Thread by @hugorifkind

It’s Holocaust Memorial Day. This year, I’m thinking of a woman called Sulamita Szapiro. Here she is as a student. We weren’t related and I don’t even know much about her, but I’m pretty sure that remembering her still falls to me. This is a thread about why.

Sulamita was born in Warsaw. Her father was a teacher, and she went on to be one, too. I think she was also a writer, maybe a journalist or a poet. I think this because somebody with her name wrote for Nasz Przegląd, aPolish-Jewish newspaper. I think it was her, but who knows?

I do know, though, that when war broke out she had only one living relative. That was her brother Nuiniek, a lawyer, married to Andzia. Here they are:

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust database, tells us that he’d go on to die in the Otwock ghetto. She’d be gassed in Treblinka. So I guess, for the reasons this thread explains, it’s my job to remember them, too.

I also know that Sulamita had a boyfriend, an engineer. When the Nazis invaded in 1939 she was seven months pregnant, although they were unmarried. Perhaps it’s wrong for me to feel that suggests a bohemian outlook, but that’s what I imagine, because you latch on to what you can.

They married the next day, and fled to Lviv, in the half of Poland now occupied by Russia. Here they sheltered in what would become the ghetto, along with tens of thousands of Jewish refugees. Their baby - a daughter - was born here.

Eventually, of course, the Nazis would take Lviv, too, and the liquidation of the ghetto would be horrific. In my understanding, almost nobody from it would survive. Sulamita and her little family were already gone by then, though, deported by the Russians to a gulag in Siberia.

I don't know much about this period. Sulamita's boyfriend - now her husband - was put to work as a woodcutter, and was hurt by a log. I don’t know what Sulamita did. I doubt it was pleasant. Maybe she was lucky, and a teacher there, too?

In 1941 Russia changed sides, the gulag was opened. Like many other stranded Jews, Sulamita and her little family went South West, to escape via the Middle East. A horrible journey, thousands of miles. Contemporary accounts talk of bodies falling from cargo trains, “like sticks”.

This story doesn’t end well. Sulamita only made it as far as Karmine, in what is now Uzbekistan. Here, I believe, she died of typhus. So did her child, at the age of two. I do not know, and will probably never know, where they were buried, or even if they were.

I don’t even know for sure that this is really what happened. Perhaps the child was thrown from a train, or given to a villager, or lost in a crush, and death was easier to explain. We know these things happened, more often than anybody will say. You have to consider it.

I do know, though, what happened to the now widowed, now childless engineer who had started the war as her boyfriend. He kept going. He crossed the Caspian Sea to Tehran, travelled through Iraq and collapsed in hospital in Palestine. Then he joined the RAF, and came to the UK.

He was my grandfather. Jozef. Here he is after the war in Rio, with the only survivor from his own family, his brother Leon. He’d go on to meet my lovely grandmother, a Polish exile pianist, and they’d have my mum. He died when I was three. I am now one of six living descendants.

Sulamita, though, has no living descendents. No family survived. Until I learned of her existence a couple of years ago, there was not one person in the world left to remember her name. Nor to know the name to that child, who my grandfather wouldn’t speak of at all.

To repeat, nobody alive knows more about these people than I do. And I know almost nothing. It's in living memory, but there is nobody to remember. This is what genocide means. This is what the Holocaust means. It’s a story of eradication. It wasn’t thwarted. It worked very well.

So, that’s why today I’m thinking of Sulamita, because otherwise nobody will. Here she is again. Maybe you’ll think of her, too. Thanks for reading.

Wow. I can't even begin to reply to all the responses to this thread. But I have read them all and truly appreciated them all, too. Thank you. I'm so glad I posted all that.