Vesta during childhood in Pinsk, Belarus
By Tasha Ackerman
When historian, Vesta Svendsen describes her research on the Sovietization of the Jewish population of Brest, Belarus, she explains: “The history I’m writing is my history.” However, it was not until recently that she discovered her own Jewish identity and the history of Jews in Brest. Vesta was born in Pinsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States with her mum when she was seven years old. Her mother had married a Catholic man, so Vesta attended a Catholic school in New Orleans. Each summer, she would return to Belarus and spend the summer with her family and friends in Brest.
In 2019 while buying Christmas presents for her family, Vesta ordered a 23andMe ancestry test because they were offered at a special holiday rate. She assumed it would return, confirming what she already knew, that she was Belarusian. When the results came back as Belarusian, Polish, and Jewish, Vesta was shocked. How could it be possible? She didn’t even know there were Jews in Belarus, let alone in her own family! These results inspired Vesta to reexamine her personal history.
Vesta during childhood in Pinsk, Belarus
Vesta during childhood in Pinsk, Belarus
Vesta was born in Pinsk, Belarus in 1989. She explains that neither she nor her mother, who was born in 1968, knew that there had once been a large Jewish population in Pinsk. However, until 1941, Pinsk had a population of up to 70-80%. During her childhood in Pinsk, Vesta often stayed with her great-grandparents, Alesandr and Lidia But-Gusaim, because her parents worked as translators. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many international companies entered Belarus, so her mother often had work that required her to travel to Europe. Therefore, Vesta formed a strong relationship with her great-grandparents and described her babushka as the most important person in her life growing up.
In Pinsk, Vesta’s maternal great-grandmother, Lidia, was always perceived as different. She did not speak a pure form of Russian. On her street, people would refer to her as “The Ukrainian” because she claimed to be from Ukraine in order to explain her accent. Growing up, Vesta did not understand some of her babushka’s behaviours. For example, she did not buy meat but rather would slaughter animals in her yard. Every Friday, she would make challah. Yet, since Vesta had no exposure to Jewish culture in Pinsk, she had no idea what these rituals represented.
Alesandr, Vesta, and Lidia in Pinsk, Belarus
Vesta recalls that Lidia had an incredible green thumb, and would bring Vesta along as she brought flowers and vegetables to sell at the market. She recalls one time that her great-grandmother pointed out where the ghetto had once been. Not until years later as an adult, did Vesta make the connection by looking at a map that indeed they would have been walking through the area that was the Jewish ghetto during World War II. The lines of this neighbourhood were fully unmarked. Vesta had not even been aware that there had been a Jewish population in the town that would have been targeted.
When Vesta’s 23andMe results came back with Jewish ancestry, her great-grandmother’s Jewish identity was such a well-kept secret that her mother didn’t know from whom in the family the Jewish ancestry would have come. She suggested it came from her father’s side. Her maternal great-grandmother, Lidia, they deduced would have been the Polish ancestor.
Before her great-grandfather, Alesandr, passed away, he informed them that Lidia was not actually Ukrainian, but she was Polish. Her great-grandparents had met when they were both partisans in the forest, and when he found her, she had no papers. This was an unusual thing to do because it would have been very suspicious not to have papers to identify yourself, even amongst the partisans.
After the war, Lidia remained with Alesandr in the Soviet Union. So for their whole life, Vesta’s great-grandfather kept the secret of her Polish identity. At the time Poles were being deported to Gulags, Russian Labour camps and were repatriated to Western Poland. Since she wanted to stay with Alesandr in Belarus, she even changed her father’s name from Adolph to Anton on her documents to prevent suspicion. It wasn’t until years later when Vesta began to connect all the dots that she would come to understand that it was her great-grandmother who had been Jewish. Now, what she had once perceived as strange behaviours began to make sense as traditions upheld by Jews.
Left to Right, Vesta’s mother, two cousins, and Vesta at the Brest Fortress
As a teenager, Vesta spent her summers in Brest to attend private ballet lessons and stay with her father who lived there. She had maintained a lot of her childhood friendships, so was able to really understand what it was like to be a teenager in Brest. And as teenagers do, they hung around and explored the town’s ruins. They went to The Brest Fortress all of the time. Her ballet teacher suggested that walking would help her from being sore from ballet, so during her free time, Vesta would walk around the town. She explained that she always felt like she was looking for something, but just didn’t know what it was.
Vesta always found cemeteries interesting and would walk around the old cemetery in town. Growing up in New Orleans, she already had experience tracing history through cemeteries. For example, she could walk around and notice an increase in child deaths surrounding the yellow fever epidemic, or find people from nations that were no longer recognised such as Prussia. She found it interesting that there were gravestones with Soviet stars and newer stones with crosses, but none with Stars of David.
