In recent years, staff at Yad Vashem’s Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project have received Pages of Testimony from all over the world, and often from volunteers from the "Memory, Assistance, Generations" Project—part of Ma'agal, a joint JDC and Hillel initiative for young Russian Jewish leaders. In recent years, these volunteers have managed to expand the geographic scope of their activity, making contact with Jews all over Russia, including those living in different republics that were once part of the former USSR.
In July 2019, Moscow Volunteer Coordinator Natalia Chertok sent the Names Recovery Project several of Pages of Testimony, as well as a hand-drawn map with heartrending inscriptions. “Sketch of execution site where the German barbarians shot our parents in the outskirts of the city of Novogeorgievsk [Ukraine] on 9 January 1942,” it read. The sketch itself features simple and everyday features such as “river,” “path to harbor” and “fairground.” Text next to a sign shaped like a rectangle reads, “Here is the narrow valley where our mother and father were executed by gunfire along with another 300 Jewish families.” In the bottom left corner: “This sketch was drawn by the young son of innocent murdered parents—Y. A. Branopolsky, 24 March 1944”; and in the lower right corner: “Sent to you, dear little sister. Look and remember where they cruelly cut short our dear parents’ lives.”
The map and letters were sent by Yaakov Branopolsky, a Red Army soldier who reached his hometown of Novogeorgievsk in March 1944, where from the local inhabitants he discovered the fate of his parents and other Jews. Yaakov was one of Golda and Avraham Branopolsky’s four children, and he sent the information to his sister Katya, who had been evacuated to Zholtoye in the Ural region.
The Pages of Testimony for Avraham and Golda, who were murdered, and their son Piotr, who was killed at the front, were completed by Sergei Prokopov, a great-grandson of Avraham and Golda Branovsky and a grandson of Golda and Avraham’s third son, Michael. Besides the sketch, he also sent a map of the area and a photograph of the letter that Yaakov had written to his family, which begins with heartbreaking words: “Greetings to my loved ones. Today I must write the saddest letter of my life.” In the letter, Yaakov also recounted the horrifying fate of two other Jewish women from the same city, as the inhabitants had related to him.
A power station was built in Novogeorgievsk in the 1960s, and the city was later flooded and no longer exists. However, the murder site was on a higher elevation and could have remained above the water, and Sergei plans to travel there in the coming months. "After my mother's passing, I began to organize her papers, and there I found the letter and the sketch," explains Sergei. "I hope to find the place where her grandparents were murdered and buried. But even if I am not successful, it is important that their memories be preserved at Yad Vashem."
“Unfortunately, Yad Vashem knows the names of only about 50 people who were killed in Novogeorgievsk, out of 300 families that were wiped out there. We have undertaken the enormous task to recover the names and unique identities of each and every one of the victims of the Holocaust, including those from Eastern Europe. This is made that much harder in countries like Poland, Romania and the former USSR, as well as in Greece and Yugoslavia, where there were no lists of deportations, no files of camp or ghetto prisoners, and the names of the victims are likely to live only in the memory of their families and friends. Now, as time goes by, this mission is more urgent than ever.”
Director of Yad Vashem's Hall of Names Dr. Alexander Avram
The Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project is generously supported by Dana and Yossie Hollander. Yad Vashem’s names collection efforts are also supported by: Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, France; the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany; Swiss Banks Settlement; Genesis Philanthropy Group; the Noaber Foundation; the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism; the Nadav Foundation; Swiss Friends of Yad Vashem; the Zanker Foundation; the Maror Foundation; Friends of Yad Vashem in the Netherlands; Friends of Yad Vashem in Austria; and Anonymous, Switzerland.
For more information on filling out Pages of Testimony or donating other sources containing names of Holocaust victims, please contact: names.proj@yadvashem.org.il
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 90.
