I Want You to Know We're Still Here by Esther Safran Foer

Author:Esther Safran Foer [Foer, Esther Safran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

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The details of mass murder of the Jews in Chetvertnia has been well documented by Yahad-In Unum, an organization founded in 2004 and led by Father Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest who has devoted his life to chronicling these massacres, collecting evidence and interviewing eyewitnesses.

Yahad estimates that between 1.5 and 2.2 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust by bullets. No one knows the exact number, and we probably never will, because there were few survivors. These numbers are based on witness interviews and forensics done at each of the mass graves. Yahad-In Unum, which means “together” and “in one” in Hebrew and in Latin, is dedicated to locating and thoroughly documenting the mass graves of Jewish victims of the Nazi mobile killing units—the Einsatzgruppen—in the former Soviet republics. Father Desbois’s work has been sanctioned by the pope, recognized and encouraged by the president of France, and supported in Europe and the United States.

Witnesses told the Yahad team that there were about 120 Jews in the ghetto in Chetvertnia, including those from Chetvertnia, Lysche, and several other rural villages. The Germans had arrived in the village at the end of June or early July 1941 and forced the Jews to wear yellow badges, presumably Jewish stars. In December 1941, all of the Jews of Chetvertnia and those rounded up from the neighboring villages were confined to a ghetto that was behind barbed wire and were forced to do hard physical work.

The ghetto was liquidated on October 10, 1942, two months after the Jews were murdered in Trochenbrod and Kolki. Fanya said they knew about what had happened in Trochenbrod, but they somehow thought, or at least hoped, they would be spared because they were doing forced labor, which was mostly farm work, and were in an out-of-the-way rural ghetto.

How did my father and Fanya escape being murdered? I asked. Although I knew the answer, or at least the partial answer, I found that by asking the same question of different people, I was often able to collect new details.

Fanya said there were only three survivors from the ghetto: my father, Srulach Zilberfarb, and Fanya. I had heard bits of the story and knew my father was with someone else, but at that time I’d never heard Srulach Zilberfarb’s name. As I knew, my father and Srulach had been on a Nazi work detail when the Jews were brought to a pit and shot. Now Fanya told me that the morning of the mass murder, her mother saw soldiers stationed outside and sensed that something bad was about to happen. She convinced Fanya to hide inside the sofa, by which she presumably meant that she buried herself under the cushions. She survived; the rest of her family, her parents and siblings, were murdered, as were my father’s wife and child and Srulach Zilberfarb’s family.

A witness to the murders told the Yahad team that he had been nearby, with his grazing cows, when the Jews appeared in a line, their hands tied with rope.

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