Everyone deserves to be remembered, to have their story told. But how to tell the story of someone I never met, who lived so far away, left no survivors, and for whom not a scrap of genealogical information exists? No birth document. No marriage record. No physical trace of a life lived. Not even a grave.

And so the story of my great aunt Paiche (pronounced pie-tze) will of necessity be but a sketch. Her life was cut short at the age 33 or so, but she lived a full life. She had a husband. A  child. A profession. Dreams. This is her life story, as best as I can tell it, based on the the little I have: a few photographs of her and her family as well as the recorded recollections, some 50 years after her death, of her younger sister, Chaya Sarah (Adele).

Her Hebrew name was Puah Leah, though she was known to her family as Paiche, the Yiddish equivalent of Puah. (The name Puah derives from one of the midwives mentioned in the book of Exodus who refused to carry out Pharaoh’s order to slay the first born male children.) In Polish, she was called Pola or Paula. She was the sixth child born in the Polish town of Zambrow to my great grandparents, Chone (Elchanan) and Sheindl Wierzbowicz. They married in Zambrow in 1898. My grandfather was their first child, born in 1899 or 1900. The next two children, born in 1903, were twins, a daughter, Chana Golda (known as Chanche) and a son, Kelman. (Click here to read my reconstruction of Chanche’s life.) Kelman died a year later in 1904. Then followed two more sons, Shmulke and David, born in 1906 and 1908 respectively.

My best guess is that Paiche was born a year later, in 1909. I have only one photograph of her as a child. It shows her with her younger sister, Chaya Sarah, and her eldest sister Chanche:

Paiche, seated on the viewer’s left, looks to be about three or four years older than Chaya Sarah, who I know was born in 1912. Paiche stares intently into the camera as Chaya Sarah lovingly rests her hand on Paiche’s left arm. Paiche appears to be about 1o years old. Despite her youth, she projects an air of confidence, of being a composed, self-possessed and serious person. The girls are all dressed conservatively, wearing long sleeved dresses with collars that cover their bodies, in keeping with their being raised in a traditionally religious family.

Given the age of the sisters, the  photograph was likely taken sometime around 1918-1920, not long before my grandfather was drafted into the Polish army to fight in the Russian-Polish war of 1920-1921. He served in the army for about a year before absconding from his unit and sneaking across the border into Germany. (To read this story, click here.) He spent about two years in Germany, made his way to Palestine and, about four years later, to New York. He never saw Paiche again, and so the image of Paiche in this photograph is close to how she looked the last time he ever saw her.

Paiche married at a young age, when she was about 19 or 20 years of age. Her husband was named Shimon (Simon) Rosenbaum.

Paiche appears to have married well. Shimon looks like a good person, handsome, likable, intelligent, respectable. He appears, as judged by the photos, to have had a modernist outlook. Whether or not he grew up in a religious family, he did not wear a head covering, unlike his religious father-in-law. Yet despite any religious differences, he seemed to have fit in well with his in-laws. Here he is, in the center of the photograph, standing behind his in-laws and child and between his wife and sister-in-law, Chaya Sarah.

Chaya Sarah, who has her hand around his arm, had clearly formed an attachment to him.

I know nothing about Shimon’s family. Rosenbaum is a common name (especially compared to his wife’s maiden name, Wierzbowicz), which complicates the task of tracking down his records. There is a birth record from 1902 of a Shimon Rosenbaum from Gniewoszow, a town about 150 miles from Zambrow. Given that Shimon appears to have been several years older than Paiche, this may well be his birth record.

Paiche and Shimon had one son, whom they named David. Based on the photographs, my best estimate is that David was born around 1930. (I have not been able to locate any record of his birth.)

Paiche apparently named her son after her brother who died at age 18. I know nothing about Paiche’s brother except his name, the year of his birth, 1908, and, alas, the year of his death, 1926:

No one in the family ever mentioned him. Photographs of all of Paiche’s siblings exist, except for him. Indeed, I learned about his existence only from genealogical records. My suspicion is that he had some type of developmental disability or birth defect for which his family felt shame and which resulted in his premature death. (Click here to read about this story.)

No matter what the cause of the family silence around David’s birth and death, I find it moving that Paiche sought to honor him and preserve her brother’s memory by naming her first son after him.

Paiche’s David was a beloved child and quite cute.

He had alert eyes and appears to have been quite bright.

 

Paiche wanted a better life for herself and her family. She didn’t want to stay in Poland. She wanted to immigrate either to Palestine or to the United States. She certainly was in touch with her brother, my grandfather, who, by 1927, had immigrated to the United States and, by 1934, become a U.S. citizen. (Click here to read about my grandfather’s immigration story.) The problem was that the doors to immigration were closed. The British had severely limited Jewish immigration to Palestine. And in 1924, the United States imposed restrictive immigration quotas based on national original. By the mid 1930s, the annual quota for all Polish nationals was less than 7000 people. Had she been single and male, she perhaps she could have figured a way to leave Poland. Her brother Shmulke had left Poland in the late 1920s or early 1930s, travelling to Cuba and then using Cuba as a stepping stone to immigrating to the United States. (To read his story, click here). As a married woman, and a woman with a family, Paiche’s chances of finding a way to leave Poland were remote.

And so Paiche and Shimon decided to stay in Zambrow and raise their family there. Two factors must have played an important role in guiding their decision to stay in Zambrow. One was Paiche’s desire to be close to her parents. Both of her surviving brothers had left Poland. Her eldest sister, Chanche, had moved with her husband to Gruidentz, a city in western Poland over 200 miles away from Zambrow. And so it fell to Paiche and her husband to stay in Zambrow and look after her parents.

