by Linda Jesmok

Editor's Note: When NVGS member Linda Jesmok was directed to a NVGS Library book on victims of the Holocaust, it sparked a renewed search to identify family members in old photos, and ultimately led to correcting a family story about a Holocaust survivor.

Some years ago, my cousin gave me copies of three photos that belonged to her mother and had been sent to the US from Vilna, Lithuania in the early 1900s. Neither of us knew the names of the people in the photos, but we had a clue - someone had written, on the backs of the original photos, that the couple was our grandmother's youngest brother and his wife. The individual photos of the couple were from the early to mid-1920s. The family photo (pictured below) was from the late 1920s, judging by the clothing.

I searched on JewishGen.org using the names of my great-grandparents and was able to fill in more data about the extended family over the years except for those of the people in the photos. About a year ago, the website added new information, and I first found David Markels, Grandma’s brother, and later, when his marriage record surfaced, Khaia Segal, his wife.

For years, the daughter’s identity haunted me. One of my aunts had met her in Haifa, Israel, in the 1960s but did not have her name. My aunt told me that her cousin (the child in the photo) had been imprisoned at Auschwitz but had survived the war and moved to Israel.

About two months ago, I received notice that JewishGen added new records from Lithuania and from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. I tried again to see if the daughter’s name would surface. I found Yad Vashem testimony on behalf of David and Khaia, who were murdered in 1943 in Lithuania by the German occupation forces. The testimony had been submitted by Naomi Markels Frumer. I had found the girl in the photo!

Hunts on Ancestry.com, Wikipedia, and my own reference book on Lithuania revealed a story that was markedly different from the one I had been told, which opened a window on an aspect of history that had been lost to our family.

Naomi and her parents were imprisoned in the Vilna ghetto when the German army took the city in June 1941. The ghetto area was subsequently reduced and forced to house not only the Jews of the city, but also families from the surrounding countryside. Even in times of fear and deprivation, education, literature, and entertainment culture were vital to the ghetto population. David and Khaia were teachers, and Naomi was a poet who served on the editorial board of Zvishn Vent—Doch Jung (Within the Walls—Yet Young), a publication in Yiddish.

The liquidation of the Vilna ghetto was initiated in March 1943. The old and infirmed and the educated and skilled were sentenced to death. Many of the murders took place at Ponar, in killing fields six miles to the north of the city. Naomi reported that her parents were murdered in 1943, her father at Ponar.

In early June 1943, groups of partisans began to join camps in Rudniki Forest, about twenty miles south of Vilna. Shortly after, Naomi left the city to join the partisan groups, most likely through underground tunnels connected with the city sewer system. Her parents may have already died, or they may have told her to leave without them while she could.

The partisans had guns and ammunition they collected before they fled the city, and the camps survived for a year before the Soviet army, closing in on the city from the east in the spring of 1944, flew above the camps and dropped additional munitions into the forest, to restock the partisans’ supplies. The partisans fought the Germans from their forest hiding places, and they joined the Red Army in liberating the city in June 1944.

After returning to liberated Vilna, Naomi resumed her activities with the Yiddish literary group, and she appears there in a photo with other noted poets in 1945.

After 1948, Naomi left for newly established Israel. There she met her husband, Josef Frumer, a Polish partisan. By 1952, they were living in a kibbutz called Lohamei HaGeta’ot and were parents of a son.

Naomi’s husband Josef died in 1992. Naomi lived until 2009. Documents and photographs of Josef and Naomi are housed in the Ghetto Fighters House Archives, Ghetto Fighters House Museum, Lohamei HaGeta’ot, Israel.

Khaia, Naomi, and David Markels