised by grandparents without any siblings.

That's why, at least to my knowledge, there were no Holocaust survivors in my family.