Braina Kavenoki was born in Bialystock Poland. Braina had a large family including her two grandfathers, Yehudan and Haim, two grandmothers, Tzira and Sara Rachel, her father Yakov, her mother Nehama, her brothers, Nochem, Tsvi, Yisrael, Herschel (the youngest brother). The brothers worked as textile workers and carpenters.

Braina also had 10 uncles and aunts, and dozens and dozens of cousins, as well as some nieces and nephews who were born in the years just before the holocaust. A rough estimate is that her immediate extended family numbered about 60 people in Bialystock. In 1939, when the Germans occupied western Poland, Braina was fortunate to be in Bialystock which was eastern Poland, and which was occupied by the Russian army. There, she was even more lucky and met Isaac, who was a soldier and an officer in the Russian army. He had been fighting in the Russian army since 1935, starting the Finnish Russian war.

Isaac and Braina fell in love and were married in Bialystock. This made Braina the wife of a Soviet army officer, and because of that, when the Germans invaded the remainder of Poland in 1941, she was able to quickly escape with her mother to Kazakhstan, where she remained for the war. In Kazakhstan, however, her mother was killed by a thief, and so eventually she was alone.

When the war was finally over, Isaac and Braina managed to reunite. Braina then returned to Bialystock. She searched and searched for all the survivors. Of her family of around 60 people, she and one cousin (on her father’s side) were the only survivors. Braina then, in 1945, had a daughter, but unfortunately, due to the very harsh conditions of the time, this little girl died. In 1948, Braina had a son, Sam and James’s Grandfather, Jacob (child photo below), and he grew up for 10 years in western Ukraine.

Braina entered the names of her father, mother, brothers, nieces and nephews in the Yad Vashem memorial database in Israel. This included her 4 year old niece, Yocheved, who was the daughter of her brother Nochem. On the left is the entry for her younger brother, Herschel. In the bottom left, you can see that she lists the “date of death” as “1942 (?). Ultimately, Braina never really knew exactly how and when her family was murdered. However, from some history from Yad Vashem and other records, it is possible that they were murdered in gas chambers in Treblinka, in November 1942.

This story speaks to the importance of memory and remembering the victims of the Holocaust. Had Braina her cousin not survived, the story, and even the names of her family would not be remembered or even known. Braina was fortunate to be outside of the Nazi occupation during the war. Despite the stories of survivors of concentration camps, in general, most – in fact, nearly all, did not survive. Only a few family members are left to tell the story. There are likely many entire families whose stories or names will be known.

Isaac Gorelik was born in Schedrin, Belorussia. Of Isaac, we do not have pictures as a child because the family was poor.

Isaac liked to recount a story, that he had once been visited by a fortune teller in the village he grew up in, and the fortune teller told him two things: First, that he would marry somebody not from the village or even the same country. And secondly, that there would come a time where everyone would go one way, and he would go another, and this would save his life.

After Isaac and Braina married, Isaac had to continue to fight in the war. He was in the artillery, and fought in major battles across Eastern Europe. Below is a photograph he made (on the left) with another soldier (on the right) when they found a camera with film (he kept the film with him for the entire war) in a bombed out house in the middle of the war.

At one point during the war, Isaac found himself in an alley, with several other members of his unit. They were all running down the alley and came to a fork in the road. At the last second, just as all of the other soldiers ran left, Isaac ran right. He heard the sound of machine gun fire as all the soldiers who ran left lost their lives. He believed that this was the time he would “go the other way” and be saved. During the war, Isaac was eventually captured by the Germans during a battle. He kept his identity as a Jew a secret. The prisoners of war were led on daily marches in the late evening from a work site to a camp by their guards, and Isaac and a few others noticed that in the distance there was a “dark area” on the horizon. He thought it was a forest, but one evening he and a few others made a run for it, and it turned out to be a large hill. They hid against the side of the hill for hours, until they felt sure they had escaped. Isaac then joined resistance fighters known as the “Yugoslavian Partisans” and managed to survive most of the rest of the war with them.

Isaac, after seeing the devastation to the Jewish communities in Europe, decided that “a Jew must live in his own country”, and in 1958 he, Braina and Isaac escaped the Soviet Union via Poland and arrived in Israel. He lived there, working as a butcher in Be’er Sheva, Israel, and then retired and died in 1990. Braina lived until 2015, when she died at the age of 97. Her cousin too lived in Israel and her own family, who are now James and Sam’s fourth cousins. Before she died, Braina saw baby pictures of Sam and James. All her life, she remained a person who was well loved by all her neighbors and friends, and despite all she went through, remained energetic, focused, and loved to keep little “tsatskes” or small ornaments in her home.

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