This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor from Kostopol, Ukraine. Years after she passed away, I was trying to learn more about her life before the war—something I knew very little about.
When I found a book called "Sefer Kostopol"—Hebrew for "Book of Kostopol"—I hoped to find her among its pages. It was a memorial book for her hometown, but beyond that, I wasn't sure what to make of it. I'm a scholar of Holocaust memory, but I had never come across anything quite like it.
It was a bit like a scrapbook, with varied types of images, essays written by different residents and lists of survivors—where I found my grandmother's name—and of their murdered families, including her mother and sister. My questions led me to investigate exactly what "Sefer Kostopol" was—and to learn that communities of survivors created over 1,000 such memorial books, called "yizker bikher" in Yiddish. After the Holocaust, Eastern European survivors and Jews who had left before the war created these memorial books to honor their destroyed towns and murdered loved ones.
Devoted to their neighbors, these collaboratively written volumes were one way for survivors to reclaim their lives and memories. Yizker bikher were created not only to document the destruction of the Nazi genocide but also to preserve the everyday lives that came before it. The volumes insist that Jewish communities be remembered not solely as sites of death but as places where people lived, argued, worked and celebrated.
In general, around two-thirds of a given volume is devoted to describing prewar life; the remaining third includes first-person accounts of the Nazi occupation of the town and a long list of the dead. Each book had anywhere from 20 to 50, even 75, contributors, who wrote in a warm, colloquial style. The visuals, too, feel personal.
Photos portray the particulars of prewar life, with images of sports teams, school groups, bustling market squares and busy, modern streets. Maps are another common feature, almost always drawn and labeled from memory by a survivor: the details of the forests and the rivers, the nicknames that locals used for the streets and stories of the homes and shops. Beyond the photographs and maps, most volumes contain sketches by amateur artists to convey information about life under Nazi occupation.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
