One of the biggest mysteries surrounding my Zambrow family’s fate is where they died. Actually, it only became a mystery to me when I started researching the Zambrow Yizkor book, whose translation into English I oversaw. The book states that the Jews of Zambrow met their end on January 16, 1943, in Auschwitz.
This contradicts what I learned about my Zambrow family from my mother and aunt. The story they told me, which my aunt recorded in her memoirs, is as follows. A short time after the war, two sisters wrote a letter from Australia to the Zembrover Society (Zambrow landsmanshaft organization) in which they told of the German invasion of Zambrow and the transport of Jews on trucks and trains to Treblinka. There they saw my ancestors, my great grandmother Sheindl, her daughters Paiche (Puah) and Hinde, and Paiche’s two children, “undressed, poisened, gassed, burned to death on the 12th of Shvat, 1943.” The sisters wrote that they were forced to serve as concubines to German officers, which is how they managed to survive. They decided “to keep a calendar and a list of every horrible thing that happened and if they were alive at the end of the war they would give information to the families.” The letter they wrote was unsigned. A representative of the Zambrover Society delivered the terrible news to my family on a Saturday night, extinguishing hope that they had somehow survived. They then commenced to sit shiva.
In 1999, my aunt, who then lived in Jerusalem, went to Yad V’shem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and filled out two “Pages of Testimony” for her murdered aunts in which she stated that the family was murdered in Treblinka.
On my visit to Zambrow a few years ago, I noticed a plaque had been placed by the entrance of the Jewish cemetery by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, the official Polish organization in charge or preserving Jewish cultural sites. The plaque, written in Polish and English, states that the Jews remained in Zambrow “were transported to and murdered by the Germans in Treblinka.”
My research on Zambrow, however, indicates that the Jews who remained alive by January 1943 were sent to Auschwitz. In my previous post, I noted that the various sources, including the Zambrow Yizkor book, states that they were killed in Auschwitz on January 16, 1943, on the eve of the Sabbath, which would make it the 11th of Shvat in the Hebrew calendar.
I have consulted a number of other sources, and they generally consistent with this account. The Jewish Virtual Library states that “On Jan. 12, 1943, their transport [of the Jews of Zambrow] to Auschwitz began in batches of 2,000 a night.” The Holocaust Chronicle, a book and online resource, which lists major significant dates of Nazi atrocities over the course of the Second World War, states, on page 414: “January 12-21, 1943: Twenty thousand Jews are deported from Zambrow, Poland, to Auschwitz.” However, the book, on page 385, leaves some room to consider Treblinka as the destination for at least for some of Zambrow’s Jews: “More than 100,000 Jews remaining in the towns and villages in the Bialystok region of Poland are arrested and deported to holding camps at Zambrow, Volkovysk, Kelbasin, and Bogusze before being sent to the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps.”
I recently purchased a book by a survivor of Auschwitz from Zambrow, Israel Lior-Liechtenstein, entitled Remember Never to Forget. It is more of a factual than an emotional account, not one of the more moving Holocaust memoirs I have read. The author writes that on January 13, 1943, the Jews of Zambrow were ordered to gather in the main square of the ghetto, taken by a horse drawn sled to the Chizeiy train station where they were loaded on cattle cars. He then writes that “the train passed the Makin station at speed, people began to breath more easily; they looked excited and even somehow glad. Makin station was the station one took to Treblinka, and since the signification of this place was known, all were glad to see it was not our destination” (pp. 74-74).
He continues: “Jews travelled for over a day until they arrived at Auschwitz on January 15, 1943. Along with about 300 other residents of Zambrow, he was taken as a prison to Birkenau while the other Jews were gassed.” (Ibid.)
The Zambrow Yizkor book is consistent with this account. It recounts that the Jews of Zambrow feared being sent to Treblinka, only about 30 miles from Zambrow, and were greatly relieved when the train continued past it. Malkin was a small train station about five miles from Treblinka that served as the junction for trains bound for Treblinka. Given the proximity of Treblinka from Zambrow, it might have made “more sense” to have the Jews sent there, but who can account for the Nazi mindset which determined who would be killed where.
Here is what is written in the Yizkor book about this last journey of the Jews of Zambrow:
We still harbored the thought that, despite all, we were being taken to Treblinka. When we arrived at the Malkin station, and the train stopped there, a frightful panic immediately broke out. We knew that from Malkin, one rode into a forest, and the distance is not more than from ten to fifteen minutes a ride. Velvel’s little daughter began to tremble and spasm over her entire body, and she screamed that she did not want to die. Following here, everyone broke out into bitter wailing. I sat stonily in a corner, and looked at my watch. Five, six, seven minutes…ten minutes…fifteen minutes. We are proceeding to travel further. Who can convey the agony of that moment. ‘Yes’ – Velvel says to me – ‘Glicksman [the head of the Judenrat] didn’t deceive us after all. Indeed, we are not going to Treblinka, just as he said.’
I also consulted Martin Gilbert’s The MacMillan Atlas of the Holocaust, which shows the transports of January, 1943, and states that the transport from Zambrow took place on January 12, 1943, to Auschwitz. Here is the relevant page:
