The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs by Chana Stiefel

Yaffa was a girl who lied in a shtetl, a small Jewish town, called Eishyshok. Yaffa's family and most other families in the shtetl had roots that went back over nine hundred years. Their stories were part of the shtetl, and helped keep their faith and traditions alive. Yaffa and her brother Yitzchak played their way through the seasons, sledding and skating in winter, swimming in the lake in the summer. Yaffa would help her Grandma Chaya sell candles on market days. Yaffa and her friends would have their fortunes told for a fee. 

Yaffa's Grandma Alte has a photography studio above the family's pharmacy. Her grandfather brought a camera from America years earlier and Grandma Alte has now become one of the town's photographers. She photographed shopkeepers, newlyweds and babies. Pictures of the Jewish New Year were mailed all over the world to family and friends. Even Yaffa had her picture taken when she was six years old, feeding the chickens. But that year things changed...

German tanks and soldiers came to Eishyshok. Jewish schools and businesses were shut down and the Jews rounded up and forced into the synagogue. Yaffa's father fled out a window and fled with his family into the forest. Yaffa stuffed a few family photographs into her shoes. Almost all of Eishyshok's Jews were killed over a two day period. But Yaffa, her brother Yitzchak and her parents were saved by a kind farmer who hid them in his underground shelter.

As they hid over the months, Yaffa learned to read and her father shared stories of their town's holidays and weddings. During the war they would live in many different places but Yaffa kept safe the photographs she had saved. 

After the war, Yaffa did not return to Eishyshok, but instead moved to Jerusalem. She grew up, married and moved with her family to America. There she became a history professor.

When a new museum was being built in Washington that would document the Holocaust, President Jimmy Carter asked Yaffa to design a memorial. Instead of focusing on death and suffering, Yaffa chose to highlight the lives of those who were lost in the Holocaust. She remembered the people of her shtetl, the children, brides and grooms, the milkmen and the musicians. Remembering the photographs she carefully saved during the Holocaust, she wondered if others had done the same. Perhaps she could build a memorial to the lives of Eishyshok, photograph by photograph and that's what she set out to do.

Discussion

The Tower of Life gives young readers the backstory of a memorial known as the Tower of Faces which is part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum located in Washington, D.C. The designer of the memorial, Yaffa Eliach survived the Holocaust along with her father and brother Yitzchak. Most of their village were not so lucky. In 1941, almost the entire Jewish population of the shtetl was murdered by the Einsatgruppen (the Nazi killing squads). When Yaffa returned for a visit in 1987, not only was there not one single Jewish resident in living in Eishyshok, but the Jewish cemeteries had been destroyed, the main synagogue was a sports center and the events of the massacre largely erased and forgotten. 

To commemorate what happened in Eishyshok, and to honour the lives of the Jewish people, Yaffa collected six thousand photographs of the residents of Eishyshok that were taken between 1890 and 1941.  Of these photographs, Yaffa chose just over one thousand photos to be used in the permanent memorial which opened in 1993. The photographs not only represent the innocent victims of the massacre but also shtetl life prior to the Holocaust. Of course for the late Yaffa Eliach (she passed away in 2016), the photographs were also a memory of what happened. 

Author Chana Steifel makes use of the picture book format to tell Yaffa's story and that of the creation of the Tower of Faces memorial. It is a compelling read that makes both the story of the Holocaust and the Tower of  Faces accessible to a younger audience. Illustrator Susan Gal's artwork mirrors the events  of Yaffa Eliach's life: life in the shtetl prior to the Holocaust is portrayed in vivid colours of greens, reds, yellows and blues, while the arrival of  the Nazis and the subsequent massacre sees the palette change to reds, oranges and blacks. The people of the shtetl in life before the Holocaust have recognizable faces and features, smiling and interacting with one another. They have a dynamic community, bonded by over nine hundred years of history.  During the massacre, all is chaos and darkness, with faces of fear. Yaffa's work to research and collect photographs for the memorial over a period of seventeen years, is portrayed again in vivid colours. The faces of relatives and friends, as they look at old photographs, are shown filled with the joy of remembering.

The Tower of Life is a fascinating account of  Yaffa Eliach's determination to remember the victims in a way that honored the best parts of their lives, their zest for living, for loving and being with family. The author has included a timeline of Yaffa's life in A Snapshot of Yaffa's Life and Legacy, as well as a Bibliography.

Readers may find this thesis, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Multivalent Tower of Faces by Grace Astrove to be very informative.

Book Details:

The Tower of Life by Chana Stiefel
New York: Scholastic Press      2022