The only shul left standing...

The Jews made up 33% of the population before the war.  370,000 Jews and this is JUST in Warsaw... Try to imagine those numbers for a minute - it's staggering.... There were 850 Shuls in Warsaw before the war and now there is just ONE.  

The Warsaw ghetto

I had imagined the ghetto as being a gated small area but when you think of the Jewish population at the time, they had to find an area to contain 370,000 people.  The area of the ghetto is enormous. The Jews were brought to a platform called the Umschlagplatz - which was like a waiting station before being put in the ghetto.  Now, on that spot, stands a huge memorial to the Jews who lost their lives in that ghetto.  What's interesting about the memorial is that it's a huge wall with Jewish names listed according to the alphabet. And you can't stop reading those names. You see these names and you know people who share these same names - Josef, Chawiwa, Sura, Yizrael, Jakob etc.... Even with the Polish spelling, we know everyone on that wall. And what's worse is that you can't help searching through that list to see if you can find your own name on that wall. (My name was spelled Chawa) And yes, it's a morbid thing to do but it's subconscious.  You don't realize you've done it until your eyes lock onto your own name etched in the marble.  And it makes you realize that if not for the year you were lucky enough to be born in, it could have been you standing on that platform....

What Zvi, Yitzi and I all noticed was that both my grandparents names where there - one on top of the other just a few rows apart... Majlech and Regina

Warsaw....

So... first of all, all of Poland surprised me.  It's a beautiful country - lush, green with rivers and rolling hills and beautiful architecture.  Modern Warsaw is a bustling, metropolitan city - tall buildings, luxury malls and restaurants. We stood in the main square of where the Jewish community once stood and there is tis enormous building standing shoulder to shoulder with more modern structures.  The windows are blown out, boarded up and instead of razing it or renovating it, the city placed huge posters on the edifice of the dilapidated building of pictures of the Jews who used to live in Warsaw before the war broke out. It's a glimpse of a community that once thrived. These pictures are not of the typical shtetl Jew that you automatically picture in your mind when you think of Polish Jewry, but these were pictures of the modern Jews of Warsaw, educated, cultured, stylish... 

Modern Jewish ideas brought about by the reform movement was spreading from Germany to Poland and the Jews were moving away from that old stereotypical "Jew" towards a more modern, enlightened Jew....

Changing my tune....

I admitted once before that while walking in Krakow, I was predisposed to eyeing any and all Polish octogenarians warily, hoping I could guilt them into looking shameful with my accusatory glare and it was a given - for me at least - that it was more than likely that they stood by silently and watched our people being herded onto trucks and trains before being deported to the camps...

Hearing Paulina speak did make me change the way I think.  It's not that I've suddenly welcomed them all with open arms, but rather I'm trying to look at them as individuals rather than as a whole group. And Paulina (check out a previous post about this amazing woman) wasn't the only one. 

While walking with Isabella in Sosnowiec, we seemed to attract quite a bit of attention (this leads me to believe that Sosnowiec isn't a Polish city that is high up there in the Polish tourism trade....) An old man sort of followed us around a bit, eavesdropping despite the fact that he didn't understand English.  He finally approached Isabella and they began to talk.  She translated that he remembered the Jews, and what had happened and at some point he was tearing up, clearly sad at reminiscing the sad history of his native country.  At first, being the cynical Israeli (thanks Yisrael Feldman) that I am, I was slightly aggravated.  From what Isabella was saying I understood that he was upset that he was forcibly removed from his home to make room for the Jewish ghetto but it became clear to me that he was crying because of the whole situation. That the Jews were herded up, that they lost their homes, that his country was at war and that so many people's lives were lost.  He was also very angry at what the Germans had done to destroy his country and leaving Poland with such a deep dark stain that will never come out.

And then there was the woman whose house was literally on the property of the Strymeciece cemetery. Even after the government stopped giving her funds for the upkeep of the cemetery, she continued to care for it. She gave those long forgotten-about graves deep respect when no one would have known otherwise had she left them to further decay.

I admit that I still eye these old people with doubt, but I'm not muttering "Nazi!" under my breath just yet....

