Maternal aphasia: Week Four

Abraham was named for a great-uncle on my father's side, who was killed in Poland during the Shoah. Another great-uncle, Yehuda, who escaped from the Nazis, eventually settled in Australia and wrote a memoir. Here is an excerpt:

My brother Abraham, with his wife Fenia and their beautiful eight-year-old daughter Shoshana, were killed in Siedlce during the “Aktion” there on 22 August 1942 (“Aktion” served as an euphemism for liquidation). All the people had to sit in the rubble and stones at the marketplace with their heads bent down for two days and nights, without a drop of water or any food in the squalor of those very hot August days.

Suddenly, Abraham got up and vehemently warned his fellow Jews of the fate that awaited them, urging them to fight and try to escape from the German assassins. Before he could finish, a salvo from a German machine gun killed him and his family, and probably others around them too. The Germans liquidated all the ghettos in that region and deported the Jews in cattle trains to nearby Treblinka, where already in 1942 the gas chambers and the crematoria worked around the clock.

This episode was described in “Yizkor Siedlce” (Memorial to Siedlce) by an eyewitness who survived the “Aktion” and the war. May their memory live for ever!