The search for the man from Olevsk

NICK EICHER, HOST: This is The World and Everything in It, I'm Nick Eicher.

JOSEPH SLIFE, HOST: And I'm Joseph Slife. In recent months my wife has been working on gathering family photos, going back several generations, scanning them and getting them organized online. We've learned some things about our family heritage that we never knew before. Maybe you've had a similar experience from working on a family tree or perhaps reading a diary or journal kept by one of your ancestors. Regrettably, many people know previous little of their family heritage. Our special correspondent Susan Olasky tells us about one such person you might know. He happens to be our editor-in-chief. Here's a report about his search to find someone, anyone, who knows the family story.

SUSAN OLASKY, REPORTER: Thanksgiving makes me think of family ties and traditions.But when my husband, Marvin Olasky, thinks about family he always hits a dead end. His family had few traditions. They did not share family stories.

Louis Olasky, Marvin’s grandfather, was a Jewish immigrant to the United States. He emigrated from Ukraine. But his family never knew details of life in his old country … or of his journey to America.

OLASKY: There’s a certain myth out there about warm Jewish families, and extended families. My particular family was not particularly warm. In fact, you would perhaps think we were in a Trappist Monastery with vows of silence. There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation that went on. And we were connected to people that lived 3000 years ago. We weren’t connected to people who lived 30 years or 300 years ago.

He knew one thing: The name Olasky came from a village called Olevsk in Ukraine.

OLASKY: I enjoyed it because in the 1960s when I was about 12 or 13 there was a television program called the Man from Uncle so I enjoyed thinking of my grandfather as the man from Olevsk. And I also enjoyed it that we were living in the Boston area where there were lots of O’Learys and O’Laughlins, and I liked having the name Olasky except without an apostrophe and thought it was funny that it came from this town in the Ukraine called Olevsk. 

When his mother died in 2008, Marvin realized he had only two living relatives of her generation. They were in their 90s, and the opportunity to learn family stories was fast fading. I encouraged him to call his cousins to find out what they knew about the family that he did not. Maybe their parents reminisced more than his own had. So he began calling cousins he hadn’t spoken to for 50 years. A typical conversation went like this:

OLASKY: Hi Joyce, this is Marvin, Marvin Olasky, Oh, Marvin!!!

It turns out, the cousins didn’t know much, either. Marvin almost let it go, but then something happened. He received an invitation to a journalism conference in Kiev. Accepting it gave him a reason to visit Olevsk—the small town his grandfather fled 100 years ago.

He found information online …

OLASKY: On the internet there was a notation about a Jewish cemetery and gave the name of an old Jewish gentleman who was the key holder, apparently there was a fence around it. and gave the name and telephone number.

We met Andrei Barkov, head of Hope International in Ukraine. He agreed to drive us to Olevsk.

It’s a two-hour drive. Then Barkov pulls over near a huge sign written in Cyrillic. Under it in English—Olevsk.

Barkov asks, What now? What’s the plan? Marvin doesn’t have much of a plan. Just 15 year-old information from the internet. A name and a phone number for a man named Roman Shapiro.

Andrei makes the call while we wait in the back seat. We can hear an animated conversation in Russian. Then Andrei hangs up. Shapiro is dead. But that was his son, Arkadi Shapiro. He’d be glad to take us to the cemetery.

AMBI: SHAPIRO SPEAKING IN RUSSIAN

We drive to meet him. He’s a weathered-looking man wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigarette … he gets in the car and gives directions to the cemetery.

SHAPIRO: It used to be a totally Jewish city.

We arrive and get out.

SOUND: GETTING OUT OF CAR

Shapiro opens the cast iron gate.

SOUND: FOOTSTEPS IN CEMETERY

We walk slowly through the crowded graveyard. Iron fences surround many of the graves. Stones with the star of David and etched with photographs--in the Russian style.

Shapiro finds his father’s grave. The guy from the Internet.

AMBI: SHAPIRO SPEAKING IN RUSSIAN

Marvin looks for graves with the name Chaya—his great grandmother—or Yehoshua—his great grandfather.

Where did all the Jews go? Many died in Stalin’s famine of the 1930s. The Nazis killed millions more. Those who survived left for Israel and the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s. Few remain in Olevsk.

AMBI: BACKGROUND CEMETERY SOUND

We head from the cemetery to the nearby site of a Nazi massacre. The road is overgrown. Invisible. Forgotten. Andrei translates the Russian words on the monument …

BARKOV: READING MEMORIAL PLAQUE: "German invaders killed 900 children, women and elderly people. civil inhabitants..."

OLASKY: Just looking up at the trees and thinking... These folks who had been peaceful, they had lives, they had families, they had work, they had the culture and they’re just marched out there, stripped, and massacred. And their last sight was looking up at these tall trees.

We left Olevsk knowing little more about Marvin’s family than when we came. He found no grave. He found no long lost relatives. So what did he learn?

OLASKY: Our lives are short, and left to ourselves. If it’s just ourselves. If it’s just our material existence, we do die and we may be remembered for a while, but basically other people will forget us. The joyful thing is that God does not forget. The joyful thing is that for all those whom God blesses have life that goes on and the stuff that has disappeared on earth still has meaning in heaven. Those lives have not been lived in vain.

It did become clear why his grandfather didn’t talk about his past.

OLASKY: The joy of being in a free country, the misery of even thinking about the terrible things he had personally experienced there, and the even more terrible things that people he knew had experienced there. So why talk about it. You have the language barrier but you also have a deliberate desire that those old times are best forgotten...

And he learned a way to think about his own place in that family story.

OLASKY: I am cut off from the past. But in many ways, My past now is not the history of my own people or family. It’s the history of the church. That’s a family. And it’s the history of the country. That’s a family.

For The World and Everything in It, I’m Susan Olasky.

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