The caretaker of the Strymeciece cemetery's house. If you take the path to the left, the cemetery is right there in her backyard...

Two ancestors, one cemetery....

What is the likelihood that you would find an ancestor from one side of the family and another ancestor from the other side of the family buried in the same cemetery, not far from each other.... 

We were already armed with the information that Reb Izaak Reb Yekeles was buried the Ramah cemetery. Not only was it written on my great grandfather's tombstone, but my grandfather had told us this information.  When my father told his parents that he was making this trip, my grandmother, Pearl, told my dad that she had a direct descendent who was buried there as well.  When we got to the cemetery, we split up and got to searching for both graves.  We found Reb Izaak quite quickly but it took us a while until we located the second grave... You have to imagine that although not huge, the cemetery is quite big and the stones are not easy to read... So many of them were rubbed smooth and we were afraid that we would not be able to find it.  We finally located it at the far end of the cemetery by the back brick wall. It was surrounded by an iron fence and looked to be in good condition.... Turned out that my grandmother's great, great, great, great (and a few more greats) grandfather was a gadol known as the "Bach"...

Who would have guessed that more than 350 years later their direct descendants would marry each other????

This is Reb Izaak Reb Yekeles' kever, my father's father's ancestor.

....and this is Reb Yoel Sirkes, otherwise known as The Bach, my father's mother's ancestor... How amazing is that???

Shabbat in Krakow....who would have thunk?

We had an unbelievable Shabbat experience here in Krakow.  There must have been at least 5 different groups spending Shabbat there and shul on Friday night was packed.... We came late to the Kupa shul (it was raining like cats and dogs) so we made our way over to the JCC where we joined a British group for tefillah and the Friday night meal, which was delicious and plentiful... The caterer Kosher Delight prepared over 400 Shabbat meals (the JCC handled the other groups). 

We went to the Temple Synagogue for Shabbat morning tefillah.  The shul was one of the most beautiful shuls I have been in and on that particular Shabbat there must have been more than 400 people in shul.  This week happened to coincide with the Krakow Jewish Festival so besides the groups, Krakow's Jewish quarter was packed...

It was when the chazan said Av Harachamim, that it hit me... Saying that particular tefilla while standing shoulder to shoulder with Jews from all over the world who had gathered to daven in this magnificent shul that had stood empty but for the ghosts of those Jewish souls that had been murdered for their beliefs was an amazing thing...

The director of the JCC, Jonathan - an ex-pat from NY, spoke to us Friday night and said something very empowering that changed the way I thought about this trip we had embarked on.  He had said that every Jew who came on one of these trips centered it on Auschwitz and on the destruction of the once thriving Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.  He wasn't wrong.  But he said that we needed to not just focus on the darkest part of our history, but on this new and emerging light that - after so many years - was rising from the ashes.  That this trip shouldn't just be focused on the past and death, but in the present and the future and the fact that Krakow's Jewish community was experiencing a resurgence, that Jewish life was coming back to Poland and it was coming back with a vengeance... 

Paulina, the righteous Gentile...

Right after we ate lunch on Shabbat (amazing cholent...) we had the incredible privilege of listening to Paulina's story...

Paulina was 16 when the war broke out and she lived in a farming village near the Ukraine.  She said that in her district, helping a Jew in any way was punishable by death and during those first few weeks after the Germans came to her village, she had witnessed a local Polish woman giving some food to a young Jewish girl - they were shot right in front of her eyes.  But that didn't stop Paulina and her parents and when a young girl showed up at their door asking for food, they not only gave her some hot soup but told her to come every day and that there would be soup for her.  She came the next day with four more Jews.  And this was the beginning of how Paulina and her parents and a neighboring farmer managed to save 5 Jews by hiding them in a bunker, feeding them, providing not only medication it vitamins as well.  

They also managed to create fake documents for a single mother, Rosia, but arranged for a friend of theirs, Kasha,  to take her baby daughter to raise until the war was over.  She told her neighbors that she had no money to keep her baby with her after she was born and had left the baby in the care of a relative until then, but niw had brought the baby back and everyone believed her.  Paulina went on to say that the Germans would often block off two or three streets and gather everyone inside and send them - these were local Poles and NOT Jews - to work for the war effort.  This young girl, Rosia, was on one of these raids and worked on a farm for the war effort - but as a Pole and not as a Jew - until after the war was over.  The five people that Paulina and her family saved survived the war and she is still in contact with the young boy that she saved.  He is now a grandfather and he and Paulina still correspond with one another.  She received a medal of honor from Yad Vashem and was recognized as a Righteous Gentile along with her parents, Kasha and the farmer neighbor.

