Khurban

Bela Taraseiskey is a storyteller and an artist. Here she tells the story of her mother and aunt and how they survived the Holocaust. Bela has named her story, Khurban. This is a Hebrew word that means “destruction.” Historically there have been three Khurban in Jewish history: the destruction of the First Temple, 286 BCE by the Babylonians, the destruction of the Second Temple, 70 AD, by the Romans, and the attempted genocide of the Jewish people in during World War II by the Third Reich. Bela has illustrated her story that follows.

Artist's Note: My personal Khurban started during the first days of World War II in Lithuania. The exact date was June 22, 1941. Through my paintings you will learn of the unspeakable horrors that began as soon as the Soviet forces fled eastward and the people of my mother's village, Rasainiai, were left to fend for themselves.

I am told that crimes against the villagers began even before the Nazis arrived. However, when they did come, the killings became “well organized.” Nonetheless, several local units were asked to shoot their Jewish neighbors, and they complied.

Lithuania had been made into a Soviet Republic a year before war came to the country, in 1940. The propaganda waged against the Jews at the time was that they were all communists. Many “bourgeois” elements; owners of businesses and Jewish citizens and some Lithuanians Christians, were deported by the Soviets to Siberia. Constant confusion and hysteria drove people insane. Unarmed Jewish civilians, including all women and children, the old and sick, were consistently humiliated, imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and their property stolen. Around a quarter of a million Lithuanian Jews were shot and dumped, often still breathing, in large mass graves—almost an entire population of a race singled by the Nazis.

My mother, Rosa Lurie and Sara Furmanskey, her aunt, were among the very few survivors of Rasainiai. However, their entire families perished along with so many others. Rosa and Sara became witnesses to the orgy of barbarism in which Jews, just because they were Jews were bitten, and shot to death sadistically. In the middle of these atrocities, Rosa and Sara witnessed acts of heroism on the part of Lithuanians who risked their lives to protect them. They too lived in constant fear of death for their humane acts of protecting innocent Jews.

Khurban is the Holocaust journey I took as I visited my mother's homeland, to follow her footsteps of survival and to paint that journey. I found myself traveling the pain and death of others who lay beneath my feet in the pastoral beauty of Rasainiai's countryside. I felt the rich heritage and contribution by Lithuanian Jews to their culture and religious life which dated back to early the fourteenth century—long before Rasainiai became a killing field. Through my mother's stories I remembered that Lithuania had a robust Yiddish culture, was one of the seats of serious Talmudic scholarship and jurisprudence, was at the advent of the Mitnagdim, saw the birth of Hasidic practice, and supported flourishing secular Jewish movements and modern Yiddish literature.