On a cloudy June Sunday in 1996, Meryl Frank headed to her Aunt Mollie’s Bayonne, New Jersey, home, much as she had done many times before. Only this time, Mollie handed her a thin paperback book titled “Twenty-One and One” and gave her niece special instructions: never to read it.
Author Meryl Frank
“It was about 22 actors who died in the Vilna ghetto [known today as Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital city], and she showed me a picture of my cousin [Franya Winter], and she said, ‘I want you to take this book. I want you to give it to your children when the time comes, but don’t ever read it,’” Frank says.
Given that the book was written in Yiddish, Frank would have needed to translate the text to read it, but she obeyed her Aunt Mollie, whom she describes as a formidable woman with a commanding presence. For 20 years, Frank says, the book sat on her shelf unopened.
Then, she was contacted by the Mémorial de la Shoah, the Holocaust museum in Paris. A man had donated 50 photographs he had discovered in a home that was about to be demolished, and the museum was researching the family in the images. Frank, a New Jersey resident, immediately recognized members of her family in the photographs and flew to Paris to identify them.
“When I saw the photographs, I said, ‘I need to do this, I need to write a book,’” Frank says.
Frank is no stranger to her family history. She says that ever since she was very young, her family has continually told her stories about her European relatives, showing her photographs, including one of theater actor Franya Winter, to whom Frank says she was drawn due to the elaborate costumes she was photographed in and because she smiled in her images, a rarity among the sepia-toned, stone-faced expressions of the era.
Frank, who is named after her grandmother, was designated by her aunt and other family members as a “memorial candle,” which Frank describes as a descendant of Holocaust survivors who continues to tell their stories. While Frank’s Aunt Mollie never formally told her to take on the mantle of family historian, the stories and artifacts passed down to her were acknowledgement of her role, one that Frank accepted passionately. But as to the fates of her European relatives during the Holocaust, her family remained silent.
“They would say, ‘They’re all gone, they didn’t make it,’ and that’s all they would say,” Frank says. “Somehow I knew that they didn’t want to talk about it, and I thought that they didn’t know anything.”
As Frank got older, she theorized that this history was perhaps too painful for her family to speak of, that the horror and violence their relatives suffered was too much for them to share. Frank believes it may have also been out of protectiveness. As a new generation, Frank didn’t experience the Holocaust firsthand, so she was shielded from it. She says she knew about Hitler and that Nazis killed Jewish people, but the details were largely left out. Frank’s grandfather emigrated to the United States in 1904 during the Russian Revolution, followed by her grandmother, so her immediate family was already in the U.S. when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, initiating World War II and the atrocities that would follow.
Armed with the knowledge of her family history and dedicating seven years to research, Frank published “Unearthed: A Lost Actress, a Forbidden Book, and a Search for Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust” in April 2023. In it, she details her journey to uncover the truth about Winter and the other Yiddish theater actors in Vilna, along with the contents of the forbidden book. But she also asks how the past should be honored and how to teach the next generation about tragedy. These are topics she will address during a luncheon at the 2023 National Genealogical Society Family History Conference on June 3 at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.
“I did start doing family history and family trees, and this is what I’m going to speak about in Richmond, and that is: How do you take that family tree and tell the story? Because the family tree is just a skeleton. It tells you who they were, what their names were, maybe where they were born, maybe their occupation, but it doesn’t tell you their story,” Frank says. “I felt that what I needed to do was I needed to fill in that story, and it was difficult because these people were murdered and the records were very hard to find, but luckily, with all of the information that was coming onto the internet, I was starting to be able to put together pieces of their lives so that I could tell their story, and I felt very deeply that it was so important to tell their story because I wanted to give them back their personhood and their dignity, their humanity. These were people that were [intended] to be erased, so it’s not just telling the family story which we all have, but it’s trying to give something back to them.”
As a wife and mother of four, Frank says, unearthing these stories was no easy task. She would often spend hours at her computer after putting the kids to bed until she would hear the birds chirping in the morning. Her research would take her across four continents and involve interviews with her own family as well as Holocaust survivors and their descendants. She did eventually discover the fate and tragic death of Winter, detailed in the book, and she did much of this research without ever opening the forbidden book. But once she felt satisfied that she knew what the contents of “Twenty-One and One” were, she did have it translated.
“I figured my aunt told me not to read it for a reason, but this research was bringing me closer and closer to who Franya was, and finally I found testimony of a woman who said that she was with actress Franya Winter when she died and when she fought the Nazis,” Frank says. “I was able to find so much about [Winter] and unfortunately about her fate that I started to understand why my aunt didn’t want me to read it.”
Frank believes her extensive research helped prepare her for what she would discover in reading “Twenty-One and One.”
“I did read it five years into the research. I finally decided to read the book because I knew what happened to her already, and so reading the book itself was not as shocking as reading the testimony,” Frank says. “What it did do for me was it filled in her life, because not only did it talk about her death, but it talked about her life, and I was able to get a lot of information about her.”
Frank hopes her book inspires people to stand up against injustice. She has spent a life in public service as an activist and international champion of women’s leadership, human rights and political participation. She served as mayor of Highland Park, New Jersey, from 2000 to 2010. She was appointed as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women by former President Barack Obama in 2009. She’s a frequent speaker on gender, health, environment and refugee issues. Most recently, in 2022, she was appointed by President Biden to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and the board of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
She also hopes to inspire others to learn about their own histories and ancestry, to continue telling the stories of those who came before.
“I’m hoping that this book doesn’t just sit on shelves but is read and is meaningful to people and hopefully moves them to take some action in their lives to find out about their families and to also be aware of what’s happening around them.”
The 2023 National Genealogical Society Family History Conference runs May 31-June 3 at the Greater Richmond Convention Center. Open to the public from novice family historians to experienced genealogists, the event includes more than 110 lectures and special luncheons, an Expo Hall and other in-person and online activities. For nonmembers interested in attending in person all four days, registration fees are $405, and single-day admission is $140. Online sessions for nonmembers cost $265. Individual tickets to Meryl Frank’s discussion and luncheon are $48. For more details and to register, visit conference.ngsgenealogy.org.
