The Jackson Sun from Jackson, Tennessee • 6

FROM THE COVERLOCAL Sunday, March 29, 2009 Secret I Continued from cover 6 AThe Jackson Sun i she kept while toiling in the camps with her mother and working as a translator in a German hospital for prisoners i of war. She often wrote jour-J nal entries in four to six Ian-i guages in case the Nazis HfflH B-Ii 1 -3 Submittedphoto gr Nonna and Henry Bannister are married on June 23, -j 1951, at his parents' home in Baton Rouge, La. jpf" -r-v-' I 1 ----v- 57- I "Ii3 Photos by KATIE MORGANThe Jackson Sun ABOVE: A page from Nonna's notes about her life story. BELOW: Henry Bannister typed Nonna's life story for their children. Pk 1 found them.

The book will be released Wednesday. It tells of how Nonna held her father's hand as soldiers bayoneted his broken body, how the Gestapo took her mother on Nonna's 16th birthday and Nonna's search for her after the war, and how she saw countless atrocities, including a German soldier breaking a Jewish baby over 1 his knee. What the book does not tell is much of the story of how her husband and family waited more than four decades to learn the truth about her and how that changed their relationship with her during the final years of her life and those that have followed. 1 When Henry Bannister met Nonna on the Tulane Univer- sity campus in 1950, he did not see a war-hardened survivor. He saw a cute foreign brunette who told him something he could not believe when he asked her on a date.

Tve never dated," she said. So instead they went to church. She had just arrived in the United States, sponsored by the Napoleon Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, Henry was a student at Loui- siana State in Baton Rouge but was attending a seminar at Tulane in New Orleans. After Sunday service at Napoleon Avenue Baptist, they took a walk in Audubon Park on an August afternoon. She told him her family died during the war.

He asked what happened. She dropped her chin, and her face became strained. It was a look he would see whenever the subject came up for the next 40 years. He saw tears, so he let it be. "Can we talk about it later?" she asked.

Before they were married, Nonna told Henry what doctors had told her before she i left Germany. 1 "You know I will never be able to give you children," she said. "Says who?" he said. John Bannister, of Jackson, said his memories of his mother are marked by clues pointing to what she survived in her adolescence. The youngest of Nonna and Henry's three children, he remembers her constant frailty and blames it on what happened to her in Germany.

She spent months in a clinic dealing with back problems that threatened to prevent her from walking again. When she tentatively re-learned to walk, John got in trouble for using a metal mop handle to painfully I teach another boy not to make fun of her. He also remembers his mother was great at hiding and finding things, a skill that seemed innate before the fam- I ily learned the truth about her PAIN AND Submitted photos ABOVE AND BELOW: Nonna sits with her children: Hank, Elizabeth and John. RIGHT: Nonna and Henry. was sent away to protect him from being drafted into the army during the coming war.

He read her notes on what happened to her father. Drunk on pilfered wine, German men found her father hiding in a cellar and blinded him and broke his body. Several weeks later, Nonna held his hand as soldiers bayoneted him to see if he was alive moments after she thought the last of his life had flickered out. He learned that Nonna and her mother agreed to work in factories in Germany, and the horrors they saw along the way. Nonna was herded with Jews being taken to a freshly dug ditch to be shot after she tried to feed a starved boy a hunk of bread.

The boy pushed her in the ditch as frail, naked bodies began falling in, and she hid under his light corpse for hours until it was safe to crawl out of the scarlet mud to find her mother. And he read about Nonna's search for her mother, whom the Gestapo took on Nonna's birthday in 1943 and placed in a concentration camp for the remaining years of the war. Nonna searched for her mother for years while- dealing with long bouts with rheumatic fever and a heart infection. Nonna finally left Germany in May 1950. When Henry finished reading her translations, he began typing a timeline and a print version of her diaries, pecking each letter with his index fingers.

He would work about three years on nights and weekends before delivering thick white binders to his children telling their mother's life story. "My God," he thought while typing, "more people have to read this." Read more in Monday's edition of The Jackson Sun. Nicholas Beadle, 425-9763 said, and it would be good to leave that history for the children. Nonna said OK. For the next few years, Henry would wake at night to find his wife missing from his side.

