How fragile are the traces of the past ?

The mother of the author rarely refers to the extermination of her neighbors, classmates, and friends from childhood and adolescence spent in Telz. On the other hand, this brief anecdote returns again and again like a leitmotiv: she was probably not more than twelve years old when, as a fresh student at the Yavne school in Telz, where all instruction was conducted exclusively in Hebrew, she wrote a composition that began with the word “bin'ourai” (in my youth). On the day when the director of the school came to class to hand back the assignments, he asked Rosa Portnoi to stand up and asked her gently, “bat kama at?” (how old are you)?

On her return to Lithuania in 1992, Rosa obstinately refused to return to Telz, where only phantoms would have been there to greet her. From that past time she has kept three class photographs. The faces of several of her classmates and teachers appear there. Blessed with a sharp memory, she has long remembered the name of each teacher, a few of her classmates names and numerous details about the school curriculum and atmosphere.

Now that her memory is failing, this anecdote recurs, posing a piercing question.

Stimulated by this narrative, the author was compelled to tell this story from the perspective of life, the awakening lives of these young girls and women.

These three photographs must have been taken between 1931 and 1935 (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,the memory book of the city, the author was able to determine that the earliest one was taken in 1931). How many 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 earlier photo. It took some time after the testimony of Mr. Genys, one of the 3 last survivors in Telz in July 2000, to realize that some of the 500 girls were indeed here, before the eyes of the author, in these photographs which she has looked at since her early childhood. They were a few of the rare treasures her mother had brought along in her book bag, with a miniature china teapot and its two tiny cups, when she fled Telz in the last days of June 1941.