Photos from the Old and New Worlds – An Article by Peggy Walt of Halifax in the Times of Israel

For most of his life my husband could count his small post-Holocaust family on the fingers of one hand: “We were five. My brother and me, my parents and my grandmother.” That’s all he knew. Everyone else was dead, and their deaths were so awful, that no-one even spoke the names of the lost aloud. As if they had never lived. Their occupations, their hobbies, likes and dislikes, none of it was spoken about, so none of it was known. My husband’s parents rebuilt their lives after the war without the benefit of family, jobs, homes or possessions, except for a few very precious photographs from “before.”

In recent years, we’re counting on more than five fingers as we’ve joyously embraced some discovered cousins (by marriage), with whom we’ve connected in Canada, Sweden, the US and Israel. And now we have names and approximate dates for those who perished. Many were murdered by Lithuanian collaborators in the killing pits of Ponar, formerly a country place Jewish families went to for weekend picnics, about thirteen kilometres from their stylish homes in Vilna.