Yom HaShoah And My Own Family

Photo by D A V I D S O N L U N A on Unsplash

By Erin Deborah Waks

Last night marked the beginning of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Its purpose is to commemorate the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, as well as shine a light on those who saved lives, and survivors of the atrocities.

I’ve written before about the living legacy the Holocaust has in my life, even in something as small as my dining room and its furniture. But it felt fitting that, this week precisely, I learned something of the impact the events of the early 20th century had on my own family.

My great-great grandparents, I already knew, left their various home towns in eastern Europe at the turn of the century. The living relatives we have been most able to trace, on my maternal grandmother’s side, came from Poland. The members of my family who left their small Polish town did so at some point between 1894 and 1897, and found refuge in bustling Johannesburg, South Africa. 

My family, very fortunately as a result, largely escaped the horrors of the Holocaust. As such, some one hundred years and five generations, I was born in the city’s pretty Killarney district in August 2000 to two very happy, very safe Jewish parents.

I have spent the last two weeks back in South Africa, and during this trip, my grandmother handed me a booklet of paper with our family’s ancestry on it, intent on her grandchildren learning more of her own roots. I flipped through many of the names and surnames familiar to me. I stopped when I saw a whole section I did not recognise, far off in a distant, tenuous and yet inextricably linked branch of my family tree:

Child 1: b. approx 1931, d. Holocaust

Child 2: b. approx 1933, d. Holocaust

Child 3: b. approx 1935, d. Holocaust

Child 4: b. approx 1937, d. Holocaust

Child 5: b. approx  1941, d. Holocaust

I paused for a moment to get to grips with what I was reading. It was not that I had family members who had perished in the Shoah so much that bothered me, but rather the complete absence of information about said humans - or, rather, children. Take, for a point of comparison, my own entry into the records - which, for the record, I did not even write myself:

Child 1: Erin Deborah Waks, b. 3 Aug 2000 in Johannesburg, SA. Occupation: Journalist. Lives London, UK. No spouse.

To know that distant cousins died in the Holocaust is tragic, but sadly not that surprising, given all four of my grandparents’ roots come from 20th-century Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. 

But to know that these five children died without so much as a record of their name, date of birth and, perhaps worst of all, date of death, is devastating. All the more so because they were just a few to face this fate among far, far too many.