by Thomas J. Scheff (February 2012)

The end of WWII was in 1945, when I was 16. It brought rejoicing in my family, but also a shocking sadness. Through my father’s inquiries, we learned that all of his family in Vilna, Lithuania, had been killed in the Holocaust. His father, mother, and sister died on the first day of the war, when the Germans took over the Baltic States. My father’s brother Hym had immigrated to France earlier, where he became a French citizen. However, as we learned when the war was over, he was deported to a concentration camp when the Germans overran France and at some point during the war died in a camp. more>>>