Based on letters, photo's, archive film and interviews I plan to make a documentary about the life of my Jewish aunt, Bejla (Betty) Lulinska and her siblings. Aunty Betty was the youngest sister of my great grandmother Annie Taylor. She and Annie had three other sisters, Esther, Faigl and Dvora, and one brother, Zelig (Sydney). Because I have vivid childhood memories of Betty, she represents for me the link between the "Old World" or "Der Hejm" (The Homeland), as it's referred to in Yiddish, and the modern Jewish diaspora. She was the last to cross this threshold before the Yiddish world was cut off by the holocaust to sink into the darkness of history. With this work I hope, perhaps just for a fleeting moment, to bring back to life the "Old World" in the imagination of the viewer.
This weblog will track the progress of this project as it's happening. Below is a brief summary of the storyline. The rest of the pages in the weblog tell chapter by chapter the whole story as it unfolds with each filming and research trip.
Standing from left to right: Dvora Golomb, Annie Taylor, ? Golomb
Sitting from left to right: Bejla (Betty) Lulinska, Raie Taylor
Storyline
"I'm sorry I called you Aunty Batty. I just didn't understand." Thus ends the surrealistic webcam conversation the documentary-maker has with his deceased Jewish aunt, Betty. During the film the viewer is taken on a journey through Betty's life: back to her birthplace in Lithuania, her search for a new life in Namibia and Scotland, and the loss of her sisters and their families during the Second World War in the Vilna Ghetto and the Estonian Nazi labour camps.
The documentary is the story of an ordinary Jewish woman from an ordinary Jewish family caught in a moment in history which has shaped the modern world: the time of the Jewish diaspora of the 20th Century and the time of the holocaust. Having emigrated from Vilnius, Lithuania to Scotland in 1936, at the invitation of her sister, Betty journeyed on to her sweetheart in what was then called South West Africa, modern-day Namibia. What brought Lithuanian Jews to Namibia? What was life like out there in the thirties in the Kalahari Desert? In any case, their relationship didn't work out. After one and a half months Betty returned to Scotland.
In 1941 Betty and the rest of the family lost all contact with the family in Vilnius. The last that was heard from them was a telegram, a cry for help, after it became known that Hitler had made a deal with Stalin, and Lithuania would fall into German occupation. While there was uncertainty in Lithuania, Betty married Harry Barnett, a cinema manager, in Glasgow, Scotland on 3rd June 1941. A few weeks later after the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, German control of Lithuania was a fact.
In 2009 I was given a photograph of the Lulinsky sisters taken in 1928 in Vilnius (more about this in a future chapter). This photograph sparked off research which led to new insights into what happened to the family during the war. It became clear that a number of family members lived longer than 1941 to endure the hell of the Vilna Ghetto until at least 1942. In the meantime, Betty's nephew on the American side of the family, the son of her sister, Esther, Norman Cohen, fought in the US Army in the Normandy landings, D-Day, in 1944. Was he aware of the plight of his aunts and cousins in Lithuania at the time? And if so, how did this knowledge influence him during the campaign?
The daughter of Betty's sister, Faigl, Basia Daiches, 13 years old when the war started, survived the ghetto to be transported to the Klooga Nazi labour camp in Estonia in 1943, after the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated, to work as a seamstress. She didn't survive the camp. In an attempt to wipe out all traces of their crimes, the Nazis killed all the remaining camp detainees and burned the bodies on specially constructed wooden pyres.
As a child in the 80's I remember visiting Aunty Betty for the last time, in a darkened room in an old age home in Glasgow, shortly before she died. No-one in the family liked her. She was generally regarded by the family as being a very difficult person. Was it because that was simply her nature? Or had it something to do with the difficulties and disappointments that life threw at her? The dream of a life in South West Africa turned out differently than she perhaps had romanticised. Her husband died two years after they were married, leaving her childless. Betty submitted her pages of testimony for her deceased relatives in 1977. She had no more siblings at that point to share this with. She remembered her loved ones in what must have been a tacit solitude. I thought she was weird because of one half-shut eye in which she was partially blind but mainly because of her thick, odd accent. It wasn't until later that I realised that this was a Yiddish accent and it wasn't until much later that I understood what that really meant.
