We are the stories we tell ourselves. And the stories we tell our children. This living, collective narrative provides meaning and hope to a people. When those stories perish, so too does a culture.

This week we mark the liberation of Auschwitz, 60 years ago. And despite the passing of time, Auschwitz remains a powerful black hole in human history – a dark, gravitational force so great that no complete individual or cultural memory from a time before its creation can escape its pull. All that survives are fragmented stories.

These stories were passed piecemeal, from grandfather to grandson, sitting at a kitchen table over plates of eggs and toast, walking through a farmer’s field to the fishing hole, and riding in the torn passenger seat of an old Ford van. And though the stories reach back a thousand years, they are, in the end, just ash and smoke traveling on the winds without context or coherent meaning.

Feigel Washinsky was born in 1891, in Grodno, Lithuania. Grodno was one of the oldest and largest of the Lithuanian Jewish communities, a thriving center of learning, with a number of Yeshivas – schools for study of the Talmud.

Grodno was also a rich town with large markets, thick with the smell of smoked meats and braided breads. Was there the kinetic energy of Klesma music? The chattering rhythm of Yiddish words? Or are these memories just reflections of painted, sky-blue Chagall figures, floating, hand in hand, high above idealized shtetls? Or does it really matter? They are mystical, Kabalistic truth, not real to the touch perhaps, but truth nonetheless.

Then there are other truths: In 1939, the Jewish population of Grodno was 25,000. Upon its liberation in July of 1944, the living Jews in Grodno numbered 200.

There are no surviving stories of Feigel in Lithuania, and so we might imagine her in a peasant’s dress and with a kerchief on her head attending to the matters of keeping a household.

Akiba Kriegman was born in 1889 in a small Ukrainian village called Novgorod-Volinskii. It too had a rich Jewish culture, a farming community with a small wooden synagogue and modest clapboard houses. Akiba was a young man with a passion for politics and the promise of a new century. His search for meaning took him down a different path than his ancestors. He turned his back on the orthodox religious beliefs of his father, became radicalized by the politics of the day, and mixed with the Russian revolutionaries of 1905.

Of Novgorod-Volinskii and its people after 1939, little is known – because nothing is left.

For Feigel and Akiba, fate had its ironies. They escaped the later destruction of their villages and families. In late 1905, Feigel left Grodno, and Akiba fled Novgorod-Volinskii. They traveled separately to America, to the port of Boston. And there, the old-country names and old-country customs were exchanged for new-world names and new-world customs. Feigel became Fanny. Akiba became Edwin.

Edwin made shoes in a Brockton, Massachusetts factory. He remained a radical – an active unionist and communist. He knew and worked with Sacco of Sacco and Vanzetti, the two turn-of-the-century anarchists coldly executed by an America lost in one of its periodic convulsions of fear.

And at some moment, lost to memory, Edwin met Fanny. They married. They had five children. Their first born, David, was a free spirit and unconventional humanist. Like his father, he was not religious, nor was he much interested in the old ways or the old country. And yet, he taught his grandson something of the ethical spirit of eastern European Judaism – the faint ghosts of the Yeshiva perhaps, or the residual shadows of the shtetl: read many books, question everything, seek truth, have compassion for all people.

Edwin’s first grandchild – David’s first-born – was a girl and Edwin’s great joy. Later that girl had a son. And to this first-born son – in the old Jewish tradition – she gave Edwin’s name. And to that son were given the fragmented stories to hold.

But Grodno and Novgorod-Volinskii, and their thousand year histories and thriving Jewish cultures, are all gone, and so too are Edwin and Fanny and David – all reduced to smoke and ash and fragmented memory.

Certainly, we should never forget Auschwitz. But let us hope, as time passes, Auschwitz will not be all we can remember.



--Steven Edwin Laffoley is a writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. You may e-mail him at