Shadows of a Forgotten World

I recently finished reading Daniel Mendelsohn's book  The Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million about his search for what happened to six of his relatives during the Holocaust. He searched specifically for the fates of relatives who lived in Bolekhiv, Ukraine, a place where his Jewish ancestors settled many centuries ago. His research took him all over the world, visiting places where the tragic events happened and meeting survivors who he hoped would be able to share with him specific details about these relatives and what happened to them. It was a very well written and engaging story, both his own journey and search, but also the story of his relatives. I highly recommend this memoir as a good source from which to learn what exactly happened to the Jews of one particular town in Galicia. It's these personal stories that really touch you, the people become no longer just part of a statistic of all the people who perished during the war, but people you feel you knew. Duri...

During WWII my grandmother was separated from her sister, only to be reunited with her half a century later on the other side of the world. While my grandmother and her family succeeded in escaping Ukraine before the Soviets took over their homeland in Galicia, her sister Maria had an entirely different fate, which carried her into the underground movement, a Gulag work camp, and exile in Siberia before she was able to return to Ukraine. By the time I was old enough to be curious about my grandmother's life in Ukraine and experiences during the war, it was too late to ask her. Fortunately, her sister took up the daunting and I'm sure emotionally difficult task of reliving her tumultuous life in order to document her experiences for her descendants. It was through these memoirs that was I was able to learn about my grandmother's life and her family, about the country I had heard so much about, about their struggle and sacrifices for a land they loved so dearly. Although ...

We sing certain Ukrainian songs in the diaspora that are unknown or have been forgotten in Ukraine. I think the most powerful and saddest one is "Mamo." It's about a boy who during WWII was in the Majdanek concentration camp. (The camp was named after the Majdan Tatarski district in Lublin. Majdanek means “little maidan.”) Every night he sings out to his mother, but he can't get to her because of the barbed wire…  We used to sing "Mamo" at Ukrainian summer camp. It was always one of my favorites, but at the same time the saddest one. Unfortunately, these days new war, tragedy, farewell, and death songs are again being composed and sung in Ukraine. From the singers Darka & Slavko: “We first sang this song together in April 1986 at an evening dedicated to the poetry of Ukrainian political prisoners. This is dedicated to all those who are fighting for Ukraine's freedom and who have died for it. And to borrow a phrase from our friend Peter S...