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For Yaffa Eliach, a Jewish survivor of that nightmare, the answers were long in coming as she searched her soul unsuccessfully for years. It was suddenly clear to her what had to be done, however, when she returned to her birthplace in northeastern Europe and stood atop a mass grave containing the bodies of her immediate and extended family and most of her friends and neighbors who, with their town, were wiped off the face of the earth by the ravaging Nazi Juggernaut.

She decided in that moment to document the history of her hometown and its residents to leave a legacy of life for the future of mankind.

Dr. Yaffa Eliach, standing in the Tower of Life in the
Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

'Tower of Life'

The result, capping nearly two decades of steel dedication, painstaking research and devoted love, is an exhibit called the "Tower of Life" in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The multi-story display is a square room whose walls are covered by 1,500 photographs depicting the 900-year history of her birthplace, the former Polish and now Lithuanian town of Eishyshok.

The photos capture the vibrant personalities of the town's inhabitants through time and the development of the community, located 40 miles from the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius (formerly Vilna), before it was obliterated by German troops in World War II and nearly all of its 3,500 people, mostly Jews, slaughtered.

Eliach also has written a monumental book chronicling the history of her town,There Once Was a World, which has been nominated for a National Book Award, and she herself has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

10,000 Photos

She related the story of Eishyshok and presented a slide-show sample of the 10,000 photographs of the town and its people that she has collected in her research during a recent lecture at St. John's University.

Her appearance, sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Jewish-Christian Learning at St. John's and St. Thomas universities, took place in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass), the 1938 Nazi rain of terror unleased throughout Germany against the Jews. Marauding troops destroyed 7,500 stores and 191 synagogues, killed 236 men, women and children, and sent 30,000 others to concentration camps.

Eliach is a professor of history and literature in the department of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College in New York as well as a poet, playwright, speaker and contributor to many scholarly, literary and popular publications. She has lectured worldwide and appeared on television in the United States and abroad.

Her widely-acclaimed, 960-page tome on the shtetl (town) of Eishyshok followed her earlier book, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, which received the Christopher Award for excellence.

Survival & Death

Born in Eishyshok near the onset of World War II, Eliach was among only 29 people in town who survived the Holocaust. She said about 700 managed to live through the war only to be murdered shortly afterward by neighbors infused with strong anti-Semitic propaganda.

She was 4 years old on Sept. 25, 1941 when German soldiers invaded Eishyshok, massacred its 3,500 Jewish inhabitants and obliterated the town.They overlooked members of her family who were hiding in a cave under a pigsty, and she herself was saved by her maid who protected her as her own child in the midst of the slaughter.

Eliach lamented, however, the loss of her mother and her two infant brothers at that time. One brother was suffocated by a group of townspeople trying to confine his movements in a residential attic where they were hiding from encroaching German soldiers; her mother and the second brother were killed with others before her eyes shortly after the armistice in 1944 by locals who felt that "too many Jews survived the Holocaust."

"When [the latter] killing took place," Eliach recounted, "my mother was screaming to her murderers, calling them by name, 'Anthony, kill me first because I cannot see the death of another of my children.'" Eliach survived because her mother and brother fell on her when they were shot, leading their killers to believe she was also dead.

Holocaust Commission

Although she had written of those events and other aspects of the Holocaust, Eliach hadn't started her large book on Eishyshok or considered an exhibit in the Holocaust museum until she was chosen in 1979 by then-President Jimmy Carter to be a member of the Commission on the Holocaust. The commission was established to study and recommend to the president a blueprint for the design of the newly-conceived memorial museum.

Commission members began their work by going to Eastern Europe to visit the Nazi centers of death and destruction, including the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau,Treblinka, Majdanek and Plaszow.

Dr. Yaffa Eliach

She wondered out loud if it was appropriate, as her colleagues proposed, to fill the museum with replicas of gas chambers, crematoria, cattle cars used to transport "undesirables" to their death, and photographs of Jews in hiding, in ghettos and in concentration camp uniforms.

"I kept saying to myself," she said, "are these the kinds of things I would like to be presenting at the museum in America? Is this what I would like the American public to see: a representation of Jews only as victims, as emaciated people, not resembling anybody who was normal?...

"What about life that existed prior to the Holocaust when we were normal people just like everybody else?...Everybody must understand that people are normal. The Holocaust was a short period in our lives representing us only as victims."

Decision to Document

Those thoughts brought Eliach to a decision as she flew with the commission from Warsaw to Kiev in the Ukraine to visit the killing fields of Babi Yar where Nazi Einsatzgruppen troops shot 32,000 Jews to death in September 1941.

"Suddenly I realized," she said, "that somewhere below the clouds was the little hometown of my family where I spent a very short period of a short, interrupted childhood. And then and there on the plane I said to myself I'm going to take this little hometown and make it a model of normal life that existed there."

She decided to document the history and society of Eishyshok in extensive detail, from its founding in 1065 by a military prince to the present day, through the collection of personal photographs handed down over the centuries and in a definitive book describing its development.

"I said to myself I'm going to try to find as many photos as possible of the people who lived in the city and of every element of life, from shops in the marketplace to the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, to show a normal life that existed for 900 years," she said.

"And I'm going to try to document the history of the town in a book [based on] as many archival materials as possible from private and public archives, diaries, letters, passports and documents about every element of stetl life."

True to her professional dedication to historical accuracy, Eliach vowed to verify and document every element of information she collected and to reject propaganda photographs by German and Central European photographers who, she said, "always felt that East European people don't look as well as West European people."

