(Dotnuva, Lithuania)
55°21' / 23°54'
Project Coordinator
for online presentation on the JewishGen web site.
JewishGen, Inc. makes no representations regarding the accuracy of
the translation. The reader may wish to refer to the original material
for verification.
JewishGen is not responsible for inaccuracies or omissions in the original work and cannot rewrite or edit the text to correct inaccuracies and/or omissions.
Our mission is to produce a translation of the original work and we cannot verify the accuracy of statements or alter facts cited.
Translated by Sara Mages
|
My name is Danny Tal; I'm the son of Leah (Shapira) Tal and Meir (Meirko) Tal from Kibbutz Ramat HaShofet, Israel. Before World War II my mother Leah Shapira lived with her family in Dotnuva, Lithuania. Her family included her parents Shlomo and Nechama (Lebenberg) Shapira, and their children according to their birth order: Miriam, Moshe, Freida, Shoshanna, Leah and Pesia. The father was a religious Zionist, as was the whole family. They spoke Hebrew and Yiddish at home.
Shoshanna was the first to leave home, immigrating to Israel in 1933. The second to leave home was Freida (Shulamit), who was sent in 1935 to New-York to live with her aunt Mary, her mother's sister. The last to leave was my mother Leah, who immigrated to Israel in March 1937 after receiving her pioneer training from “Hashomer Hatzir”. She was among the founders of Kibbutz Ramat HaShofet. Her parents, brother, and the rest of her sisters were murdered by the Nazis and their helpers. In 1998, after Freida's death in New-York, her son Norman Danzig found a collection of letters that had been sent to her; more than half were written in Yiddish and the rest in Hebrew. In memory of the family we are publishing here the collection of letters that were sent to Freida from her family in the years 1935-1941. The last letter was sent on 30 May, 1941. The collection includes around 90 letters in Hebrew and in Yiddish. Note that the original letters in Hebrew can be seen at here |
|
| Danny Tal
Israel |
|
My mother came to America in the fall of 1935 after a visit from her Aunt Mary (Mary was the sister of her mother Nechama) and Uncle Morris. They invited my mother to come to America and live with them in Forest Hills Queens, New York. Two sisters, Shoshanna, and Leah (Danny's mother) were sent to Palestine – Shoshanna in 1933, and Leah in 1937. My mother and her sisters in Israel regularly wrote letters, but did not see each other again until the summer of 1961 when my mother went to Israel for a visit. It is hard to imagine my mother leaving Dotnuva, her small town in Lithuania, and making her way to New York, never to see her family again. I've wondered about my mother's trip to America and, after some research, I think she must have taken the train from Dotnuva, to Kovno to Vilna and then down to Warsaw. There, she would have taken the express train, through Berlin and on to Paris; then the train up to Cherbourg where she took the S. S. Berengaria to New York. My mother left in October, 1935. The Nuremburg laws, limiting the rights and movements of Jews, were passed on September 15, 1935. My mother and my father, Abraham M. Danzig, were married in August, 1937, and lived in the Bronx. In 1942, my brother Myron was born. I was born in 1947 and was named after my grandparents. My full name is Norman Shlomo Danzig. The Norman is after my mother's mother, Nachama, and Shlomo after her father. In 1986, my brother and I cleaned out my parent's apartment. I had known for years that these letters existed, and hoped that they had not been destroyed. Luckily, they were in a bag in the bottom of my mother's closet. The letters corresponded to the time my mother came here until a few months before the murder of my grandparents, uncle, and aunts. The last letter was in May 1941. I can only imagine how desperate my mother and her sisters were, during those months when the letters stopped until they received the news that their family had been murdered. My father once told me that in the fall of 1941 my mother received a letter from a cousin who had climbed out of the killing pit and escaped into the forest. He wrote in graphic detail what had happened; the family had been rounded up, led to a pit in the forest, stood on the edge, were shot and killed, and their bodies dumped in the pit. (In the summer of 1941 the Einzatsgruppen moved into the Baltics and the systematic killing of the Jews in Lithuania began. While the SS was in charge of directing the killings, it is clear, that it was the townspeople, the very people whom my grandparents knew in town, and who went to their store, to buy vegetables, and beer, did the actual killing. My mother, like her two sister and so many others, who either escaped or survived would not talk about her life and family in Lithuania. There was an unspoken rule in our house,“Meh ret nisht fun dem, we don't speak of these things.” It was a lesson I learned well and only rarely broke. Twice, when I was in college, during the Seder, I was able to get my mother to talk a bit about back home. The door would open, as if in anticipation of Elijah, and then slam shut. I think that all the Shapiro grandchildren grew up trying to find some way to pull back the gates that were shut around our family, to uncover who our grandparents, uncles and aunts and their children were. And my daughters, Sarah and Esther, as I know is true of all the next generation, have absorbed and understood that history is not simply chapters in a book, but it is real and has profound consequences for all. In October 2009, my cousin Danny and his wife Maya, stayed with me and my wife Gail in New York. We spent hours going through the letters and photos identifying everyone we could. Danny was determined to continue the project and thanks to him the letters now have a home and are being translated. Thanks to Jewish Gen for doing this work; it is part of what I and my brother have struggled with for a very long time. While these letters don't, and can't explain anything--how could they--they open the gates a crack to show us what my grandparents, uncle, and aunts were like and the world they lived in before it was destroyed. |
|
| Note: Reizale and Shoshana are the same person [the daughter who went to Eretz Israel]. Shulamit and Freida [the daughter in America] is also one person and Pessie, who writes Hebrew and is apparently proud of it, hebraized the name. |
Yizkor Book Project
JewishGen Home Page
Copyright © 1999-2024 by JewishGen, Inc.
Updated 4 Feb 2019 by LA