Once there were 26,000 Jews in Brest Litovsk, among them the wife of Helen Motro's father and her half-sisters. Only he survived the Holocaust. On the 60th anniversary of their murders, she recalls her father's life after the war
When the Nazis stormed into Brest Litovsk in 1941, 26,000 Jews resided in the Polish/Russian border town, over a third of the total population.
On liberation three years later fewer than 30 were known to have survived. My father's three young daughters were not among them. Today marks the 60th anniversary of their murders.
In the summer of 1939 my father came to visit his brother and the World's Fair in New York City. When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1st he was stranded in the United States.
During his lifetime my father knew only that by coming to the US his own life had been saved, but that Nazi Europe had swallowed his wife and children, his mother, all his brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, his entire world. He was spared the details of their bestial deaths; these facts have only come to light since he passed away.
Yet my father was a man obsessed long before the word "Holocaust" was part of the world's lexicon. He devoured every movie and television documentary on the subject, sitting rigidly before the television or beside me in the cinema, hands clenched, staring intently at the screen. Throughout my childhood my father was not a man to whom smiles came easily.
The eradication of the Jews of Brest is just a drop in the sea of six million. But Brest may stand unique in the annals of Holocaust history because of the registration programme the Nazis instituted.
For one year before its entire Jewish population was shot into mass graves, an identity card was issued to each Jewish resident. In the autumn of 1941 every adult was required to register in the town hall, where Polish clerks noted their names, addresses, parents' names, birth dates, professions and dependents. Each was fingerprinted and a photograph attached to the registration.
None of the 12,260 registrants survived, but the 560-page ledger containing their registrations did.
For 50 years after the end of the war it mouldered away in the archives of the town hall, unpublished by the Soviet authorities. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union was it discovered. Copies are now on file at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Most significantly, through a project of the University of Arizona, the entire ledger of names is posted on a searchable database on the Internet.
Not long ago I typed the website for the Brest Ghetto Passport Archive into my computer. Within minutes I was staring at Registration 9262 and beside it the name of my father's wife.
Two weeks later a brown envelope from Yad Vashem arrived. Pursuant to my request, it said, enclosed was a photocopy of Registration 9262 issued in Brest on November 26th, 1941.
From pictures my father had brought with him to the United States, I recognised the photograph of his wife. The registration clerk had verified her identity via a passport issued in the spring of 1941 immediately before the Nazis attacked the Eastern Front, belying my father's vain efforts to obtain visas for his family.
Listed in neat order are the names and birth dates of her dependents: Pesla age 11, Rachela age nine and five-year-old Ruta, my half sisters. Their mother's signature is the last proof of their life on Earth.
My father did not know the date of his family's deaths on October 15th, 1942, not the location of the pit into which they were herded, nor about the hot lime poured on their bodies after they were shot.
But I am sure that he recalled his little girls who in 1940 and 1941 wrote to him in New York: "Dear Papa, Don't worry, we are all together", decorating the pages with crayoned pictures.
In the first years he sent them warm sweaters, hats and gloves. His four-year-old asked for a doll in a doll carriage, with a blanket and a pillow. Could they, or he, have dreamed what awaited them? Their last letter is dated April 1941. After that there was only silence.
After the war my father remarried, and I was born. He ostensibly built a second life, yet who knows with what pain he looked back on his first, which had been wiped off the face of the Earth. My father did not perish in the war, but he, too, was its casualty.
Helen Motro is a Jerusalem- based commentator and a columnist with the Jerusalem Post