THE UNTOLD

Prologue

It was really bizarre waiting in front of the Prayer Hall about to bury my mother. She’d died six days short of her century, but still didn’t quite make it to 100 before she was buried.

We seemed to kick our heels for an age before a religious guy wearing a small, black top hat poked his head through the front door beckoning us inside, guiding us towards three low stools with shortened legs. Rabbi Lawrence recited a special blessing, then tore my shirt just above the heart, a religious custom signifying my torn heart, my sorrow, and my grief in the face of death. Then he repeated the custom with my two sisters.

Everyone was waved into the hall, men to the left, women to the right, and according to the old Jewish custom, they stood both sides of the coffin, which was draped with a black cloth hanging majestically across its four corners as it’s been done for the past 6,000 years. We had prayers, eulogies, and then the burial.

‘What will they say about me? I bet they don’t say this or they miss out that…’ It’s inevitable that these thoughts have crossed your mind.

I pondered what my children really know about our family. Were they too busy growing up to be interested? I’m well aware that our story doesn’t hold the magic of Churchill, Napoleon, or Shakespeare and it’s not so very different from tales other Jewish families will tell, but it’s an important story for us.

Friends say, ‘Why didn’t we ask grandparents about life in Latvia, Lithuania or Poland, why they’d left or at the very least written down the cheesecake recipe or ingredients for those wonderful East European dishes they served up at Friday night dinners?’

The drivers finally pushing me to document our family history were the three monumental events of enduring significance: my mother’s passing; that mind-blowing moment I discovered the hidden diaries and letters of my Uncle Wally, recording private thoughts as he served in the RAF until his untimely death in 1943; and, of equally compelling importance was the powerful secret journal detailing the life of my mother’s first cousin Chaim’s life in Poland, who wrote of his traumatic suffering through Nazi occupation, capture, work camps and escape.

These events and thoughts nudged me. It was time to research and to scribe the knowledge of our family history before it and I finally evaporate. So, with papers scattered across my desk, I started on the long journey…