When she finished talking, she stood up and gave a Bracha to the group in Polish - she gave her entire talk in Polish and there was a translater with her - and said that it made her heart so happy to know that the young Jews of today were remembering their grandparents and great- grandparents and were continuing in the traditions that Hitler tried to wipe out.  She wished everyone only the best life and the best future and said that she hopes nothing like this will ever happen again in the world.  She got a standing ovation and then proceeded to hug everyone who came forward to thank her.... It was an amazing thing to see.

Birth registration document...

Translated from Polish:

It is recorded in the village of  Strzemieszyce Wielkie, on the 25th of November 1934, at 3 PM, in the presence of the clerks whose signatures are presented below in this town hall, in the part of the City Hall that deals with non Catholics, whereas David Good, the religious studies teacher / rebbe, has come in person, aged 58, who did not belong to this community but belonged to the Shtopnike Province in Parsanuf, but living in Strzemieszyce Wielkie  on 70 Warsawska Street  in the brick building, with witnesses Itzka Marshkovsky, aged 50, and Mendele Markovitch, aged 62, who also lived in the village of Strzemieszyce Wielkie, and he presented us the male child, declaring that this child was born in Strzemieszyce Wielkie on July 29th, 1914 at 5 PM, from the married wife Chava Rachela, maiden name Weinstock, aged 39 when the child was born, and that this child during the ceremony of circumsion was given the name of Majlech, and not registering this act at the correct time, the father was irresponsible and it occurred as a result of his laziness and not really caring about these things. This was presented to the father and the witnesses and was signed by both the father and the witnesses

One more amazing discovery...

Sometimes the best discoveries are the ones you were never looking for in the first place.... Since my great uncle, Mully, is still alive B"H, he gave us the address for my grandmother's house which is how we found the exact apartment in Sosnowiec.  But there is no one left from my grandfather's family to give any information so we had accepted that we would never find the house where my grandfather grew up.  

We were surprised enough when we found the documents of my grandfather's birth registration at the Sosnowiec archives.  But the information in the document was just as compelling.  One of the things it specified about my grandfather was that he was circumcised and not of the Christian faith - which we found fascinating.  It also told us that my grandfather's father, David, was a teacher of religious studies, something else we didn't know.  But the best discovery written in the document was - to our utter and complete surprise - my grandfather's home address, 70 Warsawska Street, which coincidentally is the same street name where my grandmother lived in Sosnowiec!

So of course, off we went....

Unfortunately, we found number 68 and 72, but where number 70 should have been, there was an empty lot.... A bit of a letdown but at least we had a better idea of where my grandfather came from....

Here is the street sign located a few meters from where my grandfather's house once stood....

More amazing discoveries...

One thing about Poland:  there are absolutely no signs and hardly any information about how to find obscure Jewish memorials.  Memorial plaques in cities like Krakow or Warsaw - easy to find... Sosnowiec - not so much...

But Isabella did her research and this is what we found...

This is the house where Wladyslaw Szpilman (the famous pianist who was the subject of the Oscar Award Winning movie, The Pianist) grew up.

The Sosnowiec Gymnasium - otherwise known as the Jewish high school where my grandmother and her siblings went to school....

A memorial to the Jews of Sosnowiec who died during the Shoah. Look carefully at the second photo... You can see where someone had scratched a swastika into the marble in the top left hand corner....

