Once There Was a Small Shtetl Named Lunna
by Ruth Marcus

In August 2006, I accompanied Eliezer Eisenshmidt, his granddaughter Liat and Mira Feingold (her father Aba Margalit was born and grew up in Lunna) on a visit to Lunna. Impressions and reflections of this visit, together with selected photos, are presented in the article which can be accessed via the link: https://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/newsletters/grodno/Lunna/index.html

More pictures from the visit to Lunna are shown below (©2006, Ruth Marcus)

Our Visit to Lunna in 2006
by Mira Feingold

From the time I met Ruth Marcus I have known that a day will come when we will visit the "shtetl" where my parents and Ruth's father were born. They came to Eretz Israel in the early 1930s. They settled in Eretz Israel and even managed to support their families who remained in Lunna.
Both Ruthie and I were born in Israel. During my childhood I heard many stories about Lunna. I heard about names of people, their occupations, the landscape, the atmosphere in the shtetl and even its individual smells.

When the day came and the sign "Lunna" appeared in front of my eyes I became very excited. The car that took us from Grodno entered Lunna. We saw the houses, some of bricks and other from wood. The market square was empty. The church nearby was sparking with whiteness. From the municipality building, there is a road leading to a monument recently built, a memorial to those who were killed by the Nazis. We got permission to put a memorial plaque in Hebrew writing for the memory of the Jewish victims.

Dear Eliezer Eisenshmidt who escorted us, pointed at the houses where our parents had lived. A young family living in my grandmother's house was unfriendly, so I did not ask permission to come in. I observed every plank of wood on the outside of the house and the fence. I tried to picture my grandmother's entrance and exit from this little house. My great-grandmother's house however was destroyed.
Eliezer continued pointing at the Jewish homes mentioning the names of the Jews who had once lived there. On the roof of one house we saw a "Magen David" symbol. Other houses had on top the year they were built. Another house had the initials of the name of the Jewish owner. It is silent evidence to Jewish presence.

We continued towards Zaleski Forest and the Niemen River, the places of entertainment and rest for the local residents and their guests. The river appeared in its glory. I felt my mother's footsteps alongside me... I could not physically distance myself from this place.

A major part of the visit in Lunna was spent at the Jewish cemetery. Two years ago, a group of American students fenced the area, removed the wild grass and tried to clean the gravestones and read the inscriptions. Today, once again we found the cemetery overgrown and neglected… Eliezer prayed "Kadish". There was nothing to do more.
Lunna the "shtetl" exists. The Jewish population has been erased.

Reflections From a Visit To Lunna
by Alex Gisser

The following are just some random, unrefined thoughts I shared a few years ago, by e-mail, with Ruth Marcus …

In 2003, I went "solo" to Belarus, no tour group or anything… (I obtained my visa for Belarus in Budapest – a long and amusing story in itself). My hotel was pre-booked in Grodno for five nights but I did not stay in Grodno all that time. In fact, on my second day in Belarus, I visited Lunna for what I thought would be a day trip. I was accompanied by a very nice Belorussian woman who grew up in Lunna and whose father still lives there. (Her brother, I found out, lives near Baltimore, Maryland). Before I knew it, it was sunset, and the last bus back to Grodno had long since departed. The woman generously invited me to spend the night at her father’s home. As it turned out, I actually ended up staying (much to the chagrin of the Belorussian authorities, who apparently were keeping tabs of my failure to return to the hotel) in Lunna with this family for two nights and three full days. The father (about 70 years old) lives on the top of the hill behind the new school. The father had been a bookkeeper at the local Lunna Kolchoz, and actually had grown up in one of the Belorussian villages very close to Lunna. His family apparently moved the entire house (literally) to Lunna a few decades back.

During my stay in Lunna I was able to chat, with the help of my hostess, who speaks English, to many older residents. My hostess seemed very interested and took many notes. In general, the persons I spoke with appeared willing to answer my many questions about Jewish Lunna.

None of the older locals seemed to remember my family, although some vaguely remembered a "busy" butcher shop with more than one person working in it. I had a fairly good idea where the meat shop may have been, based on what my father had told me. I think it was right near where the synagogue near the town- square was (the synagogue is gone and now there is a club there). My dad told me that their house was a two-story house across from the synagogue... I tried to enter the house I assumed was my family's house, which is now a multi-family dwelling, but no one let me in.

The older locals remembered the Wola Ghetto quite well, but the younger townsfolk, including my hostess had never heard of Wola, let alone the Ghetto. I recall that she diligently took notes, and even sketched a small map during the three days I spent asking the older residents as many questions as I could about the pre- and war periods in Lunna. Among other things, I was told that the Jews were able to move around well in the Wola Ghetto (or within Lunna itself? – which does not seem, in fact to be the case), that they “ate well” and there may have been some farm products available (no doubt at a very, very extortionate price), since small town ghettoes were, at least sometimes, better than the larger ones. One person told me that her father had driven one of the horse-drawn carts (“telechki”) used to carry the Jews in the early hours of November 2, 1942, the date of their final deportation to the Kielbasin transit camp, 35 or so kilometers away, near Grodno. Another pointed out the exact roads along which the Jews were driven out of town. Yet another older person, a Polish woman, as I recall, told me that her family had offered a Jewish girl (who she said was her son’s girlfriend) on the day of the deportation, to remain (presumably in hiding) with them, but that the girl preferred to stay with her family as they were being deported to Kielbasin. Whether this story is true or not we will never know … One thing I noticed – not a single person I spoke to in Lunna ever mentioned the word Auschwitz - it was always just that the Jews were taken to Kielbasin. My guess is that many didn't want to know, or care to know, of their Jewish neighbors’ ultimate fate.

