A survivor herself, Yaffa Eliach has accomplished a staggering amount in commemorating the Holocaust. Throughout, she has focused not only on the deaths of the residents of the vanished shtetlach, but also on their lives.
Rabbi Eliach nods. “I think you had to already be something special just to survive the war,” he says. “You had to manage your life every second, to make sure you had that extra sip of water, that extra scrap of blanket to lie on. The people who came through were fighters from the beginning. Yaffa always had that drive.”
“But how does she find so many people who help fund her work and make it happen?” I persist, still amazed that this diminutive lady with the gentle voice has managed to coordinate gargantuan, wildly expensive projects like building Holocaust museums.
Rabbi Eliach smiles. “Yaffa has a way of making friends and getting to know people,” he says. “She can sit on a train and strike up a lifelong friendship.”
I see what he means; before I leave, Yaffa insists that her husband take a picture of us on the balcony of the apartment. We go out, and she puts an arm around me. After several hours of absorbing conversation, the Eliachs are starting to feel like family.
Yaffa gazes out at the skyscrapers. “Such beautiful buildings. I also built things,” she murmurs. “I built so many things.” After living through so much destruction, she has devoted a lifetime to heeding her father’s admonition to “make sure it never happens again; choose life and do everything for the life of Am Yisrael.” Through her books, museums, documentaries, and monuments, she has ensured that literally millions of people have gained awareness, not only of the cruelty of the Holocaust, but of the beauty of what was lost.
In 1982, the Eliachs went to Eishyshok for the first time since the war. Lithuania was still Communist, and people were not as a rule allowed to visit the shtetlach. Yaffa had already begun writing Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, and she persuaded the KGB to allow her to visit for scholarly purposes.
Once in Eishyshok, she found that the younger generation knew absolutely nothing about Jews, had no memories whatsoever. They finally found an old man who said he could help them find Yaffa’s grandmother’s house. They got into a taxi, but it soon became obvious the man was simply very drunk, and they told the driver to stop at the hospital and drop him off.
“As we stood in front of the hospital, a man happened to bicycle by,” Yaffa recounts. “Out of desperation, we asked him if he might be able to help us. He said, ‘I don’t know much, but my mother probably remembers something from those days.’ He took us to his mother’s house, where she told us, ‘Yes, all the Jews were killed during the war, they shot them into a ditch. There was one little Jewish girl I used to help watch, I was like her nanny …’ Then we realized the little Jewish girl she was talking about was me! Both of us started to cry.
“After that, this woman showed us everything — the cemetery, which by now was destroyed, and all the other old Jewish sites. But we just couldn’t get over the Hashgachah pratis — that we just happened to run into her son at precisely the right moment.”
Some years later, the Eliach family erected a monument to the Sonenson family in Eishyshok. Of the town’s 35,000 pre-war residents, only twenty-nine survived. A few of them stayed in the area, most raised as Catholics. When, through Yaffa’s research, she managed to ferret them out, she was able to reconnect some of them to long-lost family in Israel. While grateful to her for helping them meet up with lost family members, most of them were not, unfortunately, interested in reconnecting to their Jewish roots.
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 220)
