The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister Page 2
Is it really possible for this to ever happen again? “The Rossija shall become free again”—those were the words of my dear grandmother. It was a promise that she made to us, her grandchildren, as well as to her children. The beautiful land where creativity, art, and music would flourish again someday, free and independent. The land where the Russian people would be able to exercise their talents freely.
I get furiously angry at the thought of what has been done to my ancestors and to the land I love so much. But I do feel very fortunate to have at least some knowledge, which was passed on to me by my own family before I lost them. I shall try to pass this on to my own children so that they will know the truth and be as proud of their roots as I am.
How can one tell the story, especially write the story, without knowledge of the writer? The story is so real and so full of horrors. How can I describe the things that I have seen and felt and that made me the sole survivor of my family—all the troubled times and horrors and terror that surrounded all of us? It is difficult for me to put my thoughts into proper perspective, especially since my English vocabulary is somewhat limited.
Though I have lived in America for forty-seven years, I still find it difficult to express my thoughts properly. I have yet another problem, which is that I have allowed myself to forget the languages I knew so well when I came to this country. I spoke six languages very well, and most of my notes and some of my poems, which I wrote between nine years old and nineteen years old, were written in the Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Latvian, and German languages.
I kept diaries during those years, and even as I lay in the hospital stricken with rheumatic fever and the ensuing heart problems, I continued to write in my diary for some time before I left Germany. My diary was written in several languages, but it was written with the deep feelings of one who had gone through a great deal of sad times. Most of my writings were about my mother, father, and my brother, Anatoly. I also became very close to God Himself, and my writings were full of expressed feelings toward faith in God and His mercy on me. I felt very close to God, and I felt that He had chosen to keep me alive for a very definite purpose. So I put into writing all my feelings—as best I could—and all that I had learned about God from my dear grandmother and my parents.
Translating from my own notes and diaries, I find myself in a great state of confusion, because it is difficult for me—after so many years—to understand my own writing, especially since the languages it was all written in became somewhat estranged to me. However, with extra time and much effort, it finally comes to me, and I am able to put it into English so that at least I can understand the meaning of my own thoughts during those troubled times. When I wrote some of my poems, I wrote them under the influence of grief, which was still with me after losing my entire family. It was so recent, and I was still in shock from the whole ordeal.
My age has become a hindrance to me in remembering some of the events that took place during the very early part of my childhood. But it seems that I manage to block out the sad times in my memory and to concentrate only on the happy ones. Little by little, all of it comes back to me as though by chain reaction. It may take me some time to put it all together, but I am so inspired to write that I don’t think anything can prevent or discourage me from writing my true life story now. I only wish that I had some education in writing stories, even if it is the story of my own life.
Perhaps someday I will be able to put it all in proper perspective, but right now I only want to get it out of my head and just write it down the best I know how. What I write is all true, and I have witnessed all of it. Most of all, I like to write about things that I learned from my grandmother and my loving parents.
Nonna L. Bannister
Prologue
Henry Bannister met Nonna Lisowskaja in 1951. He knew little about her when she agreed to marry him. She was a mysterious woman with a painful secret—a secret she hid from him for more than forty years of marriage.
A decade before Nonna died, she took him by the hand and led him to the attic of their small house in Memphis, Tennessee.
“It’s time,” she said.
Henry had waited a long while for those words. He didn’t know what secrets the attic held, but he had watched his wife climb those stairs many times, disappearing into the night for some unknown reason. He never asked why she went or what she did up there, knowing that she could not speak about it and deeply respecting her privacy.
He also never inquired about the black-and-white-striped ticking pillow Nonna held to her heart each night at bedtime. He just knew she couldn’t sleep without it.
Nor did Henry ask Nonna about her family back in Germany or Russia, or wherever she had come from. He knew she’d tell him when she was ready. So he waited.
Only once did Nonna give Henry a glimpse into her painful past. They and their three young children attended a church service at Central Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at which the guest speaker told of his harrowing Holocaust experiences at the hands of German Nazis. Nonna shocked Henry by jumping up from the pew and running out of the sanctuary, crying. He quietly gathered the children and took Nonna home. She immediately went to bed—and stayed there for several weeks. Henry didn’t know how to help her.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” their younger son, John, asked again and again. “Mama, what’s wrong?” John received a mother’s embrace, but no answer to his question.
Again, Henry didn’t pry into Nonna’s past. He simply took care of the house and children, and he waited for her to get up from her bed, to reveal what had so disturbed her.
Many years later, he was still waiting. The children had grown up, married, and built lives of their own. Nonna suffered with her health—her heart and her back—and underwent several surgeries. Her fingers knotted with painful arthritis, Henry’s eyesight dimmed, and together they grew old. Then one day, out of the blue, she spoke the words he longed to hear: “Henry, it’s time.”
