Never Forget, But Never Dilute
“They dragged them out of their houses, and led them to their deaths, to a pit right outside town, in Zelyonke. Like cattle. They took them like cattle and then shot them. When they finished them off, the earth kept moving for a few days afterwards. Like cattle.”
It was in the winter of last year, in one of the very last conversations I had with my beloved, 95-year-old Grandma Fruma, that she revisited those last moments in the life of her parents, Zeev and Rachel Liond. This experience, like so many others of my grandmother who, at the age of 18, found herself enslaved, starved, and orphaned, came to haunt her for the rest of her life. I heard the story many times: about the aktion, when the elderly Jews and children of the towns surrounding Vilna, lovingly known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, were herded like cattle and, like the rest of the Jewish population of the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories, were shot by local murderers, some perhaps their neighbors.