Helaine Greenberg

Voices from Vilna Helaine Greenberg

To my great joy, I found poignant letters in my family home describing my father's and his family's life and current events from 1930 to 1940 in Vilnius, Lithuania. On a "roots trip" there in 2000, the letters were shown to the Director of the Vilna Gaon Museum who thought them valuable. Voices is a creative, non-fiction memoir told from the perspective of a first generation 'child'. The letters are arranged chronologically, interspersed with letters to my father telling him what I found. Sadly, new photographs show evidence of ongoing anti-Semitism. I wrote this story as a memorial to the letter writers. Chapter One contains love letters to my mother from my father. It also describes his desperate attempts to leave the country. Chapter Two shows how hard my father tried to get some of his family out, especially his sister married to a rabbi. Rabbis were targets of oppression. Chapter Three illustrates how difficult life became in Vilna even before the Holocaust. It was a cry for help. They knew what was coming, yet kept hope alive. I'm glad my father could not go back with me because the experience would have been too painful for him.