Finding Olinka in 2019
I presume you have read “A Memoir within a Memoir: My Father’s Story”. Thus, I knew that the Rosen family (my father’s side) could be traced back to a little patch of ground in eastern Europe where my father spent the first 10 years of his life. This patch, or shtetl, he pronounced, as he wrote it, “Olinka”. I was an early techie and as the internet became more sophisticated, periodically I would try to search for Olinka in the digital universe.
I found it was not so simple as it might seem, and all my efforts invariably met with defeat and frustration. When I started my searches, our computers used DOS, before Windows, and our fat cathode ray monitors were black and white and limited to text only. My computer and internet searches turned up a whole slew of towns with names that sounded or looked like Olinka. Upon closer examination, however, none of them were anything like what my father described. My father had passed; I couldn’t seek his help.
Olinka was a small and insignificant shtetl when my father was a child, between 1900 and 1910. Did it even exist now? Who could say if it had not been erased completely, disappearing under the ravages of the Second World War, along with the finality of the Holocaust. And even if it did exist and was searchable, how would “Google Search” spell it? (That question was not as trivial as it might seem at first glance.)
I had always searched for the village using my father’s spelling, Olinka. After my father’s death, following the funeral, I remember reminiscing with Aunt Helen (his youngest and last surviving sibling) around her kitchen table. Perhaps I told her of my failure to find Olinka on the internet. She told me I was spelling it wrong. “Pa,” she said, (meaning my grandfather Morris), "always spelled it with a ‘G’… Golinka.”
Later, when I researched it, I discovered she was right. Although always pronounced the same, its spelling was very different in Russian, Polish and Yiddish. Even the scripts used different characters: Cyrillic, Latin and Hebrew. In the course of being translated from one language to another, all the vowels could be freely interchanged, and usually were. The consonants “G” and “H” were apt to be added, particularly at the beginning of the name. What my father pronounced and wrote as “Olinka”, might be rendered on official documents (in English) as Alynka, as Holenka, as Golinke, or some endless variation. It seemed hopeless.
However, gradually computer technology kept evolving. Google Maps became available and then world-wide in its coverage, adding Eastern Europe at some point. I decided to search for Olinka directly, using Google Maps, moving about and peering down at the ground, like a present day photographer’s drone over an outdoor wedding.
I had a few clues. My father said it was "3 Russian miles", (or 14 US miles), from Grodno, (a city easily found on Google Maps). That narrowed the search area down to a circle, centered over Grodno, with a 14 mile radius. If you have access to a middle-school pupil who can do the math, (as I had), it came out to 615 square miles.
Beginning around 10 years ago, I would go hunting on Google Maps for Olinka, somewhere in that circumscribed area. I quickly found that in order to see the details of any village, including its name, I had to zoom down practically on top of it. Imagine trying to find an outdoor wedding somewhere in Manhattan using this photo drone method. You are only told to look for a group of people arranged around something that might be a chuppah, as seen from the air. Without knowing exactly where to position the drone, where exactly to look under the satellite, using Google Maps seemed futile and hopeless.
Nonetheless, I still kept trying. It became another way to kill time, another way to aimlessly surf the net. I never found anything. In the end, I concluded that Olinka was lost forever. It had become my own little Camelot, a dreamy Marc Chagall print, now existing only in the imagination, and no longer a physical presence on the plains of eastern Europe.
That’s the way things stood until 2018, a year ago. I had explained in “A Memoir within a Memoir: My Father’s Story” that everything transcribed from the recording of my interview had disappeared over the course of 40 years. I could not find a single copy of the narrative I had sent out to family 40 years earlier. But luckily, my cousin Gary not only read it but put a copy up on his family’s genealogy site.
I was able to download the lost story directly into my word processor. I was very happy. However, the story came down as a single body of text, stripped of all paragraph markings. In order to re-paragraph it, I had to very carefully re-read it. In that process, I got new clues from the names of nearby towns and villages, some large and more easily seen on Google Maps. With this new information, I was able to triangulate between the towns and thus narrow down the area to be searched. Instead of all of Manhattan, I could now concentrate on Fifth Avenue in the 70’s. Then, only after a week or two of searching, Olinka finally came into view on Google Maps.
I went back and read what my father had said about Olinka. I compared it with what Google Maps displayed:
In Olinka we lived in a house facing the village square. In front of the square were the better homes for the town officials: the priest of the Russian Church, the teacher and principal of the Russian school. On one side of the square was the church and on the other the synagogue where we used to go to pray.
Today the town is spelled “Halynka” and lies in Belarus, almost on the border with Poland. (I will continue here and elsewhere to spell it as my father wrote it, Olinka.) Under Halynka, the village is searchable in Google Maps and easily found. (Click on the map of Halynka here.) Sure enough, it is almost exactly 14 miles from the bridge-crossing into Grudno.
The village square, with the church on one side, its steeple easily discernible by its shadow, can still be seen on Google Maps. Every other detail from my father’s story adds up and I am convinced this is where he spent the first 10 years of life.
The website JewishGen gives the population of Olinka (or Holynka in it’s Yiddish rendition) in 1897 as 500, close to my father’s estimate of 400. The website also states the town was “half Jewish”. This is at odds with my father’s estimate of “mostly Jewish”, a misperception easily explained by looking at the town from his perspective as a child, from the world he inhabited.
I presume that nothing remains of Olinka from my father’s day except the outline of the town, its borders. I also presume (although I cannot know for sure) that the town is essentially judenrein, and nothing remains of the society and culture that shaped him.
When I look at the image of Olinka included above, I find no message from the blurry image, but I am totally surprised to see how green the village looks, even granting that the satellite image was probably taken in summer. I always pictured Olinka as solidly grey or brown, wet, windy and muddy, with little irregular tumble-down buildings huddled against one other. (Maybe that was the case over 100 years ago.) Today, it looks bucolic, with orderly rows of trees surrounding the church. How I wish I could get his reaction seeing it.
It whets my appetite for someday seeing it myself, actually going there in person. I’m getting older and less able to bear the strain of travel. Nonetheless, I can fantasize pulling into the Grodno depot in the morning, with a car waiting to take us to Halynka-Olinka, spending a few hours walking near the village square, looking for a trace of something indicating he passed through there, finding nothing, returning to catch another train, with first class accommodations, on our way to Warsaw or Berlin. I could do it tomorrow; hey, maybe sometime in the next 5 years, Sondra and I will do it. It’s only a fantasy but stranger things have happened. Maybe that’s why finding nothing won’t bother me. It’s worth it, just to revisit.