They climbed the attic stairs and sat down beside the old heavy wooden trunk Nonna had painted lime-green—the color of living things. She picked up a worn key and turned the metal lock. She showed Henry old photographs, introducing him one by one to her family: grandmother, aunts and uncles, mother and father, cousins, friends—all of them dead, long buried a world away in unmarked graves. The last photograph Nonna pulled from the trunk was one of her only sibling, Anatoly.
“He’d be almost seventy years old now,” she said.
Nonna reached into the trunk. She took from it a fragile, hand-sewn diary, its pages filled with writing in Russian.
“My childhood diary,” she said. “Papa gave it to me on my ninth birthday.”
Then she put into Henry’s hands a small pad of paper—diaries she had written immediately after the war, each page covered with microscopic pencil marks.
He held the small pad of paper up to the attic’s ceiling bulb and tried to read the faded words.
“My eyes are too weak to read them, Nonna. What do they say?”
“They’re hard to read, Henry. I wrote in such tiny print.”
“How am I to learn your secrets, Nonna, if I can’t read your diaries?”
Nonna smiled. Then, from the trunk she pulled a thick stack of legal pads, each long yellow page filled with hand-penned words.
“The translations of my diaries, and my story,” she said. “In English.”
Then Nonna climbed down the attic stairs, and Henry began to read.
Train to Agony
1: Boarding the Train
August 7, 1942—Konstantinowka, Ukraine
It is fourteen hours and fifteen minutes (2:15 p.m.), and we were just loaded on the train! My God—this is not what we thought it would be like to make this journey! We are packed like sardines in a can into the cattle cars of the train. The German soldiers with their rifles are with us and Mama is scared. (I know that she is.) Mama still thinks we can get off the train and leave our luggage behind and walk home. There is Gr
andmother standing about twenty feet away, looking so shocked and in dismay—she is crying—with the tears running down her face as she waves good-bye. Somehow, I know that we will never see her again.
As the train starts to move, Mama and I just look at Grandmother until she is out of sight. At the hour of 1600 (4:00 p.m.) everyone inside our car is very quiet and nobody is talking. Some are crying quietly—and I am glad that I have my diary and two pencils.
I got into the corner as far as I could so I would have some room to write. Now the door of our car is open, but I can hear some noises from the top of the roof. The German soldiers had positioned themselves on the top of the train, and they are talking and singing—I think they are drinking—they sound drunk to me.
It is almost midnight—the moon is so full—and we are crossing large fields. I need to get closer to the door so I can get some fresh air. As I approach the open door, I see a pair of legs in black boots dangling right above the door—then this face leans down and the soldier yells, “Hi, pretty one!” and I get away from the door very quickly. Mama pulls me closer to herself, and I think I am getting sleepy.
August 8, 1942
When we wake up, we can look into the horizon and see the sun rising from the edges of the biggest fields that I have ever seen—it is a beautiful sunrise! Where are we? How close are we to Kiev? The train is slowing down, and it looks as though we will stop moving.
August 9, 1942
We are in Kiev, but the train stopped at least a block away from the large train station. The Germans jumped down, and I could see how many of them there were—we were surrounded. They were telling us to get out—“Raus, raus.” We saw trucks approaching the train, loaded with German soldiers and German shepherd dogs (lots of dogs). There was a truck loaded with food (soup made with cabbage and potatoes, and there was black bread). They passed out some bowls to us, and as we walked to the food truck, I looked to the back of the train and I saw two cars loaded with Jews. They were not allowed to get out—the doors of their cars were barred with heavy metal bars, and the German soldiers were guarding them. I saw old men, women, children, and even some babies. They were begging us to give them some of our bread with their thin (almost skeletonlike) hands stuck out through the bars. I started to go there with my food, but just as I got close to them, a German soldier shouted at me and commanded me to get back or he would shoot me if I dared come any closer.
* * *
SEPARATE CARS • The Jewish prisoners, headed for concentration “death” camps, were in the same transport but rode in separate train cars from the Russian women, who were headed for the labor camps. The Nazis allowed the Russian women to leave their cars, go into the woods to relieve themselves, and eat. But they allowed no such privileges to the Jews.
* * *
August 9, 1942—late evening
When we got back into the car of the train (Car 8) and the train started to move, we thought that we were on the way again. But in fifteen minutes, our train came to a stop. Three trucks loaded with Jews approached our train, and the Germans loaded them into the first two cars of our train. It was close enough for us to hear the screams of the children, the wailings and moaning of the women. There were shots fired frequently. Oh! Those screams and cries! And the dogs—there were so many of them. It was mass confusion, and I became aware that we, too, were prisoners and that there was absolutely no way to escape as Mama had planned to do when we got to Kiev.