Vesta had been taught about the Holocaust in school in the US and was always fascinated by it. At age fourteen, she even wrote a school research paper on children’s experiences of the Holocaust. When she learned about Anne Frank, Auschwitz, and Poland, it had not occurred to her how many times the Polish border had changed over the time periods surrounding the consecutive world wars. Vesta assumed that the Holocaust ended at the Polish border, not making the connection between Brest’s location on the Polish border and just how impacted her hometown was during the war. None of her teachers in her Catholic school in the US went into the history of Belarus.
In university, Vesta studied Russian history and literature at Tulane. Even through her university-level studies, she only learned about The Pale of Settlement in relationship to Catherine The Great. While her programme didn’t go into Jewish history, she still found herself drawn to Judaism. In her political science minor, she focused heavily on the Middle East. She had wanted to pursue Jewish studies, but at the time, felt that she had no claim to it. However, she would spend time at Hillel, a campus Jewish organisation. She was uncertain what it was that kept drawing her into Judaism and Jewish Studies. It was all in front of her, but the dots were not yet connecting.
So, years later after her 23andMe results returned with Jewish ancestry, and her mother’s claim that there were no Jews from her side of the family, Vesta figured that it had to have come from her father. Before a trip to Belarus in 2019, she searched for information on Jews in Brest and found a short article detailing some of the history. When she visited her father in Brest that year, she told him about the DNA results and about her research. Her father didn’t believe anyone from his lineage had been Jewish. However, after Vesta brought up this topic, he mentioned to her that a mass grave had just recently been discovered in Brest.
In 2019, the bones of more than 1,000 Jews were discovered at a construction site in Brest where land was being prepared to develop luxury apartments. Very little of the history of Jewish people in Brest is preserved, and many markers of their presence in this town despite having a Jewish population of almost 30,000 before the Nazi invasion in 1941, which was about half of the town’s total population at the time. 1,214 bodies were uncovered in this mass grave, including the remains of babies. The skeletal remains showed evidence of bullet wounds and smashed skulls.
When Vesta learned about this mass execution, she immediately began reading to learn more. Her mind was blown. The next day, she began walking around the town to locate the places she had read about. This time, unlike when she was a teenager roaming around, she knew exactly what she was looking for.
Vesta had found a Wikipedia article about the Jews in Brest, which featured an image of a home that had been in the Jewish ghetto and had a commemorative plaque. She had written down the address, but when she went searching for the house and for the small Jewish museum she had read about, she couldn’t find either of them. However, she saw an apartment nearby that had a menorah in the window, so she figured she would knock on the door to inquire.
The small, three-room apartment turned out to be a Jewish prayer space. It was a Friday morning, and a woman answered the door who had been preparing food for Shabbat. Vesta inquired about the museum, and the woman offered to call and arrange for them to visit. It turned out that Veseta had been circling the building where the museum was located, but had not found it since it was in a basement and not well marked.
After leaving the prayer room, as Vesta continued walking, she noticed that she was on the street where the house with the plaque she had been looking for should be. As she walked, the house numbers were counting in the direction of the house, but then she ran into the construction zone where they found the mass grave. She discovered that the house no longer existed.
Brześć Ghetto. (2024, March 23). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brze%C5%9B%C4%87_Ghetto
Vesta continued to the museum, where she saw her first Torah. She learned how the Great Choral synagogue is now a movie theatre, Cinema Belarus, another place where she had grown up having seen movies such as The Passion of the Christ and Harry Potter. Reflecting on the mass grave and the hidden Jewish history, Vesta said, “I had walked in all of these places countless times, but there weren’t any markers and if there were, they weren’t obvious… This is the centre of town where I walked around with my friends and all the time I had been walking around on bones and I had no idea.”
Making this discovery, in the land that she had known so well, was jarring. Vesta explained: “It’s like your entire sense of identity and reality is just interrupted by a sort of realisation because you’ve built your understanding of who you are according to the place where you grew up.” It felt both mindblowing and painful. She realised how she is part of both communities, the Brest that she knew first-hand growing up as well as the Jewish history that is now gone. It is as if she both found and lost this history and identity in one moment.
During this trip to Belarus, she continued her research and found that almost all of the Jews in Brest had been deported to Bronna Góra, where the Nazis carried out mass killings of Jews and people suspected to be partisans in June of 1942. Vesta was determined to find this site. She had written the coordinates and planned to find the memorial there. When she arrived with her husband and two sons, nothing clearly marked the memorial. She could see an old train station and about fifteen houses. She saw a man walking in his yard, so she asked him for directions to the memorial. In Belarusian, he gave her directions.
