Seven years ago, I stumbled across a dusty copy of the Lezajsk (Lizhensk) Yizkor Book when helping my mother move house. Although I knew it was a book about the shtetl my father came from, neither my Yiddish nor my Hebrew was fluent enough for me to be able to read the contents of the book. I pored over the photos however and even found one with my father in it – a blurry photo of the first Yizkor (memorial) service of Lizhensk survivors, which was held at Poking Displaced Person's camp after the war. I later found an original of the same photo amongst my father's papers. But the rest of the contents of the Yizkor Book remained a mystery. What sort of lives did my grandparents and great-grandparents (or even my father and his siblings) live in Lizhensk? What happened to the Jews of Lizhensk during the holocaust? The English sources were very meagre and yet here was a 500 page book, which I couldn't read, which presumably answered all these questions and more. My wife Sarah, having no concept of the enormity of the task or the difficulties she would face, decided to set about having the book translated into English. That task, which has taken almost five years so far, is now almost complete. I would like to dedicate this English translation of the Lizhensk Yizkor Book to my father, Israel Katz, of blessed memory, who against all odds survived the Holocaust and later made a new life for himself in Canada. Lizhensk and its surrounding shtetls lived on in his heart for the rest of his days, long after Jewish life there had been obliterated from the face of the earth. For all those from that little corner of Galicia who were not so fortunate, and perished during the years of Nazi terror, this translation is also lovingly dedicated. In particular I wish to honour the memory of the many members of my extended family who died during the Holocaust, including my grandmother, Ethel Katz, my aunts Beila, Tziporah, Rachel and Brenda, the Laufer family and numerous cousins and other relatives (many of them children) whose names are known only to Hashem. I hope that making the rich, fascinating and deeply moving contents of this Yizkor Book available to the English speaking world will help to preserve the memories of both the many individuals whose lives were brutally cut short and of the way of life which has been lost forever. I also wish to thank the translators who worked on this project. I would like to pay particular tribute to Mr Zygmunt Frankel, who is himself an elderly Holocaust survivor from Galicia. He is one of the few Yiddish-speakers my wife and I were able to find in this remote corner of the diaspora (New Zealand) where we now live. His dedication to this project over an extended period has been greatly appreciated. At the risk of stating the obvious, we all owe a huge debt to the original authors and editors of the Lezajsk Yizkor book. The book is a real tribute to the men and women of the Lizhensk landsmanschaftn of Israel, now apparently no longer in existence. Their labours, probably generally unrecognised outside the Lizhensker community at the time, have ensured that the memory of the Jews of Lezajsk will be preserved for generations to come. Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Sarah Katz. Her deep and heartfelt commitment to honouring and preserving the memory of the Jews of Lizhensk and their vanished way of life has resulted in her tirelessly dedicating herself to this translation project (and other research projects related to Lezajsk) over the last five years. I am thankful on behalf of all the descendants of the Jews of Lizhensk and surrounding shtetls that such a very important task fell into such safe hands. Stephen Katz Auckland, New Zealand

 

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