Dreaming Backward: Reflections on Holocaust Legacy, Memory, and a Scrap of Paper from 1944

 The Boxes After Death

After my father died, I eventually got around to going through what seemed like endless boxes and folders of papers that he had left behind. Psychologically, I think I wanted both to savor the process and postpone it at the same time. I was still not used to being in the world without my parents.

My beloved father, Max (Mordechai) Dunetz, was many things to many people: a Hebrew teacher and school principal, journalist, writer, and community leader. To me, however, he was always my greatest “teacher of life.” He was also a Holocaust survivor who endured unimaginable suffering and the destruction of nearly his entire family and world. From a family of six and dozens of extended relatives living in Eastern Poland before the war, only my father, his older sister, and one cousin remained alive.

Unlike many Holocaust survivors who concealed their painful memories from their children and from the world, my father spoke rather openly about what had happened. Over the years I heard, many times, the story of the German invasion of Zhetl, his town (shtetl), in July 1941, the suffering in the ghetto, the massacres, the labor camp, his escape to the forests, and his years fighting and surviving as a partisan in the forests of what is today Western Belarus.

But while he shared the facts of his story, the emotional landscape beneath those facts remained mostly hidden.

He rarely spoke about what was happening inside him then. About grief. Fear. Loneliness. Love. Rage. Hope. About what it meant to lose almost everyone he loved before the age of twenty and somehow continue living afterward.

It was precisely those unspoken emotions that I spent much of my life trying to understand. I wanted to ask him - in fact, I did ask him numerous times - but somehow my own emotions and fear of hurting him never allowed me to fully go forward. There seemed to be an invisible border between us that neither of us fully knew how to cross.

When Memory Changed Hands

Painfully, during the last years of his ninety-six years of life, dementia gradually overtook my father’s mind and memory. The man who had carried these stories for decades deep in his heart and soul slowly lost the ability to tell them. Suddenly I found myself remembering my father’s Holocaust story better than he could remember it himself.

There was something profoundly disorienting about this reversal.

I began to wonder: how does one safeguard and pass on another person’s memories when those memories are not truly your own? How do you carry forward experiences that belong to someone else’s heart?

The Envelope Inside the Envelope

One day, while sorting through old folders and papers that had been neatly and meticulously cared for, I uncovered an envelope sealed shut with deteriorating Scotch tape. Inside it was another envelope.

Immediately I sensed that whatever was inside had mattered deeply to my father.

My heart began beating faster.

What was this that had been hidden away so carefully for decades?

Inside the envelope was a small pile of handwritten scraps of paper. Some were faded almost beyond recognition. Some were written in Yiddish, others in Russian and Hebrew. At first, none of it made much sense to me.

And then one particular scrap of paper caught my attention.

On it was written a date in Yiddish:

May 8, 1944.

I remember touching the paper lightly, almost to make sure it was real. Then instinctively I shifted into what I can only describe as “preservation mode.” If this fragile scrap of paper had somehow survived nearly eighty years - through war, displacement, immigration, decades of life, and the death of its owner - then I suddenly felt responsible for making sure it continued to survive.

But it was more than historical preservation.

Something about touching that paper felt almost sacred.

Entering 1944

As I held it, I felt momentarily transported across time into a world I had previously known only through fragments of stories, silences, tears, and imagination. Here I was in the present day, yet somehow I also felt myself entering the emotional world of my father at age twenty-one.

I knew roughly where he was in his wartime story in May of 1944. He was still in the forests of Western Belarus, hiding and fighting with the partisans. Liberation by the advancing Soviet Army was still two months away. He had recently survived a near execution by his own partisan commander, and a shameful discharge, after falling asleep while on guard duty following an exhausting night operation.

These were stories I had heard many times before.

But always as history. As narrative. As documentation.

Now, for the first time, I felt I was hearing my father’s heart beating beneath the story.

Fania

It took considerable effort, assistance from translators around the world, and later the help of modern technology to partially decipher the faded writings. Even today, I cannot be entirely certain what every line says.

But gradually another picture began to emerge.

The notes spoke about loneliness. About longing.About emotional emptiness.

And about a young woman named Fania.

Who was she? By coincidence, Fania is also the name of his surviving sister.

Who was this “other Fania”, I sat bewildered at what I had discovered.

A lover?A companion?Someone who died?Someone my father lost in the chaos of war?

I realized with astonishment that I had never heard her name before.

How could this be?

My father and I had spent years speaking about his past. Together we had prepared materials for a journey back to his hometown of Zhetl in the year 2000. We had gone through testimonies, books, documents, and historical archives. Yet somehow this part of his emotional world had remained hidden.

Or perhaps forgotten.

I will never know.

I felt gratitude that my father had known love amidst such devastation. And at the same time, something else surfaced too: regret, confusion, even a strange feeling of having been left outside a hidden chamber of his life.

One translated passage from the notes read:

“I feel so lonely, so sad.Never will my heart love as it once loved.Forever will a wound remainAnd untold longing, dreams.”

Another line read:

“And alone like the tree in the fieldIs how I stand in my life today.”

Reading these words, I suddenly encountered not the survivor I had always known, nor the father who raised me, but a shattered young man still struggling to remain emotionally alive inside a collapsing world.

Listening to My Father’s Heartbeat

What moved me most was not only the loneliness in these writings, but the fact that even amidst death, violence, and unimaginable loss, some part of my father still reached toward love.

Again and again, beneath the despair, there seemed to remain a fragile insistence on connection, on feeling, on humanity itself.

That realization changed something in me.

Finally, I had a glimpse of my father’s emotional world in that fateful year of 1944. I found myself “dreaming backward” - wondering what he was feeling at that time, how he was managing to live with the violent murder of his parents, brother, sister, extended family, town, and entire world as he had known it.

Legacy as a Two-Way Street

For years I had thought about legacy mostly as something we pass forward to future generations. Stories. Values. Teachings. Memory.

But while holding that scrap of paper, I began to sense another dimension entirely.

Perhaps legacy is not only about passing something onward.

Perhaps legacy is also an attempt to travel inward and backward.

To imagine.

To try, however imperfectly, to enter the emotional lives of those who came before us.

Perhaps there is a “two-way street” of legacy.

Not only passing forward - but also reaching back.

Trying to imagine the fears, hopes, loneliness, courage, and inner worlds of those whose lives eventually made our own possible.

Of course, we can never truly go back in time. We cannot fully know another person’s inner life. Much of what we imagine will always remain partly projection, partly longing.

And yet perhaps imagination itself becomes a bridge. A bridge not only into what our loved ones of previous generations did, but into what they felt - and how they somehow continued to choose life when hope itself must have seemed impossibly distant.

A Conduit Across Time

A tiny piece of paper in faded ink, barely legible, surviving from one of the darkest chapters in human history - a chapter that decimated families, worlds, and entire civilizations of memory. Not only a legacy to pass on, but a conduit across time.

Perhaps legacy is not only about carrying stories forward, but also about dreaming backward - using imagination, memory, and love to reach toward the inner lives of those who came before us. 

Not only to connect the dots of history, but to connect to the hearts and souls of those whose lives continue quietly within our own.