International Holocaust Remembrance Day is on Monday. There are many gripping accounts of that tragic time contained in Yizkor books. I wanted to find an excerpt for this week that captured those memories in a special way. There is perhaps no more eloquent expression of grief and pain and anger than what people say when they are facing death in days or hours. Such last words were written by Jews on the walls of the Great Synagogue in Kovel (Ukraine), where they had been rounded up and taken to await extermination. They wrote with pencils, pens or whatever other implements they could find. Shlomo Perlmutter, who visited the synagogue after the war, was struck by one note whose writer “had obviously spent much effort to do it with his finger nails in the hard wall… There were dried blood stains near the writing.”

The notes which follow Perlmutter’s account speak for themselves.

I have excerpted the notes and rearranged the order in which they were transcribed in the Kovel Yizkor book. 

URL: https://www.facebook.com/JewishGen.org/posts/2777130875642383?__tn__=K-R

Bruce Drake

Silver Spring, MD

Researching: DRACH, EBERT, KIMMEL, ZLOTNICK

Towns: Wojnilow, Kovel