The Jackson Sun from Jackson, Tennessee • 6

FROM THE COVER Sunday. March a 2010 6ATh Jackson Sun Diaries Continued from cover 41 1 AT They have learned in the past year that Nonna's mother sur -v I Zf i Nonna believed the Nazis had killed her mother Anna after they separated the two during World War II, but Anna returned to Ukraine after the war and lived until the mid-1970s. 'MM iA a if V. -V" iff 1 book. That led to a Ukrainian newspaper report that eventually put the Bannisters in contact with people with photos and knowledge that seems to confirm that they are cousins.

The Bannisters were shocked to learn from their newfound family that Nonna's mother, Anna, had survived the war and returned to Ukraine with both arms broken. She lived until the mid-1970s. John says he has been told she held out hope that her daughter had survived and left Europe for the United States. "A lot of people thought (Anna) was a traitor," John said. They didn't understand the consequences of the concentration camps, that she was a prisoner." Also heartbreaking to the family was the revelation of the death of Nonna's brother Anatoly, whom she had hoped had survived the war after the family sent him away to avoid being drafted by the Soviet army.

Nonna had hallucinated that she was again trapped in a labor camp in the final days of her life believing at one point that a hospital scanning machine was the mouth of an incinerator. She had called John "Anatoly" and begged him to take her home. In the past year, the Bannisters have learned that Anatoly came home to try to find his family the Christmas after Nonna and her mother left Ukraine. w1 IT" 1-j 1 Nonna's brother Anatoly during his last visit home in 1939. Anatoly came home the Christmas after Nonna and her mother left Ukraine to try to find his family.

There was a bombing after the holidays, and he was killed. i.i vived the war and lived until the mid-1970s. Nonna believed the Nazis had killed her mother after they separated the two on Nonna's 16th birthday. They also learned that her brother, whom she hoped her family would one day be able to meet, died shortly after she and her mother left Ukraine. Now they wonder if there was any way Nonna ever could have reunited with her family, or been able to handle the answers to questions she never resolved.

"My heart just calls out to my mother for all that time not knowing that," John Bannister said. "It would have destroyed her." Bittersweet truths After World War II ended, Nonna traveled to the United States, where she met and married Henry Bannister in Louisiana. She spent the final years of her life in Memphis and died in 2004 at a hospital in Jackson, where her son John served as a city councilman until 2007. For four decades, Henry Bannister only had hints of what had happened to his wife before she came to the United States. The largest came in 1968 when their family was still living in Louisiana: A presentation on concentration camps by a missionary at their church left her crying in bed for weeks.

Because of reactions such as that, Henry did not push her to tell him the whole story of her life in Europe for most of their marriage, but in the early 1990s, she revealed to him a set of yellow legal pads onto which she had quietly translated her diaries. He later typed each word she wrote and printed copies for the couple's three children. Henry said in a phone interview last month from his and John's home in Florida, where they moved last year, that he had offered to take his wife back to Ukraine many times, but she had long assumed her entire family was dead, having been told they had been killed in a bombing. "No, I don't want to go back," Nonna told him. "Nothing would be the same.

Everything has been destroyed. I don't want to go back." Henry tried unsuccessfully to get the book published in the late 1990s, but Nonna eventually told him to wait until after she died because she did not want to be forced to relive what happened to her in the twilight of her life. He moved to Jackson after his wife's death, where he met Carolyn Tomlin, a writer who helped the family find a publisher and, with Denise George, co-edited part of the book. After the book was published, Henry's grandson took a mission trip to Ukraine, leaving behind copies of the ABOVE: Nonna's cousin Ludmila, whom she called Luci, stands at the grave of Antonja, Nonna's aunt. LEFT: Ludmila at the grave of Feodosija, Nonna's grandmother.

BELOW: Nonna and husband Henry Bannister. BELOW LEFT: Brother Anatoly, Nonna, mother Anna and father Yevgeny Lisowsky pose in 1935 for a portrait. This likely was the last family photo taken before Anatoly was sent away to St. There was a bombing after the holidays. He died.

"She probably wouldn't have been able to handle" knowing that as she coped with illness during the final years of her life, John said. We think it's probably best that she didn't know." Going home This summer, John Bannister hopes to do something his mother never did after the wan Travel to Ukraine and meet her family. But he and his father say they know the book has unearthed questions they will never have answered. Among them: Could the Bannisters hae been able to weave through the restrictions of life and the height of the Cold War to reunite Nonna and her' mother? And did Anna ever "to reach her daughter? After the war, Nonna was in ill health and being cared for in a German hospital by nuns who changed her name when a Russian visitor came asking for her. The nuns thought the man was someone with the Soviet army rounding up those believed to be traitors, but John says he now wonders whether that may have been someone sent by Nonna's mother to find her.

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