My father Jacobi Weissberg of blessed memory was bound in great reverence and love to his mother Necha Zupnik of blessed memory who, according to his descriptions, was a warm-hearted, calm, strong woman and who had protected him all his life. In 1941, shortly before the Lemberg pogrom, she begged him to flee. He hid in the nearby woods with his brother Leiwe of blessed memory. When both brothers returned to Lemberg two weeks later, after the pogrom, to look for their mother, they learned that German Wehrmacht soldiers and SS forces from Einsatzgruppe C, with the help of Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, shot Jewish people and buried them in ditches.
As my father stood by such a ditch, "the earth breathed as a man breathes," he told me, breaking decades of silence at the age of ninety. Because those who were shot are also buried under the layer of earth thrown over it, who are still moving, gasping for air and trying to dig out at night. The idea that his beloved mother was among them tormented him throughout his life. My father always suffered because he fled without his mother. The only surviving photograph he owned was of my grandmother Necha. In his final hours, his mother's likeness, his handwritten note addressed to G‑d, and his red Kabbalah bracelet gave him comfort.
“Askenazi Jews traditionally give their children the names of their deceased relatives. The Israeli psychotherapist Dina Wardi describes children who are named after their parents or siblings who were murdered in the Shoah as “living memorial candles”. My father called me Nea in memory of his mother Necha Zupnik.
- Nea Weissberg, 2022
