“I just don’t understand why they have to dig up these ugly memories,” said Halyna, not taking her eyes off the carnation garland she was weaving. Hers were the most beautiful in town.
“It’s only right, enough time has passed by now,” her husband answered.
“Why can’t they just forget and move on like the rest of?”
“I don’t know, Halyna.”
“Well, at least it’s not in town square, like it could’ve been, at least I won’t have to see it every day.” Her grandkids were beside her, as she weaved the flowers skillfully.
It was a sunny but cold day; the grey snow signaled that it was a day for fur, the one she inherited from her mother.
“We should leave soon,” her husband urged her.
She tied the finished garland and wore her coat, and left, her husband and two grandchildren in tow.
On July third, forty-seven years ago, soldiers entered the town; they were about a dozen, quickly joined by about twenty local auxiliary volunteers. The orders were clear: round them up in the town square, every one of them, no exceptions. The poor, the ugly, the diseased, the young, the rich, and the old—they were all the same anyway. If someone refused to come, they were allowed to shoot him dead where he stood. Most of them came willingly, some of them shot. And there they were, in the middle of town, waiting.
Halyna saw Rachel Portnoy slipping the other way from the town square, her blue shoes, the matching blue ribbon in her hair still perfectly in place.
“Zhydovska!” she screamed, pointing.
“How do you know?” shouted a German soldier.
Stepan Horbachenko, a local volunteer, translated.
“Because she was in my class,” Halyna said, already scavenging Mrs. Portnoy’s wardrobe and furs in her head.
Stepan turned back to the German.
“Put her with the others,” the soldier said, his voice quieter now, colder and collected.
And with the others she was put, beside her mother, who had told her to run and never look back.
“If you are not a Jew, go back inside.”
The gleeful crowd hesitated, then scattered.
Half an hour later came the screams, the gunshots,
and then silence.
Halyna, her husband, and grandchildren arrived.
“Mr. Horbachenko! Mr. Horbachenko!” young Alexey called to the lovable retired teacher.
“Yes, dear Sashinka?”
“What do you think of our garland?”
“Beautiful, but with a grandma like yours I’m not surprised,” he smiled at Halyna.
“It’s all Sashinka and Katinka’s doing,” she winked at him.
They sat down, as did the rest of those in attendance. The mayor got up to speak, and it was a lovely and short ceremony. Alexey and Katrina put the garland on top of the new small monument that was erected at the edge of a field in the outskirts of town. There were a few more garlands, weaved by a few more grandmothers and laid by a few more beautiful children.
The ceremony was over.
Halyna waved goodbye to Mr. Horbachenko and slowly made her way home.
“What were those garlands for?” young Katrina demanded to know.
“It’s not important now,” said Halyna, smiling softly.
__________
Alon Taïeb-Toper is a 26-year-old writer from Israel. Like many families shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust, his chose silence as a way to cope with its complex legacy. Members of his family were murdered in nearly every imaginable way during that time. On a recent trip to Austria and Slovakia, Alon was overcome by feelings he could not fully name—a mix of humiliation and sorrow—at how neatly his ancestors had been erased. In the town where his great-grandmother’s family once lived, the only trace of the vanished Jewish community was a small plaque in English and Hebrew at the edge of a park, where two teenagers casually asked him for a cigarette. The hotels in town still bear Jewish names, though the people behind them are long gone.