Avraham Aviel-Lipkunski

A Family From Two Twigs Avraham Aviel-Lipkunski

"It is not easy to return and relive the events, hour after hour. But for me they have been part of my life, never leaving me, day after day, month after. Month, year after year, and I am never free of the memories. I feel a commitment, as well as the right, to talk about them and write them down, lest they disappear with me when I die. They are my personal stories, but they are also the millions of similar stories which were never told and will never be told, because they were burned and buried. I cannot keep my story imprisoned within me, it is the essence of my memory and refuses to be forgotten." So wrote the narrator, Avraham Aviel-Lipkunski, who was speaking primarily to the younger generation. It is his third book, coming after A Village Called Dowgalishok (Israeli Ministry of Defense, 1995) and Freedom and Loneliness (Tamuz & Hebrew Writers Association 1992). The voice of Ayala, 12 years old: "The thought that I have nothing to lose, that my life is in their hands, and that in any case, they will kill me, made me decided, that whatever they do to me, I will not admit I am Jewish. I will play the game to the end. I am a Polish girl, nothing more. Let them kill me as a goy, not as a Jew."