Background
Fragments that Remain has been created to document a personal search for a family torn apart by World War Two, to remember the lives of those who endured, who loved and lost during one of the darkest times in History. It is also a celebration of family, of reconnection and the importance of roots.
~ Jennie Milne
A daughter’s search for her mother’s lost family
“The origin of a story is always an absence”
~ Jonoathon Safran Foer
On November 4th, 1943, Elizabeth Mary Lis was born in Hammersmith, London. Shortly after her birth, her mother, placed her in a wartime babies home in Hope Cove, Devon, promising to collect her at the wars end. She never returned. Her Polish parents were eventually traced in 1964 and Elizabeth learned that her mother, Helena Lis (nee Rothenberg), was reputedly Jewish, whilst her father, Major Stanislaw Lis worked with the Polish Government in Exile in London.
Left to right: Mark Halpern, Karen Franklin, Jennie Milne and Michael Tobias. IAJGS Warsaw 2018.
The loss of her entire family impacted Elizabeth throughout her life, in turn, affecting relationships with her own children. Following her death in 2014 her daughter Jennie Milne determined to search for answers in a bid to gain an understanding of who her mother was.
An incredible journey followed; with the assistance of genealogists, historians and a determined belief it was possible to unravel the mystery, Jennie was able to connect with Helena’s immediate family in Ohio, USA, where they settled after the war.
Later, information received through DNA established a connection to the Rothenberg’s, originally from Drohobycz, Poland, smashing a brick wall that had prevented tracing her great grandfather’s family. This led to Jennie meeting her grandmothers 2nd cousin in Israel in 2017, and other family members.
Details of her grandfather’s life, and his work in the Polish Émigré alongside General Anders and others in the Government in Exile continue to be uncovered, although no living members of his family have yet been traced.
“For everything in time gets lost.....
....the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust are now lost, or will soon be lost, because no number of books, however great, could ever document them all, even if they were to be written, which they won’t or can’t be. …
But for a little while some of that can be rescued, if only, faced with the vastness of all that there is and all that there ever was, somebody makes the decision to look back, to have one last look, to search for a while in the debris of the past and to see not only what was lost but what there is still to be found.”
jenniemilne67@gmail.com
+44 7866859908