My grandfather Nahum z”l spoke. That matters. He spoke. He did not remain silent, as so many did.

He spoke about Hislavichi. About a small Jewish town in western Russia where even non-Jews spoke Yiddish, where life was so intertwined that your neighbor’s language became your own. He spoke about his family: large, vibrant, where Yiddish was the language of the home, and life itself was imbued with Yiddishkeit, full of plans. And about what remained of them after the war: a single grave.

He was drafted into the Red Army in 1941. He fought in a reconnaissance unit and was severely wounded in 1944. A year and a half later, discharged from the hospital, he learned there was nothing to return to. His family had been murdered. All of them. Fifty-three of our closest relatives from Hislavichi appear on the lists of those killed.

On the mass grave, it was forbidden to write “Jews.” Only “Soviet citizens.” A marker was erected by a group of survivors on their own initiative. The state had no interest in the matter.

This was not an exception. It was policy.

I grew up knowing this, not as a historical fact, but as family memory: sparse in words, dense with meaning. I believed I understood what memory was.

The state that silenced

While researching my book on the history of Soviet Jewry, I encountered documents that cast new light on what I had already known from home. In........

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