(Author: Zita Nurok, Vol. 71, No. 3, Chanukah 2016)
The keys to the bottom drawer of the dressing table in my parents’ bedroom lay under the heavy green eiderdown on my mother’s bed. When we were young children my father, brother, or I never opened that drawer, and no one ever talked about it. It was just another drawer so we mostly forgot about it, but I knew in my heart that there was something there that evoked sadness in my mother.
As I grew older and became a teenager, my curiosity overcame me and I decided that someday I would look in that place to discover the secrets it held.
That day came. On many afternoons my mother walked into town to help my father with sales in the family’s bicycle shop. It was a duty to him that she didn’t enjoy. She sat in the darkness at the back of the shop patiently knitting colorful sweaters for my brother or myself while waiting for customers to come in and browse. When she grew tired of doing that she would visit the kindly Indian tailor and his wife in the shop next door to ours, or she’d walk across the road to catch up with the town’s news from the gruff butcher and his wife. They sold kosher meat on one side of the butchery and meat for the general public on the other. She kept an eye on our shop and if she saw customers arriving she returned to help with the sales of bicycles, tires, bike pumps, wheels, spokes, or bicycle bells. Records of African music blared from the gramophone into the speakers attached to the shop windows, enticing African customers to come in and make their purchases.
One such afternoon, while my brother was out playing tennis, I was alone at home, a good time to unlock the drawer I thought. The smallest key on the bunch under the eiderdown opened it. I sorted through the papers, photographs, and a photo album showing photos of family left behind in Lithuania after my parents had left to travel to South Africa. I wondered what had become of those family members. I found passports with stamped visas telling about the individual journeys to South Africa that my mother and father had taken, he in 1925, and she in 1929. There were postcards in an envelope, of Riteve, the town where my mother grew up. These showed streets, buildings, nearby towns, and more special places to her. She enjoyed telling me stories about her little town, especially about the river where she and her friends loved to splash and play, or about the forests where they would dance, skip, and run to pick berries. She told me of the way her family celebrated holidays, and how she helped her mother cook and bake the food associated with each one. There were pictures of my father when he was a yeshiva student in Kurshan, where he came from. He dreamed of becoming a teacher one day, and was proud that he was the ‘educated’ one of his brothers and sisters. We were proud of the fact that our dad could lead the services in our small shul whenever needed.
And then in this treasure trove of past lives I found it: A yellowing envelope with a cutting from a South African Jewish newspaper telling what had happened to my mother’s youngest sister Gitele and their mother, in August 1941, the year that I was born.
Many questions tumbled through my shaken mind. How did she react to the news of the manner in which her own mother and beloved sister died? Where had they spent the last days of their lives? How were they transported to that place? Were they taken from their modest small house in Riteve? How did she handle this unspeakable information?
My discovery gave us a better understanding of the impact on our family of my mother’s secrets and untold stories, and of her ways as she grew older. Like a puzzle we could fill in some of the pieces of the past, but we’d never have answers to the questions that remained to complete the puzzle.
Was the legacy of the Holocaust a dark shadow that descended over the generations that came after the war? Does that shadow, although dimmer now, continue to spread over those who are the remaining link to those years? Perhaps.
Zita Nurok is an elementary school teacher who grew up in South Africa. She is a member of the National League of American Pen Women, and has served as Vice-President and President of the Indianapolis branch.
