The year was 1941 and the world was the darkest it had ever been. In the midst of the horror, Hitler's Nazis turned on their loyal friends in the Kremlin and invaded the Soviet Empire.
My father's family was living in the city of Lughansk in Eastern Ukraine at the time. He had already been exiled to one of Stalin's colonies for "prisoners of the state." He spent over seven long, horrible years there for the "crime" of being a yeshiva bachur (student), otherwise known as a "counter-revolutionary."
Upon his release after the war, my father began a desperate search for his family. He had no idea what had happened to them, but his deep faith and relentless optimism drove him ceaselessly to try every avenue possible to find them.
He was told that there were no survivors from his town. The Nazis had surrounded and sealed off the city, rounding up all the Jews and killing them. Bereft at the news, my father found himself with no choice but to accept the tragedy and mourn for his parents. Not knowing their actual date of death, he was instructed by his rabbis to commemorate his parents' yarzeit on the same day as he said the Kaddish for my mother's parents, who both died during the war of hunger.
Shortly thereafter, my parents, together with my mother's two surviving sisters, escaped Russia by posing as Polish citizens who had been given permission by the Russian regime to return to their homeland after the war.
From Poland to France and Eventually the United States
From Poland they made their way to France where they lived for almost five years, finally immigrating to the United States with the help of HIAS in 1957. Through all the years, my father rarely spoke about his family. Any mention of them brought with it such terrible pain and nightmares about what they might have endured. He could not bear the thought that he had not been able to see them one more time or say good-bye to them.
What neither he nor anyone else in our family knew all this time was that, in fact, his parents had actually escaped Lughansk six weeks before the Nazis sealed its borders. In the chaos of the war years and their aftermath, so many people were lost that finding accurate information about what had happened to individuals was often impossible.
Now this story takes a leap forward to 1996. A granddaughter of my father's niece was working for the Jewish community in Kharkov, Ukraine under the leadership of Rabbi Moshe Moscowitz, the Rebbe's emissary to that city. She was the artist for his monthly magazine.
A Young Woman’s Question Reunites a Family
In the course of one of their many discussions, this young woman happened to mention to Rabbi Moscowitz that her grandmother had once told her that she (the grandmother) had an uncle, Meir Avtzon. She said that they had not heard anything of him since the war and she wondered whether the Rabbi might have ever heard of the Avtzon family.
Rabbi Moscowitz didn't have to look very far. He and I had been classmates and close friends and, at that time, in 1996, we were working together. The Global Jewish Association Relief Network (GJARN), which I direct, had opened an office in Kharkiv in 1992 and Rabbi Moscowitz and I were often in contact with one another. He immediately called me and I confirmed to him that my father's name is indeed Meir.
When I called my father, he couldn't comprehend what I was telling him. He had been convinced for so many years that his entire family was killed by the Nazis, that the shock of this news was more than he could accept on the spot.
Several more transatlantic phone calls were made, and after hearing all the names of his brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles, my father, with trembling hands, finally took the phone and spoke to his niece. It was the first time he had spoken to any member of his family in nearly 50 years.
Bringing Gifts to Our Newly Reunited Relatives
One-and-one-half months later, on a routine visit to the Kharkov office, I went to visit my new relatives and bring them presents from America. Before I left to go there, my father sat down with a tape recorder and told his family everything that had happened to him since they lost contact with each other. He filled a 90-minute tape and could probably have filled many more.
During that trip when I first met my family, I learned all the exact dates of death of almost everyone, except for my father's father for whom we only had the month and the year since he died running from the Nazis. My father's mother, on the other hand, lived to be well over 90 years old. She never knew that her son had survived, immigrated to America, and had a family of 15 children and dozens of grand- and great-grandchildren, keniena hora.
Recited Kaddish for His Mother in a Hospital Room
My grandmother's yarzeit is the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, the day all Jews mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple. The first time my father would have been able to commemorate her true yarzeit, he was unfortunately hospitalized for severe pneumonia, so a minyan [quorom] was brought to his hospital room, where he led the services from his bed.
Thank G-d, he recovered and is doing well, and we take this opportunity to extend him our best wishes for many more years of good health and nachas from all his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
I think this personal story illustrates that we are indeed all one Jewish family around the world - in the United States, in Ukraine, in Israel, everywhere - and that we are truly linked to each other more strongly than any of us might ever imagine.