My hosts told me a couple of other interesting things. Apparently a number of locals in Lunna did fairly well after the Jews were driven from their homes to the Wola Ghetto and even after the war - not only did they get to live in the former Jewish houses, but to this day, at least one family, I was told, owns a piano they "inherited" from a Jewish family, and others have similar possessions ... Another interesting thing - which was confirmed, in a way, by Mr. Aaron Welbel, is that when the Russians occupied Lunna from 1939-1941, the Jews would at times, in the town square, praise the Communist government (obviously in relation to the prior anti-Semitic post-Pilsudski, Rydz-Smigly, Polish nationalist Government) at rallies of sorts, saying, "Lenin Hurrah, Stalin Hurrah!" and the like. Whether they actually said this, I don't know. I do know from the Welbels that when the Russians entered Lunna, as Mr. Welbel described it - "the Moschiach (Messiah) has come, riding a red horse." ---

By the time I got up after my first night in Lunna, my hosts had already been awake quite some time, had set the table and prepared one of their many very generous meals for me. The father, I learned, had gone out early in the morning, as I think he always does, and hobbled down to the town square - he walks with a cane and a limp, and is not really very mobile. The daughter told me she couldn't believe what her father had just told her. Apparently the people in town were talking about the American Jew who was staying with them who had come to take back his property. On one of the three days I was in Lunna, I was also told that some American who had left before the war had taken back his building on the town square, or something like that, shortly before I went to Lunna. The Poles, in particular, that I had met were very nervous about me, saying that an American Jew had come to Lunna in order to claim back his family's property. In this regard, as I recall, one elderly Polish woman, at some point of our conversation, rather inexplicitly broke off our chat, insisting forcefully (and for no specific reason) that the dark, one-room hovel (I can’t describe it any other way) where we were chatting belonged to her. With that, she broke off the conversation and started rummaging, unfruitfully, through an old wooden drawer for the paper she had received from the government providing this. (The house, I believe, had once belonged to a Jewish family). If I remember correctly, this woman responded, when I asked her whether she missed the Jews of Lunna, fumbled a bit, then responded hesitantly, and somewhat incoherently, something to this effect: “Well yes, they would have let me stay in this house.”

That said, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that my Belorussian hosts were very nice, and did not have any stereotypes, that I know of. Other locals, particularly Poles, however, commented how the Jews were rich and had “jewels and gold” (indeed, in Volpa, which is about 12 km from Lunna, where my grandmother was born, I noticed, when I went to the cemetery, that many graves were dug up and there were holes in the upended gravestones. When I asked why, I was told, "Because the Jews were rich, and that’s where they hid their jewels and gold."... )

Some Lunna locals - or mainly the Poles – told me that the Jews had dug a tunnel from the old synagogue (now the club) all the way to the Niemen River. It is very mysterious, and almost certainly an apocryphal tale - but we have similar myths about American Indians in the United States.

One local woman (perhaps the former mayor of Lunna or her colleague) wrote down (in Cyrillic letters) several names of Jews from Lunna that she or others knew about. Those names are: Korangold, Kogan, Yankel [Welbel] and Kosowski - corn buyers; Rubinshtein - blacksmith; Isar - tailor; Novick - bakery owner; Archick - cattle slaughterer; Fruma - fur shop owner; Zlotoyabko - store owner; Barachowicz - cash desk; Zelick - brick-works.

I must say, to me, Lunna seems so devoid of life and vibrancy now, and, at least as I envision it, was so much more a vital town when Jews lived there. Nevertheless, something rather unusual happened the whole time I was there. I recall walking down the dirt path down to the Niemen from Lunna, and I felt - literally - some type of vibration - like when a rock is dropped in the water and it makes concentric rings – I felt some type of energy, some type of presence, of Jews remains in Lunna. On that path, I felt, and could almost see, Jews walking those same steps down to the river, say, on a Saturday. That is, it was my very real impression that there is still something remaining - very psychically, if not physically – after all, 500 years of presence doesn't completely disappear just like that. To my mind, there are still ripples or energetic traces of the Jews of Lunna there, and I felt it physically - it was amazing, and, as I have said, this feeling really didn't leave me the whole time I was in Lunna (I felt it, though much less so, in Volpa, as well.) I also have to say that this feeling was not upsetting at all - in fact, I felt myself very at home with it and I wanted to stay with this feeling the entire time I was there. Of course, those energetic traces will eventually disappear - probably this is similar to the American Indians (I grew up on a major Indian battleground, but, because it was so many hundreds of years ago, I (I can’t speak for others) don’t really feel their presence anymore there).

Anyway, all I can really say is that this feeling was so strong that you could almost touch it. It raises, a much broader philosophical question, of course, and that is, what will we, as humans on earth today, be leaving behind after we are gone from here? In Eastern thought, I guess one could describe it as karmic energy; that is, if karma is simply the law of cause and effect (I do something and it will have an effect on something else...), then we cannot but help to touch others and our environment by our actions… I am convinced that Lunna still has (at least to me) a significant amount of Jewish karma...

Below are three photographs taken in Lunna (©2003, Alex Gisser)
 

This site is hosted at no cost by JewishGen, Inc., the Home of Jewish Genealogy. If you have been aided in your research by this site and wish to further our mission of preserving our history for future generations, your JewishGen-erosity is greatly appreciated.