In the pages of Sefer Kostopol, a scholar found the name of her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor from Kostopol, Ukraine, beside records of the family members who were murdered. The book helped turn a distant hometown into a place filled with people and memories.
Sefer Kostopol belongs to a remarkable body of more than 1,000 memorial books made by Jewish survivors and people who had left Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Known as yizker bikher, a Yiddish term for memorial books, they were created after the Nazi genocide to remember destroyed communities and the people who had lived in them. The books did more than record loss. They preserved the lives that came before it.
Many volumes devote about two-thirds of their pages to prewar life and the remaining third to accounts of Nazi occupation and lists of the dead. Their pages bring together essays from former residents, photographs, maps and personal keepsakes. A reader might see a school group, a sports team or a crowded market square, alongside song lyrics, event flyers, school report cards and sketches of life under occupation.
The books were made by many hands. Each could have 20 to 50 contributors, and sometimes as many as 75. Their writing often sounded warm and conversational, rather than formal. Maps, too, carried personal details: survivors drew them from memory, marking forests and rivers, local names for streets, and stories about homes and shops.
That focus on ordinary life was important. Jewish towns were not only places where violence took place; they were communities where people worked, argued, learned and celebrated. The books helped survivors reclaim and share memories of those lives, while naming loved ones who had been killed. In Sefer Kostopol, the scholar found her grandmother's name among the survivors and the names of her great-grandmother and great-aunt, her grandmother's mother and sister, among the murdered.
The effort began remarkably soon after the war. The earliest book studied by the scholar came from Volkovisk, Belarus, and was published in 1946, one year after the liberation of Auschwitz. Its creators drew on an older Jewish tradition: the pinkes, or community register, which recorded local affairs such as meeting minutes, school budgets and political candidates. Like those registers, the memorial books were assembled by many contributors and often had an untidy, personal structure. Some even used the word pinkes in their titles.
In an introduction to the Navaredok, Belarus, memorial book, compiler Eliezer Yerushalmi described it as part of a chain carrying community history to future generations. That idea still runs through these volumes. A name, a hand-drawn map or a photograph of a school class can help people see a vanished town not as an abstraction, but as a home. The books preserve evidence of what was lost, and of the full lives that made those communities worth remembering.