How fragile are the traces of the past ?La fragilité des traces du passé
» The three class photographs saved from the past
Thanks to the discovery of eight photos taken the same day, in the personal archives of Tuvie Bal-Shem, one of the redactors of the Sefer Telz, I was able to determine in 2008 that the earliest one was taken in 1931 . Some 30 of her classmates from different classes appear in them; it is not always easy to determine whether a certain girl of 13 or 14 is the same child seen in an older photo. It took some time after I recorded the testimony of Mr. Genys in Telz in July 2000, before I realized that some of the 500 girls were indeed here, before my eyes, in these photographs which I had looked at since my early childhood. They were a few of the rare treasures my mother had brought along in her book bag when she fled Telz in the last days of June 1941.