Never Erased in My Mind

Esfir (Esther) Kaplan Lupyan’s normal childhood was cruelly aborted by World War II when she had barely turned five-years-old and was away at summer camp for young children. She, her family, and the rest of the Jews, forced by the Nazis into the lethal trap of Minsk Ghetto, had to survive through indescribable suffering. In Never Erased in My Mind, she shares the story of a young Jewish girl in Belarus, encompassing sixty years of Soviet history, including the horrors of Stalinism, World War II, the Holocaust, and post-Stalin anti-Semitism. Her father was arrested by the KGB when she was only three weeks old. The family didn’t know his fate, nor did he know theirs. This memoir chronicles how she and her mother survived the Minsk Ghetto and certain death, miraculously escaping on the last day of the ghetto’s existence to the forest, where they hid for nine months. Her closest relatives all perished, including her grandparents, 13-year-old brother, and 22-year-old uncle. After the war, Esfir and her mother reunited with her father and joined him in exile in the Vorkuta Gulag in the Far North above the Arctic Circle. Later, after studying chemical engineering in Leningrad, she and her family became “refuseniks,” denied permission to leave the Soviet Union. A story of survival, Never Erased in My Mind serves as a reminder to heed the lessons of the Holocaust, that it should never happen again.