The Strzemieczyce cemetery where my grandfather's community members would have buried those who had died.  It was in the middle of nowhere - and I mean NOWHERE... There were farms surrounding it but no signs whatsoever and we drove around a little until we found it.  An older woman lived in the house that was attached to the property and when I say that these graves were in her backyard, I mean she looked out her kitchen window into a yard filled with ancient, crumbling graves.  We spoke to the woman who lived there and she explained that her original house somewhere in town burned down due to a fire.  The local municipality decided to 'give' her the house attached to the cemetery since the caretaker had recently passed away and they gave her money every year for the upkeep of the cemetery.  As of the last ten years, the government stopped giving her money to take care of the property but she still trims the grass once or twice a year, so we left her some money to put towards the upkeep of the cemetery.  A lot of the headstones were broken or missing so it was difficult to find names.  We were specifically looking for a brother of my grandfather, Yaakov, who was killed before the war but we were unable to find it....

Polish Bureaucracy....

Isabella spent some of the long drive busy on the phone.  After a while, she finally told us that she had made an appointment for us at the central archives of the Sosnowiec neighborhood.  We weren't expecting this turn of events and I was expecting it to be a bit of a goose chase since Isabella had told us to lower our expectations. The woman she spoke to at the archives had looked up the last name 'Gut' on her computer database and had turned up nothing.  But we went anyways....

The building was incredibly modern and we went up to the second floor and waited about 5 minutes for our scheduled appointment.  The woman was initially abrupt and didn't really want to be bothered with finding our needle in her haystack.  I had prepared a family tree with as much information about names and dates that I could gather and armed with that, we attempted to cross reference the information I had with anything she could find.  

The woman kept shaking her head and saying that she found nothing until she finally stood up, opened up a tall cupboard in the back and pulled out a huge pile of ancient books.  She pulled one out after another, flipped pages back and forth and kept asking me to repeat the various names of all my grandfather's siblings and parents. 

More head shaking.

Finally, when I said my grandfather's name, Melech, she shook her head back and forth and said, "No!  Meiloch!"

We were a little shocked and then I nodded.  "Meilech Gut!" I said.  Then she nodded and finally let us see the page she was looking at.  It was amazing... 

What was amazing about it was that this page she had found, this hand-calligraphied page sitting all these years collecting dust in the archives in Sosnowiec told us things about my grandfather that we never knew...  

My grandfather never knew the day he was born, nor the exact year.  He guessed he was born in 1917 but we were never sure.  When he emigrated to Canada, the immigration officials chose a birthday for him and his whole life we all celebrated his birthday on December 25th.  This document showed us that he was born July 29th, 1914 and that he was really 96 when he died and not 93 like we had originally thought...

The most hilarious part of this unbelievable document was that his father hadn't filed his birth records until 1934!  At the end of the document, it was written (and this is not a joke....) "and the records tribunal condemns this man for not filing these important documents sooner and attributes this lack of respect for the tribunal to his probable laziness."

....and laughing ensued.....

You can see the name in bold....

It's spelled Majloch.  Isabella kindly translated the document for us and I'll put that in a separate post so stay tuned....

Once we found the first document, the archivist now had more information to work with and found 2 more, Shmuel Aryeh, spelled Szmulem Arya, and you can see the name of his wife below, Estera Feldman (no relation that we know of, but a rather interesting coincidence...)

Sura, was Sarah, my grandfather's sister....

A Day of Discoveries....

Today, my family and I went to the two towns where my grandparents grew up. My dad hired a lovely guide named Isabella and a driver for the day. To be honest, I wasn't sure what to expect. It could have gone either way. My dad emailed Isabella all our pertinent information including some document information I had discovered earlier this year in the Yad Vashem archives. We had no idea whether she was going to follow through or to what extent she would be willing to spend the time researching a family that she knew nothing about. And I'll mention here that Isabella was not Jewish...

She first took us to Sosnowiec to the street and the house my grandmother grew up in, 16 Warsawska Street.  The apartment block was there and it was exactly as my great uncle has described. But the neighborhood was modernized and we had a hard time picturing our grandmother growing up in the neighborhood before the war. We found the entrance to the building and as soon as we opened the door (which was in the alley behind the building) it was as if we had been thrown back in time. The stairwell of the building hadn't been changed since before the war, the steps broken and chipped away and the paint peeling off the sides of the wall.  We climbed the three stories to the top of the building and went to the last apartment on the right hand side.  There was a distinct marking on the doorframe where a mezuzah had once been.  While we stood there sort of speechless, I (being the true Israeli that I am) knocked on the door. Everyone sort of panicked but after a few minutes a man (who looked like he had just woken up or was stoned - take your pick) opened the door.  He let us inside and we took a picture but we couldn't believe that we had stood in the same spot where my grandmother had stood more than 75 years earlier....

