The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister
Page 1
Table of Contents
Front Matter
Endorsements
Special Copyright Notice
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
Prologue
Train to Agony
1: Boarding the Train
2: Baby Sarah
Life Before the War
3: Family Background
4: Mama’s Family
5: Educating Anna
6: Move to Taganrog
7: Move to Rostov-on-Don
8: A Day in the Park
9: The Depression in Russia
10: Winter Vacation with Babushka at the Dacha
11: Our Journey by Train
12: Homecoming Welcome
13: Our Fun Time Begins
14: Christmas Church Service
15: Christmas Day
16: Reflections on Childhood
17: Back to Reality
18: Troubled Times
19: Changing Times
20: Wine-Tasting Time
21: Times of Uncertainty
22: Remembrances
23: Germany Attacks Russia
24: Preparations for the Invasion
25: Our World Begins to Crumble
26: Papa Is Found in Hiding
27: My Last Minutes with Papa
28: Papa’s Burial
29: Life without Papa
30: Surviving the German Occupation of Konstantinowka
The Agony Continues
31: August 1942
32: The End of the Line
33: Identification Patches
34: Labor Camp, Our First Assignment
35: The Break
36: Loss of Mama
37: Survival to the End
38: Last Message from Mama
39: Searching for Mama
New Life
40: The Final Arrangements
Afterword: Did It Really Happen?
Appendix A: Life with Nonna
Appendix B: “Is This It? Is This All?”
Appendix C: Documents
Appendix D: Genealogy of Nonna Lisowskaja Bannister
Chronology
Glossary of Names and Places
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
Front Matter
Endorsements
You have only to dip into this astounding memoir to see that the suffering that marked Nonna’s early years was the very thing that God used to shape this remarkable woman. Denise George and Carolyn Tomlin have managed to give Nonna Bannister the same feeling of literary and historical importance that John and Elizabeth Sherrill brough to Corrie ten Boom in The Hiding Place. Read it and weep or read it and rejoice, but above all, read it.
Calvin Miller, Professor of Divinity, Beeson Divinity School.
What a marvelous service has been provided by Denise George and Carolyn Tomlin in bringing to light the untold story of Nonna Bannister! This inspiring volume provides a window into the personal and painful reflections of one of the darkest periods in humna history. Yet readers will be strengthened by reading this most moving and hopeful account of courage, faith, and forgiveness.
David S. Dockery, President, Union University
This book is absolutely captivating. It is an extraordinary glimpse inside the oppressive nature of Russian Communism and the viciously evil heart of Nazi Germany. But, the revelations of human depravity manifested in horrific acts of brutality and murder notwithstanding, rays of God’s Light appear in the form of a Russian Orthodox grandmother, a frail Jewish boy, and a group of Christlike German Catholic nuns and priests. These diaries are at once heartbreaking, hopeful, and unforgettable.
Lyle W. Dorset, Billy Graham Professor of Evangelicalism, Beeson Divinity School
* * *
THE SECRET HOLOCAUST DIARIES
by
NONNA BANNISTER
with Denise George
and Carolyn Tomlin
* * *
Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Carol Stream, Illinois
Visit Tyndale’s exciting Web site at www.tyndale.com
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The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister
Copyright © 2009 by NLB Partners. All rights reserved.
Cover and interior photos are used by permission from the Nonna Bannister family collection.
Published in association with the literary agency of WordServe Literary Group, Inc., 10152 Knoll Circle, Highlands Ranch, CO 80130.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bannister, Nonna, 1927-2004.
The secret Holocaust diaries : the untold story of Nonna Bannister / by Nonna Bannister ; with Carolyn Tomlin and Denise George.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4143-2546-0 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4143-3022-8 (MS Reader)
ISBN: 978-1-4143-3023-5 (Mobipocket)
ISBN: 978-1-4143-3024-2 (Palm)
ISBN: 978-1-4143-3025-9 (Sony)
1. Bannister, Nonna, 1927-2004. 2. World war, 1939-1945—Women—Ukraine—Kostiantynivka (Donetska oblast)—Biography. 3. World war, 1939-1945—Children—Ukraine—Kostiantynivka (Donetska oblast)—Biography. 4. World War, 1939-1945— Prisoners and prisons, German. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Ukraine. 6. Kostiantynivka (Donetska oblast, Ukraine)—Biography. I. Tomlin, Carolyn Ross.
