Esfir Lupyan - December 17, 2007
Return to Belorussia
But even now in Minsk still this plaza is everybody knows that was ghetto and government wanted uh, reconstruction, forget about that, and they have a big, big uh, grave where 50,000 Jew was buried in this place and it's deep, deep pit, you know, and when it's raining or snowing, it's water and everything and... Now every, every... Annually, people gather as Jews, gather from all country, came to this place and many speeches, many, you know uh, flowers. Flowers, you know. It's like, like five store building, flowers. But before I live in... Before I immigrate uh, this place was, you know, like I'd say like holy place. Everybody come and government forget that and when rab.. rabbi want... Rabbi want to--from Lithuania--want to make a speech, they turn on uh, radio so loudly that nobody could hear this, any words. I don't know what now. I even don't want to hear this thing. I don't want to go in this.
You've never been back.
No, not back. Even for one week I cannot. Maybe, maybe the rest of my life I don't know. My mother, my mother grave there. I'd have to see her.
Your mother is buried there?
Her grave in Minsk.
In Minsk.
Yeah, yeah.
Didn't she come here with you?
No, she was died. She was died in nineteen eighty... eighty-five.
So, you didn't come here until...
Oh, we were to come, we were to come, uh... When our relative from here in Detroit, they found us and they invite us and uh, I stayed a little a year to get permission. When we had permission to stay, they close door. It was...
No Jews.
They, they not allowed us and I, I lost my job. My children suffered, suffered. We were exclude from school because they want immigrants from Israel, you know, so I wait another ten or eleven years to get, you know, permission to stay both times. It's terrible. So, all our life in Is... In Belorussia, I would never wish to anybody, this life. But, you know, I was young, I was young, married, children.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn