In their later years, my great grandparents, Chone and Sheindl Wierzbowicz, were blessed with a daughter. Her name was Hinde. She was born sometime in the mid 1920s. She spent her short life with her parents and family in Zambrow, Poland, and shared the fate of Zambrow’s Jews.

I don’t know with certainty Hinde’s birth year or how old her parents were when she was born. I’ve located no birth record or, for that matter, any other official record of her life. Everything I know about her comes from four photographs preserved by her sister, Chaya Sarah (my great aunt Adele), as well as her brief recorded recollections of Hinde.

My best guess, based on the photos, is that Hinde was born in 1925 or 1926. This would have been about 25 years after her parents’ first child, my grandfather, was born. Her father would then have been 50-51 and her mother 47-48 years old. Chone and Sheindl were 22 and 19 years old respectively when they married in 1897 (as evidenced by their wedding certificate), putting their birth years at 1875 and 1878. Born this late in their lives, Hinde was truly a miracle child. A daughter, to paraphrase the Torah’s account of Sarah giving birth to Isaac, “of their old age” (בת לזקניו) (Genesis, 21:7)

Hinde was named after Sheindl’s mother, Hinde Saperstein. Sheindl’s mother died at the age of 66, probably around 1916. Hinde was the only child born to them after Sheindl’s mother died, so they naturally named her after Sheindl’s mother. (In eastern European Jewish tradition, children were named only after deceased relatives.)

I know only one thing for certain about Hinde: she was deeply attached to, and much beloved by, her family.

Sheindl took special care of her. And Hinde felt a deep bond with her mother. As a mark of their relationship, they went to a photography studio to have their picture taken.

Hinde was then a young teen, her mother already in her 60s. They stand shoulder to shoulder, the space between them dissolved, merging into one. Hinde clings to Sheindl’s arm. Her head leans toward Sheindl, coming to rest on her mother’s solid frame. Hinde’s dependence on her mother is palpable. Sheindl, for her part, gazes directly at the camera, emanating an air of determination and fearlessness, but also the weariness of a woman who birthed eight children yet still, in her later years, bore the responsibility of a mother and caregiver.

The mother-daughter bond was intensified by the many familial separations Hinde’s parents had endured by the time of Hinde’s birth. Their oldest son, my grandfather, left Poland (1921) and was living in New York City. Their eldest daughter, Chanche, had married (1923) and was living in western Poland. Another son, David, had died around the time of Hinde’s birth (1926) at the young age of 18. Their youngest son, Shmulke, would leave Poland for Cuba in March, 1929, when Hinde was a young child. Only two daughters, Paiche and Chaya Sarah, remained in Zambrow when Hinde was born. Chaya Sarah would depart for America in 1936.

And so, though she had many siblings, only one, Paiche, remained in Zambrow. Though separated by a difference of about 16 years, they developed a deep connection born out of general travails of Jewish life in Poland in the 1930s as well as the family’s difficult circumstances. Paiche, I imagine, cared for Hinde not only as an older sister, but as a maternal figure as well.

The sisterly bond centered around Paiche’s only child, David. David was born around 1930, a year after Paiche married Shimon Rosenbaum (https://rootsjourney.blog/2021/02/sketching-a-lost-life-my-great-aunt-paiche/)

Hinde helped take care of her nephew, who was only about 10 years younger than she. Paiche was busy trying to help the family make ends meet during the depression years of the 1930s. She left home for about half a year to learn the business of sewing and sale of fine linens. Here, in a photograph from about 1937, Hinde takes care of David as they walk hand in hand on the streets of Zambrow, bundled up for the cold Polish winter.

I don’t know what kind of life Hinde envisioned for herself. But the next photo I have of her shows that she was determined to carve out a life of her own.

In 1938, Hinde went for a vacation to the woods of Wygoda. She had a photograph taken and sent it to her siblings in New York. I know the photograph was taken in Wygoda because, on the back of it, she wrote, in Polish: “During my stay in Wygoda, Hinde. 1938”

As brief as the note is, it represents the only writing I have of Hinde.

The photo shows Hinde, by herself, expressing the joy of a young woman, in nature, exploring her identity.

How far from Zambow did Hinde venture on her adventure? There are two possibilities. There is a town called Wygoda in western Poland, about 350 kilometers (217 miles) from Zambrow. But would Hinde, at her young age, have travelled this far away from her parents? Would they have let her? Unlikely.

More probably, she travelled to a park called the Wygoda-Debowe Gory Reserve. The park appears on the app “AllTrails,” which describes the park and the hike as follows:

The hike is not far from Zambrow, about halfway between her home town and the regional capital city of Lomza, which is 27 kilometers (17 miles) from Zambrow.

Her journey of self-discovery most likely did not take her far from home.

I have one last photo of her, taken not long before she and everyone else in the photo–her sister Paiche, her nephew David, and her mother–were murdered.

The photo was taken after her father had left Poland for America in December 1938. It’s possible that the photo was taken after the outbreak of World War II, during the period when the Soviets occupied Zambrow, from October 1939-July 1941.

Paiche, the family’s caregiver and breadwinner, occupies the center of the picture. Her right hand rests lovingly on Hinde’s shoulder, a gesture of assuredness. David leans toward Hinde, the aunt who must have also felt like a big sister to him. Sheindl and Hinde wear the same kind of dress, perhaps sewn by Paiche herself. Sheindl exhibits the weariness of a mother and grandmother who has suffered loss upon loss, three of her children, and now her husband as well, having moved to America. The photo depicts all that reamined of the Wierzbowicz family (excluding Paiche’s husband) in Zambrow.

While all the above photographs were taken, my grandfather was occupied in New York with trying to get his family out of Poland. It was not an easy task given the restrictive immigration laws of the 1930s. Despite the long odds, he succeeded in getting his father out in December, 1938. It’s quite possible that he had actually arranged for both of his parents to come to the United States. But how could Sheindl leave Zambrow? How could she abandon her daughter? I imagine that she wrote to him that leaving was not an option unless he could also arrange to have Hinde leave with her. She still had a young daughter to take of.

During her oral history video in the 1990s, Chaya Sarah referred to Hinde as “her mother’s sacrifice.” Sheindl would never abandon Hinde. Sheindl gave her life to stay with her.

Chaya Sarah reported in her interview that, during the ghettoization of Zambrow’s Jews, Hinde was afflicted with typhus. Such outbreaks in the ghettos of Poland were common. In her weakened condition, she was deported to Treblinka or Auschwitz in late 1941 or early 1942. According to what was reported to the family after the war, the four of them, Paiche, David, Hinde and Sheindl, were together when they were taken to the gas chamber.

I imagine that on their way to their deaths, the family clung together, just as they did in the photographs. Their love, their mutual dependence, formed an unbreakable bond. A bond of life. A bond unto death.