Exploring the past, especially one’s European Jewish past, necessarily means trying to reach across generation and continents to connect with the pain they must have felt. And here I’m not even attempting to imagine the last days of my great grandmother and my great aunts, whose lives were taken in the most horrific manner possible, nor considering how that affects me. I will try to tackle this issue later, when I relate what I’ve learned about the how, what, where and when their lives, and Jewish life in Zambrow, ended.

In this post, I would like to focus on one specific moment in my family’s history: when my Zayde (grandfather) left Poland at the age of 20, never to see his mother again. The circumstances of his leaving are part of family lore. Also, as part of a class I took in college many years ago, I interviewed my parents about their family histories, and, a few days ago, I dug out of my file cabinet seven pages of handwritten notes of these talks.

The story goes as follows: After World War I and the Russian Revolution, the Poles and Russians fought a brutal war that took the lives of over 100,000, to establish the borders of the nascent Polish state created by the Allies at the Versailles Conference.

My Zayde was drafted in the Polish army to fight. The Polish army was not a very hospitable place for a Jew (of course, neither was the Soviet Army), especially one who came from a religious home. Jews were not permitted to engage in combat, but were assigned to support duties. Here is a photo of Jewish soldiers in the Polish army from the town of Kałuszyn, not far from Zambrow.

This one shows a Jewish Polish soldiers posing with an elderly man and a younger woman:

Whether my Zayde planned to escape beforehand or whether it was a spur of the moment decision is unknown, but what we do know is that he went AWOL and slipped over the border into Germany. From there he went to Palestine, where he met my Bubbe (grandmother). Later, they moved to New York, where my mother was born and I was raised.

Did my Zayde saw his final goodbye to his mother before he left Zambrow to go into the Polish army? Did he feel that this was a final goodbye?

It is difficult to imagine, in this age of airline travel and Skype, how final were the physical separations. I’m sure he wrote letters to her, none of which is extant. Nor am I aware of any letters from his family in Poland that still exist. Perhaps if the war hadn’t happened, he would have journeyed back to Poland at some point, or more likely, they would have immigrated to the U.S.

What my Zayde did receive is a photo, a haunting one, that must have been mailed from Zambrow sometime between the latter part of 1938 and before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Here is my great grandmother Sheindl, my great aunt Paiche, or Puah in Hebrew, her son Dovid, (she had another son whose name is unknown), and my great aunt Hinde. The younger generation look happy, and it’s difficult to decipher what emotions they must have felt.

What I know is that this photo represented the last link between my Zayde and his family. Though the explorations of my past, I am trying to bring this picture, and the world it represents, to life.