אילנה שודרון-מינקוב

I have lived most of my life ignorant of the fact that some of my relatives died in the Holocaust.

Approximately ten years ago we asked my uncle (my father's brother) to tell us about the family. He told us descriptively about the life they led as children of immigrants growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, New York.

He told us in a very vivid manner about their childhood, playing games in the street with children of Jewish and Italian immigrants; about their home full of children; their grandfather who lived with them and taught them Torah, and an uncle, who only recently had arrived from Europe; the Jewish holidays in a religious environment; attending synagogue on festivals etcetera. In short the life of a large, warm and united Jewish family.

Afterwards he began telling us about his father's (my grandfather) family, whose mother, sister and brothers, with their families, all of whom had remained in Galicia, had perished in the Holocaust. It was the first time I had ever heard about my family who perished in the Holocaust.

Both my parents were born and raised in the US and were always so "American" that it never ever crossed my mind that there was such a direct link between the Holocaust and our family.

From that very moment I was captured by a fierce passion to discover as much as I could about our relatives who had perished in the Holocaust. Since then I have conducted a passionate search trying to know and comprehend who these people, whom I never ever knew, were. Many avenues along which I searched proved to be barren. Although information was not easy to find and only trickled in from time to time, the more I searched the greater was my desire to know more about them.

When I called my Aunt in the USA, she told me that she had a letter that my grandfather had kept and cherished all his life. It was written in Yiddish and she did not know what was written in it. She sent me the letter with a photograph of the author. I gave the letter for translation into Hebrew and was most distressed on reading its sad content.

The letter was written by one of my grandfather's cousins, who related to him how "our family was annihilated " My Aunt also sent me a picture of my grandfather's mother with his sister and a child.

During my search, I finally came into contact with people from the town of Mikulince, where my grandfather was born, who knew my family. Meeting them was an extremely exciting experience for me. I felt that I was now so very close to my family that I could almost reach out my hand and touch them...

In the meantime, we began wondering who were my husband's relatives who perished in the Holocaust. We knew very little about them as well. We found pictures of them and more sad and formidable information on the fate of the family in Latvia and Belarus. Here too, we found sad letters written by a (non-Jewish) Latvian relative to my mother-in-laws family.

Today it is clear to me that there are many things about our family that we will never ever know.

A few years ago I began painting portraits of my husband and my family members, who were murdered during the Holocaust. Through painting, I felt that I am getting closer to them and getting to know them. I also felt that I wanted to perpetuate them, to extract them from the dark abyss into which they had been forced. I wanted to give them an identity, a shape and a face and revive the memory of people forgotten, people who even their family did not know of their existence and tragic end. I wanted to make known that these people once lived on the face of this earth; beautiful and good, intelligent and talented people, who lived and loved and raised families, until the Germans arrived.

The paintings are with charcoal on paper
Size 100 x 70 cm

Special thanks to Niusia Schweizer-Horowitz and Zelig Spierer
from Mikulince, Galicia;
And to Yozefa Herzberg-Golanzer and Abraham Herzberg
from Talsi, Latvia.