Remembering Kostopol: How Holocaust Survivors Honored Their Towns

My grandmother survived the Holocaust in Kostopol, Ukraine. After she died, I wanted to learn more about her life before the war, but I knew very little. I found a book called Sefer Kostopol—Hebrew for “Book of Kostopol.” I hoped it would contain her story.

The book was a memorial for her hometown. It looked like a scrapbook, with pictures, essays from residents, and lists of survivors. In the survivor list, I saw my grandmother’s name. The book also listed families that had been murdered, including her mother and sister.

I began to wonder what Sefer Kostopol really was. I learned that survivors in Eastern Europe created more than 1,000 memorial books called yizker bikher in Yiddish.

After the Holocaust, Jews who had left before the war and those who survived the war made these books to honor their destroyed towns and lost loved ones. The books were a way to reclaim memories and rebuild community.

A yizker bikher records two main things. About two‑thirds of the book describes life before the war: schools, markets, sports teams, and everyday routines. The remaining third contains first‑person accounts of the Nazi occupation and a long list of the dead.

Many people—often 20 to 50 contributors—wrote in a warm, conversational style. The photos show prewar life: children in school, market stalls, and busy streets.

Maps are a common feature. Survivors drew them from memory, labeling forests, rivers, and streets with nicknames. These maps give a personal view of the town.

Sketches by amateur artists illustrate life under Nazi rule. Some books include work by well‑known artists such as Arthur Szyk, a Polish‑Jewish illustrator. The books also contain ephemera: posters, budgets, song lyrics, book covers, event flyers, and even elementary school report cards.

The earliest volume I studied came from Volkovisk, Belarus, and was published in 1946, just a year after Auschwitz was liberated. It is hard to imagine survivors gathering so soon after the war to create a book.

The editors and contributors followed a familiar model: the pinkes, the community register found in every Eastern European Jewish town. The pinkes recorded meeting minutes, school budgets, and lists of political candidates. Like the pinkes, yizker bikher were written by many hands and had a somewhat chaotic organization.

Because of this connection, many memorial books include the word pinkes in their title. In the introduction, some editors explicitly linked the prewar pinkes to the post‑war memorial book. One such editor was Eliezer Yerushalmi, who compiled the book from Navaredok, Belarus.

"Each pinkes is a link in a timeless chain recording the history of Jewish communities," he wrote. "The present pinkes, the Navaredok pinkes, is here to tell the orphaned generation and the generations to come all that the community experienced from its very beginning hundreds of years ago to its terrible destruction."

Survivor communities in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Argentina were also connected. Some committees used the same editors and adopted features from other memorial books, making the process easier.

The first step was to circulate a prospectus to fellow survivors, explaining the memorial project. A prospectus for the Wielun Memorial Book, commemorating a community in Poland, was sent out in 1961, ten years before the volume was published. The editor wrote:

The Wielun memorial book must be a reflection of a former home, which was so brutally destroyed and erased. In the book of remembrance, all moments, events, adventures, and experiences need to be expressed. Different facts, good deeds, memories, figures, and types. Let nothing be forgotten: days of sadness, days of joy, and hope for a better tomorrow.

That goal—"let nothing be forgotten"—is at the heart of every memorial book.

For many years, yizker bikher were overlooked by scholars. They do not fit neatly into categories: they are nostalgic yet historical, secular yet religious, and not simply photo albums.

In recent years, interest has grown. Scholars study the books and the archives that created them to learn about prewar Jewish life. They also use yizker bikher to understand the violence of the Nazis and the ways survivors honored their loved ones.

When we take these books seriously, we can broaden our focus beyond the fact that six million Jews were murdered. We can highlight how they once lived, worked, and celebrated. Ultimately, the books remember individuals and communities as they wanted to be remembered.

The work of these memorial books continues to inspire new generations. They remind us that even after great loss, people can rebuild memory and honor the past.