Family Tree
This family tree project is an attempt to organize all the information I have regarding my parents and grandparents - it is not an attempt to create an exhaustive family tree. It is primarily intended as a knowledge repository for my children.
Like most people who went through the war period, my parents never spoke about the past, and my sister and I instinctively knew not to ask.
My father was generally a quiet and secret man who didn't like to talk about himself. When I asked my father to tell me about the family history and his past, he invariably replied "Ah, now you're interested? Someday I will tell you everything. But not today." No matter how much I insisted, he was inflexible and only offered the promise that he would finally tell me "someday," a day I knew would likely never come.
However my father did keep photos and papers, and in the last year of his life devoted considerable time organizing them, adding dates, captions and brief explanations to the family albums, clearly wanting to pass on the stories he hadn't had the will to share directly with us.
As for my mother who had lost her family somewhere in the camps of the East, we knew that behind her famous smile there were memories we should never dare awaken. She sometimes commented on others who shared their past with their children and said "why subject your children to this, it's really not necessary."
Yet, after my father died, in the last year of her life, I finally asked her formally to talk, in the context of this project, and she surprisingly became cooperative and started to share what she knew and remembered.
This project is then essentially based on the photo albums my father had put together, some interviews with my mother, augmented by conversations with relatives and friends of my parents.
This project was started in September 2009, and is always in progress with content being added/written/edited on a regular basis.
Please contact me if you have any additional information regarding people or events described in these pages, or if you would like to use any content from this site.