August 10, 1942
We are leaving the Ukraine now, and the train is moving fast. I will never forget the sight of the last sunset as we were leaving Kiev. The sun looked like a huge ball of red and orange fire, and it was moving down slowly against the horizon at the end of the endless fields. Almost it was as though the sun were saying, “Farewell, my dear—we shall never meet on this soil again!” As I stood there near the door of our train car, I kept looking at the sun until it had completely disappeared. Then I suddenly felt very sad and lonely. It was a “farewell” that made me feel that a part of me had died. Many sunsets and sunrises were thereafter, but never was one so beautiful as the sunset that I saw at Kiev.
* * *
“MANY . . . WERE THEREAFTER” • In some places it is difficult to distinguish what Nonna might have written during or just after the war from what she added later to her transcript. In this chapter, Nonna directly translates her diaries almost exclusively, though this comment reflects her backward look at this story from a late-twentieth-century point of view.
* * *
Now I know that we are heading into Poland, and Mama is beginning to make plans for us to escape when we make the first stop in Poland. The next stop is for a meal. We will crawl under the car and wait for everyone to get loaded, and we will get out quickly and run toward the wooded area. Mama is planning.
2: Baby Sarah
This horrible story, which I blocked out of my mind for so many years, suddenly comes back to me along with other memories that now surface one by one.
On August 11, 1942, we were in Poland, and our train made a stop for us to use the woods nearby. There was another train, which was heading in the opposite direction, stopped on the adjacent tracks. The train was loaded with Jews heading for one of the extermination camps. The people were so pitiful; they were dressed in rags and looked as if they had not seen food for such a long time. Some of them looked like human skeletons—they were so thin that they looked like death! The SS men and the German soldiers had unloaded all the people from our train to go into the bushes to use the bathroom. The German soldiers were standing guard with many dogs with them, which they would use to chase down anyone who tried to escape. These dogs had been trained to attack and kill upon the command of the soldiers.
After the Germans had reloaded the people onto our train, everyone was looking at the train loaded with the Jewish prisoners. It was so sad to see the condition of these people. Our train started to move very slowly. I was glad to be moving, because what I had just seen made me feel very sick to my stomach. The Jews did not look like humans but, rather, like skeletons covered with a greenish-gray-colored skin; their eyes seemed to be very big, and they were staring at us. Thin—very thin—hands were stretched out toward our car, begging for food, and the people were making sounds barely above a whisper. There were little hands of small children, and old hands of old men and women, begging for bread or anything to eat. On the side of the cars, which were packed like sardines with these Jewish people, there were yellow Jewish stars painted very sloppily—you could sense that these stars had been painted with much hate and disgust.
* * *
“TO USE THE BATHROOM” • This American euphemism is another example of Nonna’s occasional anachronistic comments throughout her diary transcripts—as is her “packed like sardines,” and her use of the post-war term extermination camp. Her diaries were written as the events took place, but by the time she translated and expanded them, she had been a citizen of the United States for many years.
* * *
Mama and I had placed ourselves closer to the open door of our train car, hoping to get some fresh air. Suddenly there was a young girl running alongside our car—no one knew where she had come from. She had a look of terror in her eyes, and she had her arms around a small bundle. Her black hair was blowing in the wind, and she was so thin that you could see her bones protruding from her neck and her shoulders. She hurled her bundle at Mama, and before any of us realized what happened, Mama stood there holding the bundle in her hands—and we heard a baby cry! The young woman was still running alongside our train car. She yelled out, “Please, oh please, save my baby—please give her a Russian name!”
By then, the train had begun to move faster, but we could see the girl still standing by the tracks with her hands covering her face, and she was weeping. The rest of the women in our rail car surrounded Mama and me as we stood there in disbelief and shock, watching the baby. It all happened so fast that it took a little while to realize what had just happe
ned.
For hours, there were all kinds of insults exchanged among the women. Some of the women were on Mama’s side and decided to come up with some story to tell the Germans as to how the baby got there—“We can tell the Germans that when we returned to our car, the baby was already here”—and hide the true story that the baby was thrown to us by a Jewish girl. There were some who suggested that we tell the Germans that a Polish woman had left the baby with us and asked us to take the baby to Germany. It was obvious to all of us that we had to hide the fact that the baby was Jewish. It was the only way to save the baby. It went on for hours as our train kept moving on, and we knew that we would soon be approaching the German border.
Some of the women were emotionally moved by having a part in saving the baby’s life. But there were some of the women that did not want to take part because it might jeopardize them. We could all be punished for what we were trying to do and even be transferred to the Jewish trains, which were headed for the concentration camps. There would not be any escape if that happened, and no one really knew what would happen as soon as the Germans found the baby. There was no possible way that someone on our train could have had this baby, since we were extensively screened prior to being loaded on the trains. We had all gone through these medical screenings.
The women began to take turns holding the baby, and we began to call her Sarah. But Mama still insisted that we call her Taissia, which was my baby sister’s name. She had died when she was only three days old. Taissia was a Russian name, and the baby would have a better chance to survive if she had a Russian name rather than being called Sarah.