She found the two memorials, a newer and an older one. She tried to imagine the 52,000 people that had been taken there to be murdered, a number that felt inconceivable. Her husband pointed to the ground, and they noticed that it was uneven and realised that they were standing on top of the pits. 77 years later, the earth had not flattened. Vesta explained: “That was one of the most affecting moments of my life…because I realised how many other Jewish women stood there holding their toddlers right in this space, terrified”
They got back in their car and continued forward, the road was narrow so it was their only option. They saw the barbed wire fences and a rusty old gate that Vesta later learned was built to resemble a train station so that when the Nazis unloaded people from the train, the fences became narrower leading towards the pits. Vesta noticed the juxtaposition of the local villagers, and how the intangible remains of a Jewish story have been integrated into their view of the landscape, similar to the sites she grew up with in Brest.
Almost as soon as Vesta discovered the history of her town and her heritage, she had her first experience with antisemitism. When she explained about her journey involving the Belarusian Jewish history and exploring her heritage, her father’s wife went on an antisemitic rant, using derogatory terms against Jewish people, claiming that the Jews had killed the Christians, and advising Vesta to forget about the Jewish part of her heritage, suggesting it was better to be just Belarusian.
Vesta, however, went in the opposite direction. The experience in Belarus had felt both overwhelming and enlightening. There, she had just started to learn the historical context but now felt inspired to learn personally what it meant to be Jewish and Belarusian. She wanted to know the thread between the two: the past and the present, Judaism and Belarus. Once Vesta returned home to the United States, her husband suggested that she try attending synagogue. The first time she went, a woman approached her afterwards, to welcome her and ask if she was new. After explaining her background, the woman replied that her relatives were also from Pinsk! She invited Vesta over for a Shabbat dinner.
Shortly after this initial meeting, the COVID-19 pandemic began, but Vesta still remained close to the family. During the early stages of the pandemic through various social distancing measures, she learned about Judaism through this family and refers to this woman as her Jewish foster mother.
A few years later, her family moved to North Carolina where she enrolled in a course on Judaism and found a nurturing synagogue. Even though her Jewish heritage is matrilineal, she chose to complete a conversion program and immerse in Mikvah. She had her two young daughters also immersed, but wanted to let her oldest son decide for himself if he would convert as well. Later, when her family was in the holy city of Tzfat during a trip to Israel, a man invited her son to put on tefillin and engage in prayer. And shortly after, he turned to his mother informing her that he also wanted to convert.
While on this journey of self-discovery, Vesta also entered into the academic world- researching history that she now understood to be very connected to her own. She enrolled in a Master’s program in Holocaust and Genocide University with Yeshiva University’s Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust Studies in New York where she just defended her thesis in 2024 about the Sovietization of the Nazi invasion in Brest. She will continue her studies at Brown University to pursue a doctorate in History matriculating in August 2024 under Omer Bartov where she plans to research political identity formation.
Vesta has contributed to the preservation of Jewish history through her participation in the Summer Graduate Student Research Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and by conducting Russian language interviews of Holocaust survivors through the Shoah Foundation. She also does translation work for The Together Plan. Her research has pushed her to consider how communities and nations were rebuilt after the fall of the Soviet Union. How did they build a political and national identity? What role has historical trauma played in that reconstruction? Is the story of the Jews cemented in memory through memorials or is it simply cemented over?
When Vesta was in Villinus this past summer for a research fellowship with FISH for the “Holocaust in Lithuania Speaker Series,” she noticed Yiddish writing written on a wall near a cafe. In Lithuania, there is a law that if Yiddish writing is uncovered, it is illegal to paint over it and they must restore it. It occurred to her how a group of teenagers could be sitting at this cafe, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, and that the Yiddish writing would be part of their landscape, it would be part of their understanding of what that place was. She sensed the disparity between her upbringing with her sisters in Belarus and the landscape before her, realising how little of the history they were aware of that shaped their surroundings.
Through historical research and by exploring her own Jewish identity, Vesta now knows the questions to ask. Now she is able to look at how propaganda shaped her understanding of herself and her understanding of the place she grew up. Vesta said, “If [The Brest] cemetery memorial was there, I would have had the power to ask questions.”She could have asked her great-grandparents their stories. She could have known what she was looking for as she wandered the streets and the cemeteries in her childhood. She could have inquired about why she always felt a draw to Jewish spaces and studies. As central as asking questions is to being Jewish, being Jewish has given her the questions to ask.
It’s time to return the gravestones that once stood at the site of the Brest-Litovsk Jewish Cemetery and build a memorial to bring hidden history into the light – the focus of The Together Plan’s campaign that will run on the 19th and 20th May – click here.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” (Hillel the Elder)