When he got up, he could see her quietly laboring on something in the office of their Memphis home. The next morning, he would check around the office for clues. There was nothing. She worked like a ghost. Henry, who is 81 now, cannot place the year he thinks it was in the early 1990s but he remembers how it happened.

Nonna met him at the door when he got in from work and told him she had something to show him upstairs. "Oh my God," he thought, "she's bought new furniture." She led him by the hand to a green wooden trunk in the attic. She took off the heavy lock that kept it closed, and handed him a yellow legal pad that was stored inside. Flipping through the handwritten pages, Henry learned about Nonna's family. Her grandfather was a Russian Cossack killed after the 1917 communist and the family fled to Ukraine.

Joseph Stalin's grip tightened after Nonna was born in 1927, and her older brother Anatoly "if a past. When vision problems forced Henry to move to Jackson near John after Nonna's death, the family found several records, photos and diaries hidden in Henry and Nonna's house in Memphis. They took apart picture frames just to be sure that there was nothing they had missed. But the boldest hint John remembers happened in 1968, when the family lived in Louisiana, before Henry's job took the couple to Houston and SECRETS: A i mm 1 not get up for weeks. When John was a boy, Nonna would tell Henry that he reminded her of Anatoly, her brother who was separated from her family during the war.

He asked her how John was like Anatoly. That pained look came back. Henry Bannister has a short answer as to why he did not push Nonna to finally tell him what had happened to her after she shut down for weeks in 1968, or the quarter century that followed. "I loved her so much," he said. "I didn't want to hurt her." But in the late 1980s, Henry changed tactics.

Instead of asking Nonna what happened to her family, he asked her to draw up a family tree. They were getting older, he KT 'S4 i tux r-! s. SJ-JL Submitted photos ABOVE: One of seven grain mills owned by Nonna's maternal grandparents, Yakov Alexandrovich ixiRuiciyevna. i ne mills were located in Ukraine ana soutnern Kussia. The family kept houses at each ri eventually Memphis in the fol- lowing decade.

A missionary who visited their church flashed slides of incinerators used in Nazi concentration camps during the war. He talked about how women and children were murdered. Nonna ran out of the church sobbing. Her tears flowed the whole drive home. The family asked what was wrong, but she would not say.

When they got home, Nonna went to bed and did TIMELINE mw August 2004: Nonna dies in hrlt-nn III JUVIJUI iT-iun it, mi ifrn in' firitu mil Nonna and her friend Alvina stand next to a German truck. They trained to be nurses while in Germany. i The threat of Nazi invasion upset Nonna Bannister's i childhood in Ukraine and put her in line for tragedies so i terrible she would not talk about them for 40 years, i September 1927: Nonna is born to Anna and Yevgeny Lisowsky. 1 1939: Nonna sees her older brother Anatoly for the last time. He was sent away to prevent him from being drafted into the communist army.

December 1941: Nonna's father dies weeks after German soldiers beat and blinded him. 1942: Nonna and her mother agree to work in a German labor camp. i 1943: Nonna and her mother I move to a hospital that treats i prisoners of war so Nonna i can work as a translator. Her mother is eventually taken from her and placed in a concentration camp. Anna is believed to have been killed April 1945.

1950: Nonna leaves Germany for New Orleans, where ii she meets Henry Bannister. 41 I Awl f- i mnr They get married the following year. 1968: A missionary's slide-show on the Holocaust prompts Nonna to leave church in tears. She stays in bed for weeks. Early 1990s: Nonna reveals her past to Henry through a translation of her diaries from Ukraine and Nazi Germany.

Around 1997: Henry deliv us wiiiic uiiiuco iu ilia iiiicc children telling their mother's lifn rfAni ers wnite mnaers to ms tnree life story. w. iiiiii. LLr Miidiuiy uuriiig his last visit home in 1939. im ai i ki mm.

llu: Anatoly during RIGHT: Nonna as a baby. Baa.