II. George, Denise. III. Title.
DK508.835.B36A3 2009
940.53'18092—dc22
[B] 2008050099
Special Copyright Notice
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Dedication
circa 1990
I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of all those who perished during the Holocaust in World War II, who are no longer here to tell their stories, and also to those who survived the horrors of it all but lost their families and loved ones.
I thank God for the little Jewish boy named Nathan, who died so that I could live.
I want to express my gratitude to the Catholic priests and nuns who were brave enough to hide me from the Gestapo after they had taken my mother away.
I want to express my deepest gratitude to my loving a
nd caring husband, Henry, who has given me his support and his understanding and caring for me—for sharing my feelings with me and helping me throughout our forty-six years of marriage to cope with the many sad memories of the past. I feel that God sent him to me because He knew what I needed to survive the many hard times. Henry took care of me while I struggled through very bad health, and without him and his love and support, it would have been extremely difficult to write this book and to cope with so many horrible memories.
I thank God for giving me three beautiful children—two sons: W. H. (Hank) Jr. and John D., and a beautiful daughter, Elizabeth J. They also have given me a lot of support and love, which I will cherish until I die.
Nonna L. Bannister
TO THE PAST
To the past, the way has been barred,
And what do I need the past for now?
What is there? Bloodied flagstone—
Or a bricked-up door—or an echo
That still cannot die away . . .
However much I beg.
Nonna L. Bannister
Preface
This is the true story of a Russian-American woman named Nonna Lisowskaja Bannister.
The material within these pages comes from the private, handwritten transcripts that Nonna made of her diaries from childhood, World War II, and the years immediately following the war. She expanded and compiled them during the late 1980s, with further commentary based on her memory of events. Translating into English from her original documents, which were written in five languages, Nonna wrote her life story on yellow legal pads and kept them hidden from everyone, including her husband, Henry.
In the 1990s, after decades of marriage, Nonna finally told Henry about her secret past. She also made him promise that he wouldn’t share any of her hidden material until after her death. Henry kept his promise to Nonna, only now making her writings public after her death in 2004.
Nonna had kept a lifetime of secret diaries. She began writing as a young girl and received a diary of her own from her father when she was nine years old. In this childhood diary she described her life, her family, and her dreams, and she included some of her poetry. She also kept a formal diary during the latter years of World War II, when Catholic nuns at a German hospital hid her from the Nazis and nursed her back to health. She continued this diary in the years immediately following the war.
During World War II, when Nonna left the Ukraine and traveled to Nazi Germany, she kept a pillow made of black and white ticking tied around her waist. In this small pillow, she kept her thin childhood diary, various bundles of paper scraps on which she kept notes of her wartime experiences, and several photographs and family documents. In addition to the written record that Nonna left of her memories—transcribed onto pads of paper and then typed by Henry Bannister—the Bannister family has in its possession one of Nonna’s diaries, dated 1947–48; postcards from Nonna’s mother, dated 1944–45; and many other personal documents and photographs from the Word War II era.
Fluent in at least seven languages, Nonna did the translation work herself. She transcribed her diaries from the various languages in which she had written them into English, one of the last languages she learned—which may account for some of the awkwardness of English grammar and sentence construction in her memoir. Also, transcribing the diaries years after the events described in them and adding her own present-day commentary in places, she did not always adhere to a linear progression. Thus, though translation was not necessary, some minor editing was. Efforts were also made to bring Nonna’s family names to a consistent spelling, though it was not possible to maintain any one style of transliteration.
The editors have in some cases combined into one place events that Nonna recorded in different places in her transcripts, as well as giving explanation to the historical chronology in the appendix. Throughout her text, editorial comments have been added where an explanation seemed helpful for better understanding of the transcripts, the historical settings, and Nonna’s family. Some of this commentary comes from Henry Bannister’s remembrances of Nonna’s stories.
