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Sunday, April 6, 2008

Six of Six Million by Diane Jacobs Moore

My friend Diane Moore, a quilter extrodiaire, has done it again. This time with a piece made special for a fundraiser auction at our synagogue. May 1, is Holocaust Remembrance Day so this piece is extra special and timely because it depicts one family's losses during that time. I will let Diane tell you about her quilt, first with the photos and then I will add her words. She told me she is available to answer any questions you may have after viewing this piece. Leave questions for Diane in the comments section and I will make sure she gets them.

Double Click on photos to see them enlarged in more detail. The third photo shows the whole quilt wall hanging. The words you see are in Yiddish.















Diane wrote: Shmiel went to NY. Came back to Bolechow because there he was a king. (Eldest son of many, Jewish prince, needed to be the big frog in a small pond.) Like Otto Frank, he wrote a lot of letters to America looking for help, many of them to his brother who was Daniel's grandfather. And there is a photo of him in uniform. Daniel is the spitting image of him. He and his second daughter, Frydka, were hidden in a tiny cellar meant for pickle jars and such. When Daniel found the place, there was a round woven rug over the trap door, and a ring to pull it up.
Frydka was so beautiful and had such a strong personality that everyone who started to talk about anyone in the family wound up talking about her.
Lorka was in the forest with the partisans. Her friend remembered how she always had the first strawberries of the season; her father brought them from Lemberg in his truck. His two trucks played a big part in his story.
Lemberg became Lvov (now Lviv); did you see the bit of map in Shmiel's section with Lvov on it?
Ruchele, only 16, was picked up with two friends (the little medallion) and a lot of other people. They spent three terrible days in the Catholic building, pretentiously called the Dom but really just a square ugly building. It's outlined in her section, as is the synagogue. After that they were taken to a beautiful field (someone said
"It was always in a beautiful place") and shot on a plank over a trench already dug.
Ester and Bronia we know less about as people because all the survivors who were still alive to talk to Daniel were contemporaries of the older girls. Ester's contemporaries were dead even if they survived the war; Bronia's didn't survive. And survivors who were friends or sweethearts of the older girls knew Ester only as a balebosteh and Bronia only as a child still concerned with her games.
Ester probably crocheted; people said ladies in that town did. The crochet lace I included was made by an old lady in central Europe; Libby gave it to me. There's a freight car in that section too.

Addition from Diane: Daniel Mendelsohn is no relation to me, but I have for the last few years been working on translations from the Yizkor book of the shtetl my grandparents came from, so a lot of what DM (hey, he has my initials, what does that mean?) found out sounded familiar to me. His town, Bolechow, is in Galicia, at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Mine, Vladimirets, is farther north, up by the Pripet Marshes and the border of Belorus. That province is called Volhynia. Both were Polish between the wars and are in Ukraine now, and had a lot of Ukrainian population then.
Oh, about the time -- I started the quilt in January and finished about April 1. I thought about it for quite a while before I started.
Diane"

9 comments:

  1. Took me awhile to down load all the pictures. This is beautiful work. Wow. how long did she take to do this quilt? What a memory piece. Beautiful.

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  2. Utterly wonderful way to bring together all these stories...and beautiful quilting.
    Lisa

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  3. Lovely quilt. I love the cloth of little houses. Beautiful additions of stones and jewels. Very sad.

    The story, so sad. I can follow it yet am confused. Who is Daniel? The quilt makers husband? Why did he find the hideaway place? Sorry, I'm a writer so I look for more links to help me as i read the story. that's just technical stuff. Probably Diane is so familiar with the story that it's hard to know how to tell it to strangers.

    Thanks for sharing this quilt Lynn. And for reminding me that May 1 is remembrance day.

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  4. Suki, the answer to your question is on the written square in second photo that Diane sewed to the back of her quilt.

    David Mendelsohn wrote a book called: The Lost: A Search For Six of Six Million, about his search for his family members. Diane read this book and was inspired by it to make this quilt.

    I will wait to see if Diane answers any of your other questions. She is not a blogger but an emailer so I will transfer her answers in here.

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  5. lynn, Diane: sad sad history, and the quilt is beautiful and helps us not to forget - and to pray for peace, reason and love. Andrea

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  6. Thanks Lynn. I had actually read that square but forgot by the time I got to the words. That's the way my brain works nowadays.

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  7. Today Diane wrote to say:
    " Daniel Mendelsohn is no relation to me, but I have for the last few years been working on translations from the Yizkor book of the shtetl my grandparents came from, so a lot of what DM (hey, he has my initials, what does that mean?) found out sounded familiar to me. His town, Bolechow, is in Galicia, at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Mine, Vladimirets, is farther north, up by the Pripet Marshes and the border of Belorus. That province is called Volhynia. Both were Polish between the wars and are in Ukraine now, and had a lot of Ukrainian population then.
    Oh, about the time -- I started the quilt in January and finished about April 1. I thought about it for quite a while before I started.
    Diane"

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  8. oh my goodness, this is incredibly beautiful. and what a glorious way to never ever forget! thanx for posting it for us all to see and be reminded.

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  9. Wow!
    an unforgettable work for an unforgettable event.

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Thanks for leaving your comments as I love hearing from you. Your words of encouragement are why I continue to draw!