| Professor Yaffa Eliach (May 31, 1935 [some sources say 1936 or 1937] – November 8, 2016) stands in front of her “Tower of Faces” exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, District of Columbia. Yaffa Eliach was born as Yaffa “Sonia” Sheinele Sonenson in Eishyshok (Ejszyszki), Poland. Her father, Moshe Eliyahu Sonenson (October 13, 1906 – August 27, 1983) traded flaxseed on the export market and her mother, Tzipora Fejga Katz Sonenson (1908 – October 20, 1944), had 2 other children besides Yaffa when World War II started. The parents, Yaffa, Yitzhak Uri Sonenson (January 7, 1931 – December 6, 2004) and Shaul Chaim Sonenson (1941 – May 10, 1942) were able to survive the Communist occupation of Eishyshok, as Moshe was affiliated with Polish leftist movements, but Moshe bribed local Polish farmers to take his immediate out of the town. German troops came in Eishyshok on June 23, 1941, and on September 21, 1941, a Shutzstaffel SS Einsatzgruppen (“deployment group”) entered the town, accompanied by Lithuanian auxiliaries. More than 4,000 Jews from Eishishok and its neighboring towns and villages were 1st imprisoned in 3 synagogues and then taken in groups of 250 to the old Jewish cemetery where SS men ordered them to undress and stand at the edge of open pits on September 25-26, 1941. There, Lithuanian auxiliary troops shot them. The old cemetery is now a site of remembrance with a memorial stone in 3 languages. The new cemetery was destroyed in 1953 and turned into the yard of a kindergarten. No Jews are known to live in the town today; the 9 centuries of Jewish history in Eishyshok ended in the Holocaust. Tzipora’s mother, Alta Rokhel Dvilanski Katz (1886 – September 26, 1941), sister Shoshana Katz (1915 – September 26, 1941) and brothers Moshe David Katz (1918 – September 25, 1941) and Avigdor Katz (1926 – September 25, 1941) were murdered by the SS Einsatzgruppen and their Lithuanian auxiliaries. Traveling separately, Tzipora with baby Shaul, and Moshe with Yaffa and Yitzhak, reached Radun in present-day Belarus. There they went into hiding with Polish farmers in Radun Ghetto. As Nazi German police approached, Polish and Jewish men convinced Moshe and Tzipora that a crying Shaul must be silenced in order to save the group. The baby was smothered, causing severe mental distress in Tzipora. As the Red Army approached Belorussia and Poland in 1944, the Armia Krajowa (“Polish Home Army”) attacked Communist forces. The Sonenson family was sheltering with Red Army officers and soldiers in Eishyshok when the Armia Krajowa attacked on October 20, 1944. To save her family, Tzipora Sonenson left her hiding place in the attic of their house to confront Armia Krajowa operatives. They shot her and Chaim Sonenzon (1944 – October 20, 1944) dead. Yaffa was covered in her mother’s blood and Yitzak cried out, but the Armia Krajowa thought it was Tzipora screaming. They left the house without finding the others. Yaffa, Yitzak, and Moshe survived and immigrated to Palestine. Yaffa married her high school principal, Rabbi Doctor David Eliach (September 13, 1922 – September 20, 2021). In 1954, they immigrated to the United States, where she received her doctorate in 1973. Starting with a nucleus of family photos she and her older brother had squirreled away in hiding, she spent 15 years traveling to all 50 states and many countries searching for photographs, diaries and letters of other Eishyshok residents. In Israel, she knocked on 42 doors of an apartment building to track down 1 family and unearthed a cache of material buried in cans under a palm tree. In Australia, she told a radio station that she was searching for a family known as “the Mice” and was fortunate to get a tip from a caller. She hired security guards to help her gather materials in a former synagogue in a rough section of Detroit. And in several cases she resorted to a kind of bribery — medication, a color television, 4 jogging suits — to persuade families to part with precious photographs temporarily so that she could reproduce them. She spent more than 600,000 dollars of her own money and loans, then supported the project with a Guggenheim fellowship. Professor Eliach ultimately collected 6,000 photographs of Eishyshok townspeople posing at bar mitzvahs, graduations and weddings, and in family groups — accounting for 92 percent of the village’s slaughtered Jews. Some 1,500 photos were selected for the Holocaust museum’s “Tower of Faces,” sometimes called a “Tower of Life,” where photographs are arranged in a narrow, soaring chasm that visitors walk through. The faces render the lives of so many ordinary Jews intimate and vibrant. By 2016, 40,000,000 people had visited the museum since its opening in 1993. Professor Eliach assembled hundreds of the photographs and oral histories into an 818-page book, “There Once Was a World: A Nine-Hundred-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok,” published by Little, Brown & Company in 1998. It was a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award. In 1987, for the 1st time since World War II, Professor Eliach returned to Eishyshok and visited the town’s mass grave. “All the Jews in the town were buried there, but I didn’t feel like I was standing on a grave,” she told Jewish American magazine Forward in 2003. “They were talking to me. They were saying, show the world that we are normal people!” | |
| Image Filename | wwii0604.jpg |
| Image Size | 264.93 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 1200 x 1195 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | January 1, 1998 |
| Location | |
| City | Washington |
| State or Province | District of Columbia |
| Country | United States |
| Archive | United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |
| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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