The Ravine by Wendy Lower

Author:Wendy Lower [Lower, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800246669
Publisher: Head of Zeus

7

THE MISSING MISSING

PHOTOGRAPHS DOCUMENT AND recall the past; they depict what is now gone, and they conjure up emotions. Survivors retelling their life stories on film hold up personal photographs at the end of an interview. They cling to the photographs because they often are all they have of loved ones who were disappeared or killed without a proper burial and without a formal death certificate documenting their existence. When I researched photographs as an element of the Shoah Foundation testimonies (searching more than fifty thousand videotaped survivors), I discovered a pattern. Survivors presented snapshots of wartime atrocities as well as family photographs, exhorting viewers to look at the atrocity shots, declaring, “This is what happened to my family, and to Jews across Europe.” Survivors, in this way, beseech us to remember. Their identification as victims starts with their family history of persecution and the experiences of loved ones who were unable to emigrate from Europe and whose exact fates remain unknown. We know what happened to the family in the Miropol photograph, yet they are among half a million unidentified Holocaust victims in Ukraine.

World War II introduced a new understanding of the depths of human cruelty in the massive crime of genocide; this era also opened up a new chapter in international humanitarian relief and rehabilitation programs, aimed mostly at assisting refugees, searching for the missing, and reuniting families. Millions of civilians and prisoners of war in Europe had been forcibly relocated and detained in tens of thousands of sites run by the Nazis and their allies: concentration camps, labor camps, ghettos, and killing centers. The uprooted in Europe included hundreds of thousands of orphaned children. At war’s end, the Allies implemented the Yalta Agreement to repatriate displaced persons (DPs) to their countries of origin. The Allies took on the enormous challenge of caring for “stateless” Jews and orphans who had no home to return to; to house them they used available sites such as the former concentration camp Ebensee, a twelfth-century monastery near Dachau, or Feldafing, a former Hitler Youth Camp in Bavaria. The Jews among the displaced persons, numbering about 250,000, called themselves by the Yiddish or Hebrew term for “remnant,” oysgevortzlte, “a person ripped from his roots,” or di nisht dershtokhene, di nisht gehargete, di nisht gekoylete: “the not killed, the not slain, the not gunned down.” The term survivor came later. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Jews said, “I am what is left,” not, triumphantly, “I am a survivor.” The novelist Meyer Levin recalled in his autobiography, In Search, that traumatized Jews who appeared in the European offices of Jewish relief agencies presented a fragmented account of what had happened, using words and locations, such as Treblinka, that he had never heard of. As Levin described it, these Jews all had their own mental snapshots, which in 1945 could not be “properly developed.”

A ragged sixteen-year-old Ludmilla Blekhman returned to liberated Miropol on June 30, 1944. She wore the shirt that she swore had saved her.

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