"At 50, I Discovered a Shocking Secret About My Family"

Ilana Shodron-Minkov was 50 when she discovered an incredibly shocking secret about her family. It was a few years after her father passed away, when she felt a desire to know more about her extended family. As part of this, she approached her father's brother and asked him to tell her more about their family members.

Initially, the uncle told her things she already knew - that both of her parents were born and raised in the U.S., and after their immigration to Israel, they settled in Timorim, where there was a significant English-speaking Anglo-Saxon community. But then he switched to another topic and began to mention: "During the Holocaust..." At this point, Ilana stopped him, astonished. "I thought he was confused," she recounts nearly twenty years later. "I didn't understand the connection between the Holocaust and my parents since they didn't even live in Europe. Then he continued and shared what my father had never told us: his grandmother, an aunt, and two uncles stayed in Europe during World War II, lived in the town of Mikulinets, and were all murdered with their entire families, none of them survived."

Family Discovery

Ilana mentions that it was a complete shock for her. "My father never told us that he had close family members who were murdered in the Holocaust, not even my mother knew about it, and when I once asked her if any of our close or distant family perished in the Holocaust, she responded: 'Not known to me.' I still don't know the exact reason why Dad concealed this, but I guess he didn't want to hurt us and preferred we don't delve into the past."

From the moment Ilana learned of her relatives she never met, she couldn't rest. "I felt I needed to know more about them, and it seemed impossible to me that a whole family vanished without the people closest to them caring. This drove me to scour various online sites and seek information about the names I had. I also contacted 'Yad Vashem' and finally connected with my aunt in the U.S., through whom the key to the mystery was found."

With the aunt, Ilana found an extremely old letter written in Yiddish, to which the aunt had never attached importance. "She passed it on to me, and I of course immediately sent it for translation," Ilana recounts, her voice breaking. "When I received the translation, I was shaken to my core, and it caused me deep sadness and a choking sensation because it turned out to be a letter written by my grandfather's cousin in a displaced persons camp after the war. In it, he informed my grandfather of the loss of his family. He told him that he had no mother and that his brother was also murdered in the Holocaust. Apparently, the cousin just didn't know then what had happened to the other family members. Today it's known that most of them were likely sent to Belzec extermination camp and perished."

The letter sent by the cousin, translated from Yiddish

Ilana's curiosity grew, and she continued to search for information in other places. "In my online searches, I reached the New York Public Library," she notes, "where I found a book from the community books that existed in Europe, compiling the names of Jews who lived in Mikulinets. I went through the names and discovered the name 'Zelig Shapiro,' next to the address 'Children's Street Kiryat Motzkin.' I realized he lived in Israel and might shed light on the fate of my family members. I attempted to reach him, and to my great surprise, he personally answered my call and told me he personally knew my grandfather's brother and his son Pinchas, nicknamed 'Panya,' whom he went to school with."

"The figures I never met suddenly became tangible," she notes. "When I met Shapiro, he also told me about the child Panya and his sister Ethel—figures that even my father's brother didn't mention in his letter. I showed Shapiro photos I had, and he pointed them out, saying, 'That's Pinchas, my friend.'"

"I then met another woman who also knew my family members. She said, 'They were all tall and handsome people.' At one point, she even suggested I fly with her to see the place where they lived. I joined her, amazed by what was happening, as I never knew I had family from Ukraine, nor did I imagine I'd fly to search for someone there. On our visit to Mikulinets, we went to the place where my relatives lived and discovered that although the houses were destroyed, almost nothing else had changed. My friend showed me where they grew up, where they sold eggs, and where the train station was. I felt I was walking in my family's history and that it wasn’t far away but a part of me."

Must Not Forget

During those days when Ilana uncovered her relatives, she was studying painting, and as part of the homework, she was asked to paint "figures with meaning." "That's when the idea came to me to paint my murdered relatives," she recounts. "I based them on photos I got from my aunt in the U.S., and created a series of paintings depicting my relatives—I painted my grandfather's mother, his sister, and the child Pinchas, Panya, who especially entered my heart. As I painted, I began to understand that my painting had a much deeper meaning than just practice and that I was actually memorializing my relatives, whose graves are unknown nor how exactly they perished. I then also painted my husband's family members who perished in the Holocaust in Latvia and Belarus."

She chose to draw the paintings in black charcoal on white paper. "I painted one after another," Ilana describes, "until I eventually had thirteen paintings—eleven portraits and two paintings from the street in Mikulinets. This series of paintings has been exhibited in several places, and is currently displayed at 'Heichal Shlomo' in Jerusalem from July 2, 2023, to August 27, 2023."

"I feel a great mission to continue presenting it," she emphasizes, "because we must not forget the Holocaust victims, especially at a time when there are attempts worldwide to generalize the Holocaust as something that affected everyone. We must remember in every way that the Holocaust was unequivocally aimed at the extermination of the Jewish people, and like those family members I never got to meet, there were millions more Jews, righteous, good, wise, and talented individuals, who worked in various fields, started families, and simply wanted to live happy lives until the accursed Nazis came."