If we had wings we would fly to you”: A Soviet Jewish Family Faces Destruction, 1941–42Kiril Feferman

Abstract

Holocaust history is a tragic story of lives broken at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Because of the lack of victims’ personal sources Holocaust scholars often attempt to reconstruct the history of the mass killing of Jews using general, impersonalized data, and singular quotes from eyewitnesses’ accounts. Very rarely were Jews able to write their own history in their own voices through personal diaries or last-minute letters on the eve of the Holocaust. Even knowing the names of individuals, it is sometimes impossible to reconstruct the biography of an ordinary Holocaust victim. This task is yet more complicated when scholars study Holocaust history on Soviet soil. Despite having many Soviet wartime sources that focused on what happened with Jews in a particular locality, there are only a few ego-documents of Jews available to researchers. In this case, the latest book by Israeli historian Kiril Feferman is of great importance. Based on the private correspondence of the family Ginsburg, Feferman aims to reconstruct the life of one Jewish family on the eve of and during the occupations of the southern Russian city Rostov-on-Don. At least eight members of the family did not survive the second occupation and were killed in the Rostov region in August 1942.