Here, we are well, and it will be even better, so we hope," wrote Jacob Bernstein on 9 May 1941 on a postcard sent from the town of Ylakiai in northwest Lithuania to his daughter Ida in the Land of Israel. "Dear Ida, we are very worried about you. For God's sake, write often, we are waiting for good news from you. Mother doesn't sleep, and mentions you all the time." Less than two months later, in July 1941, the Bernstein family was murdered at the killing pits on the outskirts of Ylakiai.
The story of the Bernstein family is one of 12 stories that appear in a new online exhibition that was uploaded to Yad Vashem's website in advance of Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2021: "The Onset of Mass Murder – the Fate of Jewish Families in 1941."
With the aid of items from the Yad Vashem Archives and Collections – personal letters, artworks, photographs, documents, testimonies, Pages of Testimony and more – the names and faces of a few of the men, women and children behind the enormous numbers of victims are revealed. A few survived the waves of mass murder, and some of them gave Yad Vashem personal items belonging to their loved ones for eternal remembrance.
Exposure to the details of indiscriminate and brutal murder, the murder of newborn babies and young children, is hard to comprehend. Some consolation may be found in the stories of the survivors: those who left before the Germans arrived, many of them in an operation in which the Soviets evacuated masses of civilians from the advancing German army; those who joined the partisans; and those who were saved by selfless persons who were later recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. Whoever was left behind, was lost.
In July 1941, the Germans arrived in the Estonian city of Tartu. Shortly before the withdrawal of the Red Army from the town, the Soviets conducted an operation to evacuate the civilians. Several dozen Jews remained in Tartu: mostly the elderly, the disabled, the sick, and those who couldn't bring themselves to wander to an unknown destination. Among those left were Prof. Leopold Silberstein, an expert in Slavic languages and culture, and his wife Malka, a lawyer who studied law at the University of Tartu – one of the first women to practice law in Estonia – who was pregnant. The exhibition features their tragic story: In early July 1941, Malka gave birth to a son whose name is unknown. Leopold was shot in August 1941 on the main road between Tartu and Riga. Malka and their baby were also murdered.
Also featured in the exhibition is the story of the Scharf family from Romania. In 1941, Chaya Scharf, a widow, and seven of her children were scattered in various places across Romania. Her son Shaya and her daughter Etta had immigrated to the Land of Israel in the 1930s. Four of Chaya's nine children were murdered in the Holocaust. Another son was killed with his wife and son shortly after liberation in an accident. Chaya survived.
"I only know one thing: there is something terrible, horrible going on, something inconceivable, which cannot be understood, grasped or explained," wrote Irina Khoroshunova in her diary in Kiev, between September and October 1941.
"Everybody is saying now that the Jews are being murdered… All of them, without exception – old people, women and children… There are more and more such rumors and accounts. They are too monstrous to believe. But we are forced to believe them, for the shooting of the Jews is a fact."
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 95.
