![\"image](\"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/apr-08-books.08.Discovering-Twins-cover.jpg\")
<\/a>Thus begins Stella ter Hart\u2019s book Discovering Twins: A Journey into Lives<\/em>.<\/p>\nAs a high school graduation gift, Stella and her mother made the trip from Estevan, Sask., to Holland. There, she meets an endless web of confusingly related kin \u2013 almost all on her father\u2019s side. A visit to the home of family on her mother\u2019s side raises questions in the teenager\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Oom Jacob and Tante Becca are Jewish,\u2019 I stated rather than questioned, \u2018no one other than Jewish people are named Jacob and Rebecca.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd, in a style completely out of character for her, almost resignedly, my mother replied, \u2018Yes, they are.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was no further clarification of her answer, no offering up of a tidbit of a childhood memory, as might be expected when revealing so vast a thing as religiously specific relatives for the first time.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018So, if Oom Jacob is your first cousin, and he has the same last name as your mother\u2019s maiden name, then he is the son of your mother\u2019s brother,\u2019 my new skill of dissecting family relationships now sharply honed, I added, \u2018so your mother must have been Jewish, too.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cIn a split second, she came back at me, her voice strident with an unexpected, insistent, and lashing response, \u2018NO! My mother was NOT Jewish. According to the Germans, she was Italian because she married an Italian.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Whether that logic ever truly convinced her mother, Sophia, it did not sit well with ter Hart. After her mother\u2019s death, ter Hart began a genealogical quest. Slowly and excruciatingly, she pieces together the tragic fates of almost the entire maternal line.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur extended circle of family, formerly numbering over 1,200, was reduced to the less than 20 who returned, or were known to have survived, creating a psychological tsunami shock-wave impacting existing and future generations,\u201d writes ter Hart.<\/p>\n
The book recreates ter Hart\u2019s prewar extended family, flashing back from postwar comfort in Canada. She captures what must have been a dawning realization among Dutch Jews in the earliest months of what became the Holocaust, as relatives who were relocated to the east inexplicably never wrote back.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow many \u2018workers\u2019 did this totalitarian German regime require for its slave labour force? Where was the food to feed them all going to come from and the rooms to house them all? Supplies were already hitting dangerous lows in the cities, and rationing was strictly enforced.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe unsettling sentiment echoing throughout the community for months raised its voice again. What in heaven\u2019s name would the Germans do with grandparents and babies? This didn\u2019t seem like a necessary part of war. This was something else.\u201d<\/p>\n
As ter Hart\u2019s research expands, numbers and dates leap off the page.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ages and dates are, each time, an emotional shock. The eye at first does not even see, let alone accept, the horrific truths the numbers expose. Mothers with all their young children around them all killed at the same time, or an elderly couple, obviously arrested and deported together, also murdered together. The gruesomeness and cruelty of it all is staggering and overwhelming,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n
On Sept. 30, 1942, 103 family members were murdered at Auschwitz, the youngest 15 years old, the oldest 54. On June 11, 1943, 64 family members were gassed at Sobibor, aged 2 to 68.<\/p>\n
The author seeks to build suspense, but her discoveries are, generally, no surprise to those with knowledge of the history. The emphasis on twins \u2013 across generations, the family seems to have an occurrence of twins about twice the average \u2013 gives the reader an anxious sense that, at some point, some family members are going to fall into the hands of the monstrous Dr. Josef Mengele.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot wanting to know, but needing to know, I researched the lists of Mengele Twins, now publicly available. None of our family were on that list, as most had been deported and killed before Mengele began his murderous experimentations. Small comfort,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n
The narrative at the beginning of the book devolves near the end into something of a genealogist\u2019s notebook, with records, short biographies and charts. Generally, the book hangs together, though an editor\u2019s hand could have been firmer, to avoid easily avoidable clangers like misspelling Anne Frank\u2019s name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cTwins run in the family, you know,\u201d Stella ter Hart\u2019s mother, Sophia, said to her nonchalantly when Stella was pregnant with her first child. That this was news to Stella is a first sign that there was a great deal about her family she did not know. In fact, she wasn\u2019t aware she had much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[21416,3429,4960,4242,53,5914,21414,21415],"class_list":["post-38628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-discovering-twins","tag-family","tag-genealogy","tag-history","tag-holocaust","tag-identity","tag-secrets","tag-stella-ter-hart"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}