The Izaak Synagogue, Cracow

After almost not making the Warsaw-Krakow flight, and then losing my luggage when we finally DID make it Krakow, we finally made our way (sans luggage) to our apartment about 10 minutes walk from the Jewish quarter.

This is the famous Reb Izaak shul in Krakow. The shul was built by my great, great, great (and a couple more greats) grandfather in 1638. He was a wealthy banker and there is a legendary story written about him which (if you're interested) you can find by searching his name in a search engine. 

Attached to the famous Rama shul is an ancient cemetery where my ancestor, Reb Izaak Reb Yekeles, the builder of the Reb Izaak shul is buried.  Standing next to his headstone is my brother, Yitzi, who is named after him.

This is one of the walls surrounding the cemetery that is known as the wailing wall.  If you look closely, you can see that it is literally a mosaic of broken and shattered headstones.  During WW2, the cemetery was partially destroyed by the Nazis and most of the graves were desecrated, their headstones shattered and destroyed.  After the war when the cemetery was reconstructed, the broken headstones were pieced together to create the wall.  It's a sobering sight, this endless wall of broken gravestones. On many of them you can make out partial names and dates but not more. We may never know who they once belonged to but this wall makes sure they will not be forgotten....

Photo credit goes to my brother, Zvi....

Warsaw airport

Yitzi and I are sitting in the Warsaw airport at an Internet port waiting for our connecting flight to Krakow.  I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this. I think when most of us think of Poland, we think of a colorless, backwater place, dreary and somewhat  dismal with a few horse and buggies thrown in for ambience.  Not a place where you can wile away the three hour layover wait trying on every luxury (read: expensive) perfume ever created while drinking a superb cappuccino...

While standing in the long line for passport control, Yitzi and I both noticed that the ponytail-wearing customs official either got up on the wrong side of the bed or was naturally a person who was loathe to crack a smile.  She didn't seem that eager to allow all these exhausted foreigners into her country... And I couldn't help but wonder what her grandfather was doing 75 years ago....

The Good Family.....Pre-war

This is my grandfather's family.  He was one of nine children and five of his siblings were married with children.  In fact, my mother had eight first cousins that died in the Shoah before she was even born.  My grandfather, Elimelech and his older brother, Yitzchak, were the only survivors.  The matriarch of the family, Chava Rachel, is the woman I am named after....

Packing for Poland....

I planted the seed of returning to my grandparents' birthplace in Poland in my Dad's head, a little over two years ago...as luck would have it, he surprised me a couple of months ago and asked if I would be interested in making that meaningful trip this summer....I jumped at the chance.  Honestly, I never was that interested in visiting the place that tore my family to shreds, but since my grandparents, Elimelech and Regina Good z"l passed away, the need for seeing those places grew stronger.  So now I am in the midst of packing for six days in Poland.  Along with my parents, my two twin brothers are coming and I'm really looking forward to the unbelievable experience I know this will be.

I couldn't help but notice the irony in packing and booking a ticket to Poland.  Some 75 years ago, my grandparents and their respective families had no way out of Eastern Europe.  The lucky families who were able to escape, made their way furtively and under the darkness of night with just the clothes on their back.  Now, in 2013, my dad consulted his travel agent (hi Elite!) for the best possible flight options and had to coordinate two separate parties departing from two different continents so we would meet in Poland around the same time.  And my suitcase lies open on my bed as I try and figure out what to take with, what to leave behind, various clothing items going in, then coming out as I try to guess at the weather forecast in both Warsaw and Krakow while simultaneously paying attention to the current luggage restrictions.

I wonder what my grandparents would think of this all if they were still alive.  I know my grandfather had no desire whatsoever to go back to the place that robbed him of his family, but I hope he understands the need that we all feel to stand there.  To take over, in some way, for the generation of witnesses who are fewer in number as each year passes by.  To stand where they cannot, for justice, for religious tolerance and for humanity.