Eliach's colleagues on the commission thought her idea was "a bit crazy" and did not include it in their recommendations to President Carter delivered on Sept. 29, 1979. Although she had to support their decision, she wouldn't be deterred and resolved to undertake her research on her own.

The Search

Running uphill at the outset in the face of negative responses to her applications for research grants and economic pressure on her family, Eliach persevered through the rigors of extensive world travel, a meticulous search for anyone and anything connected with Eishyshok history, and an untold number of interviews with current and former residents of the town and their relatives both near and far.

"I went to Canada, Israel, London, Paris, Holland-you name it," she said. "I was there in every place, and suddenly material started to accumulate: excellent photos and diaries representing every element of stetl life."

She showed some of those photographs in her slide presentation, which captured people and places of Eishyshok as early as 1824.

A picture of the Jewish community's soup kitchen in World War I demonstrated the town's charity for the poor and hungry, regardless of religion, and the help they received from many German citizens who volunteered their services. She said the experience convinced older Jewish residents during World War II that the Germans were a cultured and wonderful people who would not harm them, causing them to reject emigration when it was still possible.

Indeed, Eliach's postscript to her description of many of the photos of individuals, families and community groups revealed the fate of that decision: "All were killed during the Holocaust."

Betrayal

In a photograph of members of the Eishyshok orchestra, Eliach noted that some of the Polish musicians pictured were responsible for the murder of some of the Jewish players, despite the fact that they were very close friends before the war.

For Eliach, that tragedy and its repetition in the community was "the most difficult element" of the times. She said the town changed suddenly from a long-standing center of harmonious Christian-Jewish relations to a splintered society of animosity and anti-Semitism.

"You see the people and politics changing in the interwar years," she said. "Anti-Semitism didn't exist before, and there were no pogroms, but then you see your next-door neighbors and your best friends joining the Nazis in the killing...The 700 of us who managed to escape the Germans were murdered by the local population."

That was worse for Eliach and others in Eishyshok than the atrocities perpetrated against the Jews by the Nazis, since there was a personal connection between residents of the town that didn't exist between the population and the Nazis.

With those memories retrieved through the thousands of photographs and documents she collected, Eliach was still undecided about the best way to display it all in Washington and felt she had to go back to Eishyshok to find the answer.

Returning Home

She traveled there in 1987, more than 40 years after leaving the town as a 7-year-old child at the end of the war, and found familiar places and some familiar people. She was most moved by a chance encounter with the woman who was her maid and who had saved her life.

'"Her memory was amazing," Eliach said in her description of the woman. "She said, 'On Sept. 26 [1941] when they were killing the women, there was a little child hiding in my house, and she was crying and crying and crying, saying she wanted to go to her mommy. I just couldn't take those tears anymore, so I took the little child and started to walk with her to the killing fields.

On the way, a Lithuanian guard said, Lady, they will mistake you for Jewish. Take your child and go back home. So I picked up the girl, covered her with my shawl and took her back home.'

"I never forgot how my maid saved me during the killing."

The woman took Eliach to the mass grave where the town's Jews were murdered and buried, and Eliach paused there to reflect on the past. She said, "Imagine, you're standing on top of the grave where the entire town is under your feet, including so many members of your family: my grandmothers, all my aunts, all my cousins, all my friends and all the women and children."

Vision of Life

As she meditated, she found that she visualized those people as they were when they lived, not as skeletons in a disheveled heap.

"I saw them just the way they appear in the photos," she said. "I heard their voices from the many diaries and letters that I read and I felt they were holding on to me and begging to be remembered as human beings-as dynamic, creative people just like they appear in all of these photos, in the diaries and the letters.

"As a matter of of fact, suddenly I understood the vision of the prophet Ezekiel [about] the bones of the valley of the dead bones coming alive and turning into human beings."

She also suddenly discovered the answer she was seeking to the question of an exhibit for the material she had collected. "Then and there on the grave, I said now I know what kind of an exhibit I want," she remembered. "I want to feel exactly what I feel on the grave as I'm standing and being surrounded by a creative town of people. They are above me, they are below me, they are around me."

Total Immersion

Eliach returned to Washington and shared her idea with the Holocaust museum's interior designers, who were very impressed with her story and eager to find a suitable expression for its documentation. The result was the "Tower of Life" with its wallpapered photographs and a bridge in the middle to give visitors the impression of total immersion in the long life of a vibrant shtetl and its dynamic people.

Through the exhibit and her book, Eliach hopes to provide Americans with a practical model for the development of harmony and understanding and to disseminate what she called "a lesson for our minds and for our hearts about humanity."

"For me, the lesson of Eishyshok became a model [for mutual respect], and I hope that we in America will understand that we must have great admiration and appreciation of the culture of everybody," she said. "Just like my exhibit in Washington became the album of the family of mankind, I really hope that my book will be a bridge to the eye, to the heart and to the mind of mankind and that it will teach us that we are all brothers and sisters.

"We must assure that we will all be together in building that great family of mankind-and that we in America must be a model for it."

Rabbi Barry Cytron, director of the center; Br. Dietrich Reinhart, O.S.B.,
president of Saint John's University; Dr. Yaffa Eliach; Dr. John Merkle,
associate director of the center; Karen Schierman, program coordinator;
and Dr. Clark Hendley, provost of the College of Saint Benedict and
Saint John's University; at the College of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota.

--Article printed with permission as it appeared in the December, 1998 issue of the St. Cloud Unabridged newspaper.