{"id":13,"date":"2024-06-03T09:26:24","date_gmt":"2024-06-03T09:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/nittaibergman\/teaching\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T08:29:04","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T08:29:04","slug":"personal","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/nittaibergman\/personal\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n
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I have attached here a translation from Yiddish of a letter that my\ngrandfather, Gershon Katz, sent to his brother, Nakhum, who was then living in\nPalestine. Written in October 1944, my grandfather tells Nakhum\nwhat happened to their family and to their Lida community at the hands of the\nNazis and their helpers. He tells him that they are the sole survivors\nof their family \u2013 that their parents, their six siblings, and all of their\nsiblings\u2019 spouses and children were murdered in the Holocaust. He wrote this\nletter, alone in Europe, when he was 30.
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During the war, my grandfather escaped\nfrom a truck heading to Majdanek and joined the partisans operating in the\nNaliboki forest. As a partisan, he participated in the sabotage of\nGerman supply lines, including the destruction of five German army trains -- four carrying supplies and one transporting troops. He then joined the\nRed Army once it advanced to the area in which his unit was operating. As a\nSoviet soldier, he was decorated for bravery for pulling his\nwounded commander to safety while under German machine gun fire.
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To the day he died at the age of 83, my grandfather kept in the bathroom of his\napartment in Tel-Aviv an SS-issued razor and shaving bowl taken from a Nazi\nsoldier whom he had executed. On occasion, he would use the bowl to shave.
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Here is a copy of the original letter<\/a>, and here is its translation<\/a>. I have tried to match town names\nin Yiddish to their equivalent in English, and have transliterated the rest.\nSome of the sentences, such as the first, are difficult to understand. At\ncertain points, I have added punctuation to make the text more readable. Note the address\nthat my grandfather used. The letter arrived, notwithstanding. Nakhum kept the\nletter until his death, after which my grandfather inherited it. My family came\nacross it a number of years ago while going through his old papers.
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Here is a picture<\/a>, taken around 1918, showing my\ngrandfather\u2019s family. My grandfather is the child standing between his seated\nparents, Yosef and Yehudit.  Nakhum, the recipient of the letter, is the\nboy standing second from left.
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It is important we remember. 
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I have attached here a translation from Yiddish of a letter that my grandfather, Gershon Katz, sent to his brother, Nakhum, who was then living in Palestine. Written in October 1944, my grandfather tells Nakhum what happened to their family and to their Lida community at the hands of the Nazis and their helpers. He … Continue reading “Personal”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-13","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/nittaibergman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/nittaibergman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/nittaibergman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/nittaibergman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/nittaibergman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/nittaibergman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/nittaibergman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/nittaibergman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}