Family & Education
At last we have a place to mourn our lost siblings
Janice Hughes knew her parents had suffered two tragic losses, but had few details. Decades later, she can mourn her siblings
November 6, 2020 11:41
By, Janice Hughes
3 min read
Janice Hughes knew her parents had suffered two tragic losses, but had few details. Decades later, she can mourn her siblings
November 6, 2020 11:41ByJanice Hughes , Janice Hughes
v It’s 1940. Bombs rain down on London. A 20-year-old pregnant mother, her soldier husband fighting abroad, hurries to shelter at an Underground station and falls down the steps. She gives birth to a baby, Michael, who lives for just two days.
Twelve years later, the same mother loses her ten-month-old daughter Rosalind, during a whooping cough epidemic.
The mother was my mum, Doris Stern, who died a few years ago at the age of 94. The children were my lost siblings, one older, one younger.
I was five when Rosalind died. I can’t remember what she looked like and there are no known photos of her. A lock of blonde hair was kept by my mother but didn’t surface at her own passing. Mum never came to terms with her loss, she visited Rosalind in hospital but asked our father to arrange burial. Years later my other sister, Sylv, persuaded Mum to visit Rosalind’s grave in East Ham Cemetery. Reluctantly, she did and obtained some sort of closure.
I visited for the first time with Sylv in 2019. The visit got me wondering about Michael. Mum was always vague about the details of that traumatic event in those traumatic times:
“What caused Michael’s death?”
“Heart failure”. (No, I’ve since discovered, lung failure.)
“How long did he live?”
“Not sure — four days?” (No, two days.)
“What happened to him?”
“It was wartime — perhaps he was buried in a mass hospital grave?”
In 2019, we didn’t know the answer to that last question,
Sylv and I, contemplating the sad, fallen, blank stone heart Dad had commissioned for Rosalind (my own heart breaks now, thinking of him all on his own... no wonder it’s the only time we remember Dad ever crying), decided we had to restore her grave or mark it with a plaque as suggested by the helpful caretaker.
Then my thoughts wandered to Michael. We wouldn’t know where, or even if, he was buried. So I asked my rabbi son (Jonathan Hughes of Radlett United Synagogue) if it would be appropriate to add his name to Rosalind’s plaque in commemoration — something like “Remembering also Michael, burial place unknown.”
Time passed. Would it still be possible, with absolutely nothing to go on, to yet discover a final resting place for him? Where to start? Helped by a genealogy enthusiast brother-in-law, I applied for a death certificate. Yes, there was one! Such an unbelievable moment! One in all my 72 years to 2019 I’d never thought about even wishing for. So I knew the exact time and place of death (October 1940, Hackney Hospital), but where might he have been buried?
Our first port of call was the United Synagogue Burial Society. A sympathetic employee searched unsuccessfully. I contemplated other avenues, even ridiculously starting an online chat with the National Archives at Kew, but not proceeding very far with my under par computer skills And just how much of a national (or worldwide) search was I thinking of? The silliness of this brought a rapid end to a fruitless search.
Forward to 2020 and it was time to arrange for the provision of Rosalind’s plaque. So why not try one last time to discover what became of Michael? Back to the US Burial Society again. This time I emailed, but once more met with a negative response. However, the publicity surrounding VE Day this year gave me the idea of a second email but now adding the wartime story behind my request.
An incredible, amazing reply from Amanda Edwards at the Society ensued: “I have searched our records again slightly differently and I have found a Michael Stern who was buried on 27.10.1940 in East Ham Cemetery.” As a baby, he was buried in a grave allotted to a long-deceased adult. Of course it could only be our Michael, with date in line with the death certificate, and — East Ham — our siblings were just a few rows apart.
Sylv and I have now placed stones on that grave for both the adult and our long-lost older brother, who would be aged 80 now if he’d survived. We are waiting for the plaque to be installed on Rosalind’s grave and we will then conduct our own version of a (very) belated stone setting.
Two tiny, frail, hitherto forlorn baby cries have finally been acknowledged and they will be remembered.