Illustration by Denis Shifrin

On a stormy night I saw Lala in my dream. It was the first time I saw her. She had my father's features, with narrow lips and a sharp nose. She had my grandmother's hands, with wrinkled skin, a crooked middle finger and the rough fingernails of a hard-working woman. Her hair, in a thick braid down to her waist, was blond and shiny and her eyes were glowing. In my dream Lala was thirteen. She walked erect, her shoulders wide and her tiny young breasts visible beneath her blouse. Her eyes were joyful and on her lips I saw the shy smile one often sees on the lips of girls turning into women.

A few days before Lala appeared in my dream, my grandmother Dvora, her body wrapped in a shroud, had been laid to rest. Heavy rain flooded the cemetery. Family members who came to say farewell said they did not remember such a harsh winter. We stood, crouched under the heavy rain, watching the hole in the ground filling with soft mud. Wet and shivering we held tight to the umbrellas that the wind threatened to snatch from our hands.

Before she passed away at the age of eighty-six, my grandmother lay unconscious for eight days in the hospital. It was there, at my dying grandmother's bedside, that I first heard the name Lala.

Dvora had put another old wool blanket full of lice on the feverish Lala. In Transnistria, Ukraine, the winter of 1941 was the harshest in forty years. Dozens of sick Jews suffering from typhoid lay side by side in an abandoned old shack which used to be the local village pigsty. Wooden boards divided the pigpen into small spaces. Straw covered the frozen ground and the tinted glass in the high windows was shattered, allowing the bitter cold to penetrate. Seven days earlier Dvora had arrived there with fifteen-year-old Israel and thirteen-year-old Lala having been deported from their comfortable home in Loboka. On short notice, all the Jews had been ordered to pack a few of their belongings and gather in the village square. From there they had been driven in open carriages to the pigpen. Before the deportation Dvora had been wise enough to pack some of her dead husband's clothes to sell, one by one, for some food. Lala started showing the first signs of typhoid the day they arrived. Stomach cramps tortured her young body. She had diarrhea and high fever and refused to put anything in her mouth. For the last two days she was feverish and did not respond to her mother's touch or voice. She mumbled meaningless sounds, shaking her head, her face and hair wet with sweat. Two hours earlier Dvora had sent her son, Israel, yet again, to the nearby village with an old pair of men's shoes to exchange for some food. She was sitting at her dying daughter's side, completely detached from the moans and groans of the other sick people around her and holding a piece of cloth, soaked with water, on her child's forehead. She thought that soon her son would return with a little cornflour with which she could make thin porridge, or with a small piece of bread which she could soak in water and crumble into her daughter's mouth.

The memories and smells of the Sabbath delicacies she used to cook in her big comfortable house filled Dvora's mind. She remembered how she used to light the big stove with chunks of wood brought from the nearby city and how, every Sabbath, the stove was covered with big, steamy pots. She could still smell the sweet aroma of the slow cooking foods which her family loved so much. Boiling chicken soup with onions, potatoes and carrots, fresh from her garden, bubbled in the big pot to which Dvora added fat bones of a turkey throat to enrich its taste. In a small pot, she cooked cornflour for a sweet corn pie and together with the three loaves of challa browning in the big oven, the house was filled with the irresistible smell of fresh pastry.

The sound of the footsteps of her son, Israel, returning from the village tore the sweet comforting memories from Dvora's mind. He took five small potatoes and half a loaf of bread out of his pockets and sank on the ground, exhausted from hunger and from the long journey. Dvora immediately rose to her feet. She scooped out some of the soft part of the bread with her fingers, soaked it in the water tin and went to Lala. With one hand she opened her mouth and with the other she rolled the bread between her fingers to soften it and put it in her sick child's mouth. Lala did not respond and the soft bread mixed with saliva leaked from both sides of her mouth. Dvora sighed in despair. She knew her daughter was doomed. During their seven-day stay in the crowded pigpen eighteen people had died and had been buried in the mass grave a hundred meters away. Dvora painfully remembered that only a few months earlier her beautiful, healthy, blooming thirteen-year-old daughter used to spend hours each day writing poetry. How she loved to sit on her wide bed covered with a white lace bedspread and write. When she completed a poem, she hurried to the kitchen and read it to her mother, her voice full of excitement.

The next day, when the sun set and the cold was bitter, two men laid Lala's tortured body in the big mass grave and covered it.

The curtain around my grandmother's hospital bed was still drawn. On the bed lay the dead Dvora. Her eyes were closed and her slightly open lips showed toothless gums. I stood there completely frozen and could not take my eyes off my grandmother's body. I had never been so close to a dead human being. Behind me, my father, Israel, and his aunt were talking about Lala. Israel said they should commemorate her on my grandmother's gravestone and his aunt sighed sadly and asked what name they would engrave. Both were silent. They could not remember her given name, only her nickname. I felt a shiver run down my spine. A girl was born out of love and lived in this world for thirteen years. A horrible disease ended her young life, her body was thrown into a mass grave in a foreign land, amidst a dark war and no one remembers her name.

Lala, the sound is so soft and loving. Lalka means doll in Polish so she must have been the sweetest baby girl and the nickname lingered as she grew up. For a brief moment I saw the faces of my three children and a feeling of agony and of a great loss weakened my knees. Why were they all silent about her? How could Dvora, who gave her life and loved her all her short life and after her death, keep her in her heart for forty years? Why didn't she share her grief with anyone? She told me about everything: the good life they had had before the war, the great shock of the deportation, the hell they had gone through until the war ended and the long journey to Eretz Israel. But she had never said a word about Lala. What did she look like? There is no picture. Everything was destroyed in the inferno of the war.

On the thirtieth day after Dvora's death the clouds scattered and a warm sun caressed the family members who came to the cemetery. When we stood around the marble gravestone I put a white rose with fresh, half-open petals and a soft scent, on the words engraved in the stone:

"In memory of Lala, a pure soul, who perished in the Holocaust when she was only thirteen."

I made a vow, to tell the story of the girl whose name was forgotten.