Economics may also have played a part in their decision. Paiche’s father, Chone, had a small factory which produced oil. He purchased raw seeds, mostly flax seeds, pressed them and extracted the oil that he sold to manufacturers of products which use oil, such as paints.

By the 1930s, Chone was no longer a young man, and needed a hand in running his business. He probably hoped that his sons would help run or take over the business, but both of them were no longer in Poland. Whatever Shimon’s professional training might have been, he likely ended up working in and helping to manage the oil factory.

Even so, the family’s economic circumstances could not have been easy. Making a living in Zambrow, a relatively small town of about 10,000 persons, located in the less industrialized eastern part of Poland, could not have been easy. The economy in Poland in general during the interwar period was uncertain. The Great Depression took a heavy toll on the European economy, Poland included. The economic situation in Poland was especially precarious for Jews. One writer describes how “nationalist rhetoric, with its promises of improving the lives of Christians at the expense of pushing Jews out of the economy, was gaining increasing popularity throughout Poland.” In 1934, one of the major political parties in Poland began organizing boycotts of Jewish businesses. “As the boycotts grew more intense, cases of vandalism of Jewish property increased.”

Paiche was determined to help the family deal with its economic circumstances. She decided to learn a marketable skill in order to contribute meaningfully to the family income. Paiche set her sights on learning to sew fine linens. She discovered a trade school located in or near Gruidentz, the city where her older sister Chanche lived. Paiche was already a mother and obviously could not take her young son with her while she attended school. So she left David in the care of her sister Chaya Sarah, who was about 20 years old at the time. Paiche stayed in Gruidentz with Chanche and her family for about six months while Chaya Sarah took care of David.

It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Chaya Sarah had formed a deep attachment to the young boy. As she said in her oral interview, “David was a bright child, very bright, and very cute. And we loved him.”

Even after Paiche returned to Zambrow, Chaya Sarah’s attachment to David was so strong that she continued to act like a mother to him.

Paiche returned to Zambrow and started a small business sewing and selling expensive linens. She was talented, and, according to Chaya Sarah, the business thrived.

In 1937, Chaya Sarah met and married an American citizen named Irving (Isaac) Rubinson. As an American citizen, Irving was able to bring her to the United States as a non quota immigrant under the aegis of family reunification. Upon arriving in the United States, she took the name Adele.

Meanwhile, Paiche’s parents, already in their mid 40s, gave birth to another child, a girl whom they named Hinde. Hinde was born sometime in the mid 1920s, and was about 15 years younger than Paiche. Her parents must have relied on Paiche and Shimon to help care for their new daughter as well as to help support the family economically. Of her parents’ eight children, three had immigrated to America, two had died, and one had moved to the other side of Poland. Paiche was the only adult child left in Zambrow to help out her parents.

More displacement was yet to come. In 1938, my grandfather was able to arrange for the immigration of his father to the United States. In December of that year, his father left his wife, children and grandchildren behind and sailed to the port of New York. Paiche and Shimon remained behind to care for her mother and younger sister.

Sometime after her father left, the family sent this photograph, the last family photograph I have, to their family in New York. It shows what remained of the family (other than Shimon) in Zambrow. Paiche is at the center of the picture, now the family’s caretaker. She has her hands, lovingly, around those for whom she bore responsibility, her young sister and her elderly mother. In front of her sits David, still a cute, intelligent looking, precocious, lovable boy.

With the outbreak of World War II in September, 1939, Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Zambrow was about 10 miles into the Soviet zone of control. The Nazis occupied Zambrow briefly and then withdrew on September 22 when the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland began. While the Soviets exiled some of Zambrow’s residents, life in Zambrow retained some semblance of normalcy. All that ended with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. By August, the Nazis had set up a ghetto in Zambrow. Jews from surrounding towns were forcibly relocated to the ghetto in Zambrow. Deprivation and mass shootings followed. A life of horror difficult to imagine.

After the war, my grandfather heard a report that Paiche, Shimon, David, Sheindl and Hinde were deported to and gassed at the Treblinka death camp. That deportation may have occurred in November 1942. The last Jews of Zambrow were deported to Auschwitz on a Friday night, Janaury 12, 1943, where any family who remained alive would have met their certain deaths.

I know one other thing about Paiche: she made a strong impression on those who met her and had a memorable smile. I know this from the Zambrow Yizkor book. The Yizkor book is a memorial book put together and published in 1963 by those who left Zambrow before the war or survived it. In it, a man named Yaakov Tobiasz records his remembrances of some of the residents of Zambrow who had made an impression on him. Two of them were Paiche and her father. He writes: “Before my eyes [the Jews of Zambrow] stand, and speak to my heart: Leah Zukrowicz, Dina Golombek, with her literary excerpts, Bracha Zukrowicz, Paula Wierzbowicz, with her smile, who along with her father, Hona, the one who intoned ‘Mekhalkel Chaim’ so engagingly during the high Holy Day prayers at the White Bet HaMedrash, . . . .”

Paiche did not have an easy life. She dreamed of a better life somewhere other than Poland, a dream that her personal as well as historical circumstances made impossible. She bore the weight of responsibility for her family. While most of her other siblings had left Zambrow, she and her husband stayed behind to attend to her parents’ needs. She made the best of her life, helping to care for her family’s welfare while raising her talented child. She was a strong willed, talented, self possessed and accomplished woman, a devoted daughter to her parents, a loving wife to her husband, a caring mother to her child.

So much of her life still lay in front of her. She lived only about 33 years. She, along with her husband, sisters, mother and child, as well as all the victims of the Holocaust, deserve to be remembered.