Though similar to other memoirs of the war and the Holocaust years, Nonna’s account provides a rare glimpse into the life of a girl who was born to a wealthy family in the Ukraine, experienced great suffering in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and eventually lost her family and her own freedom at the hands of Nazi Germany. It is a story with unusual significance as one of the few firsthand accounts of a girl from a once-privileged family, who fell into the ranks of the Ostarbeiter—the primarily Ukrainian “Eastern laborers” transported to Germany during the war as slave labor under Adolf Hitler’s regime. The fact that she not only survived such turmoil and tragedy but also moved on through faith in God to forgive those who took away so much makes her story all the more remarkable.
Carolyn Tomlin
Jackson, Tennessee
Denise George
Birmingham, Alabama
Summer 2008
Introduction
I have now decided that the time has come when I must share my life story—not only with my loving family, but perhaps with all those who are interested to know what life was like for many of us on the other side of the world before and during World War II. I wish to speak the truth and nothing but the truth—but some things I shall keep to myself—nobody needs them but me. I doubt that anyone reveals the whole truth about oneself, even in confession. There are things in everyone’s life that are known only to oneself and our almighty Father God.
The events described in the following pages were written from my diaries and notes that were transcribed from the four to six languages in which I had written them—starting when I was nine years old. I have translated the poems and thoughts and scripts into English. I have worked on keeping these all together since 1942, when Mama and I left our homeland and were sent to Germany, where we were to be slave labor. In these notes, I kept a record of all the terrors, atrocities, and the new life into which we were thrown. Throughout these ordeals, I never forgot my grandmother and the rest of my family, which had been torn apart and ultimately destroyed—when I would hear a train whistle in the distance, I would immediately think that my dear brother, Anatoly, would be on that train and on his way back to us. This work is an effort to tell the truth about what took place during World War II under the direction of Hitler and his Gestapo troops.
There are not many of us remaining that lived through those very difficult and troubled times and are now free to tell the true stories of life. Many, including my own family, perished before having a chance to reach freedom. I am compelled to write this story because I was a witness to many events that took place then and because I am the only survivor of my entire family.
I do regret that I did not write this story sooner. But when I came to America in June of 1950, I was overwhelmed by my new life. I wanted so much to forget the unhappiness of the past and to make a new and happy life for myself that I actually shut the door to the past and had no desire to dwell on it. And a happy life I have made for myself by falling in love with the most kind and wonderful man and marrying him on June 23, 1951.
When my first son, “Hank,” was born on October 30, 1953, there was just no end to my happiness. I engrossed myself completely in motherhood, and I loved my husband and my son too much to ever even think of my sad past. So I became a wife and a mother full time. Then my daughter, Elizabeth, was born on July 11, 1957, and my happiness and duties as a full-time mother increased. My youngest son, John, was born on March 27, 1959, which happened to be on Good Friday of that year. My family became my only concern, and my entire interest was now directed exclusively to my husband and my children. I was filled with love and the responsibilities of taking care of them and loving them with all my heart and mind.
There were times when I would think about my family that I had lost, and I would think about how close and loving we had been. However, I just could not bring myself to inflict my sad memories on my husband and my still-y
oung children. I did not want anything to interfere with the happiness that we had, and certainly when the children were growing up, my only concern was to protect them from anything that would leave them with depressing impressions. I wanted so very much to create a healthy and happy environment for all of them.
Now that the children have grown up and are well-adjusted and intelligent human beings, I feel that they should know more about their ancestors from my side of the family—that my children must know how they lived and how they died. I also feel that by telling my true life story, I may be revealing some facts from the past that could make a contribution, however small it may be, to the history of mankind.
It is very difficult for me to relive that part of my life even through the memories that are still with me—so precise and vivid. However, I have an uncontrollable desire to write about those years of my life, which were filled not only with sad events but also with happy times when I was growing up and still had all my family. It took great effort to put my story together, but I have had tremendous support from my loving husband. I feel very fortunate to have had him by my side and to have his encouragement. Without this encouragement, it would have been very difficult to go through with it.
When I left Russia, I took with me a passionate love for my homeland the way it was before the Bolshevik Revolution—the Russia I knew from the stories that were told to me by my dear grandmother and my loving parents. My hope and desire is to live long enough to see my homeland, the country so dear to me, become free again as it was before I was born. The hope that I live with and my prayers to God are that I will see—or at least my children and grandchildren will see—Russia become the “Old Mother Rossija” as it used to be—to see Russia return to its beauty and magnificence.