In two previous posts, I explored the efforts of my great grandfather, Chone (pronounced Kho-ne) Wierzbowicz (pronounced Verzbovitch), to immigrate from his native Zambrow, Poland, to the United States. With a guarantee of support filed by his son, my grandfather, Chone applied for a visa in 1934, and, through a combination of luck and perseverance, received one in late 1938.

Within a month of getting the visa, Chone left Zambrow for the last time. He travelled to the port city of Gydnia, Poland. On the 12th of December, 1938, he boarded the Pilsudski, named after the late Polish prime minister and military hero, bidding a tearful farewell to his beloved wife of 41 years, Sheindl.

Chone’s departure was the first step of a plan to bring his family to the United States. He left before the others because it was easier for him to obtain a visa than any other family member. Even at age 60, Chone was employable and thus less likely to have his visa application rejected on the grounds that he would become, in the words of immigration law, a public charge. After living in the U.S. for five years, Chone could then apply for citizenship. Once granted, his wife Sheindl, as well as their young daughter Hinde, could apply for a priority visa based on family reunification. Then—hopefully—at some future time, his other two daughters and their families could join them in New York.

After an 11 day journey, the Pilsudski pulled into New York harbor. The date was December 23, 1938. Chone’s American life was about to begin.

My grandfather went to the port to meet him. They hadn’t seen each other for 17 years, as my grandfather had left Poland in 1921. During the intervening years, my grandfather had married, become the father to three daughters, and begun a paper goods business on the Lower East Side. Fearing he would not recognize his father, my grandfather took his brother-in-law with him, as the latter had seen Chone when he married my grandfather’s sister in Poland two years before.

After what must have been an emotional father-son reunion, they headed back to my grandfather’s apartment on Sheriff Street. His daughters—my mother and her two sisters—eagerly awaited the grandfather they had heard much about but never met.

My aunt recalls the occasion in her memoir:

“It was a Friday afternoon . . . and for first time we had a grandfather. We thought that we wouldn’t be able to speak with him, but we had been practicing our Yiddish and somehow we got along just fine. We went for a short walk with our new Zaide (grandfather) and he started to read all the signs on he street. We were so proud of our Zaide who knew English.”

A religious man, Chone brought along some keepsakes to bridge the world he had left behind and the one he was entering: a pair of tephilin, a megilla scroll to read on the holiday of Purim, a Chanukah menorah, and a pair of silver candlesticks for lighting the Sabbath candles.

He used the menorah right away, as he had arrived on the seventh night of Chanukah. However, he put the candlesticks away to serve as a weekly reminder of his wife, who, he hoped, would light them when she joined him in New York.

Chone made sure to timely file the papers he needed for citizenship. My grandfather surely helped him, for, having spent innumerable hours filling out papers to get a visa for his father, as well as establishing his own citizenship, he’d practicably become an expert on U.S. immigration law.

The first document he needed to file was a “Certificate of Arrival,” certifying the date on which he had arrived and that he had entered the country legally.

At the same time, he filed a Declaration of Intention to become a citizen. Once he had lived in the United States for five years, he could then file a Petition for Naturalization.

Chone’s adjustment to life in New York was not an easy one. He had lived his entire life in small Polish towns, his first 20 years in his birthplace, Kolno, and then, after his marriage, in Zambrow. Chone’s disorientation is highlighted by this story related by my aunt:

“One night after Zaide arrived, Papa borrowed a car and we all got in and took Zaide for a ride. We rode all over Manhattan and then crossed over a bridge to Brooklyn. We continued to show him the sights, when suddenly Zaide asked ‘Dos is alts America?’ (This is all America?) That remained a favorite family joke until today.”

Chone also had to get used to living in the cramped quarters of a Lower East Side apartment. In Zambrow, he, his wife, and his extended family lived a middle to upper middle class life in a single family home.

In New York, Chone shared a the two-bedroom apartment with his son, daughter-in-law, and their three daughters.

My grandparents slept in one room along with my mother’s oldest sister, while Chone, my mother and her other sister lived in another room. The bathtub was in the kitchen. To protect the girls’ privacy, Chone would wait in the hallway while they bathed. Chone took his own baths at the local mikveh (ritual bath house).

Chone became close with his nieces. “He was,” my aunt writes, “a very loving man. We were always aware of his love for us. He would reprimand Mama or Papa if they scolded us.”

Meanwhile, Chone established a routine. He began his day at dawn studying gemera (tbe Talmud). My grandmother would arise early enough to prepare a hot breakfast for him. Then he’d head off to an early minyan (prayer service). From there, he went to work at the job my grandfather had arranged for him: kashering meat at Shmulke Bernstein’s butcher shop.

The work was difficult, especially for a man of Chone’s age. He had to lift large sides of meat and kosher them. He worked standing, salting the meat and rinsing it in cold water. But he was happy to have a job and his own source of income. Each week he would sent a letter to his wife in Zambrow, enclosing a $20 bill.

Chone also became an integral part of the small Zambrow shul (synagogue). (I am not sure exactly where the synagogue was, either on Henry Street or on East Broadway.) He had an excellent voice, and had served as prayer leader at his shul in Zambrow. Unfortunately, someone else held that position at the New York synagogue. Eventually, a rotation system developed between Chone and the other man, with each man angling to get the honor of leading services. Chone was chosen to lead services on the high holy days. My aunt recalls the sweet melodies in the days leading up to the holidays, as he practiced the prayers with my grandfather. “All this effort,” she wrote, “for this tiny shul.”

Less than a year after arriving in New York, the Nazis invaded Poland. Fortunately, Zambrow was located in the Soviet area of control, and though the Soviet occupation brought about economic hardship to Zambrow’s Jews, they enjoyed relative freedom. Chone continued to correspond with and send money to his family, although the authorities apparently seized some of the letters and money.

At some point, his family went into the woods and photographed a scene for him to remember them by. They sat on a hammock, his wife, Sheindl, on the right, his daughter Paiche along with her son, David, in the middle, and Chone’s youngest daughter, Hinde, on the left. One imagines them gazing into the camera, as if to remind Chone that while was the first to leave Poland, he was not supposed to be the last.

Everything changed once the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Jews of Zambrow were confined to a ghetto, cut off from the outside world. Chone lost contact with his family. He went on living his life in New York, wondering about their welfare as rumors of the terrible fate of Poland’s Jews circulated in the Jewish press. Chone would reminisce about his family, especially his beloved Sheindl, her cooking, and her household management skills. She was, he said, a real baalabuste.

By early 1944, Chone had lived in New York for five years and was eligible to apply for citizenship. He submitted the last document he needed to file, a Petition for Naturalization. As did many other Jewish immigrants, he used the opportunity to change his last name, choosing the one his son had used when he became a citizen: Waxman.

On May 26, 1944, he received his U.S. citizenship papers.

Chone Wierzbowicz, Polish emigree, had become Chona Waxman, American citizen.

In his petition, Chone listed his wife’s name as well as the those of his six children, three of whom, he declared, “reside in Poland.” His citizenship paper lists his marital status as “married.” But, tragically, by the time Chone filled out his petition, his family had all been murdered. The Jews who remained alive in Zambrow were, with few exceptions, murdered upon their arrival in Auschwitz between January 15-19, 1943.

Perhaps the stress of worrying about his family’s fate contributed to his becoming ill in 1944. He suffered from terrible stomach pain, diagnosed as intestinal cancer. Fortunately, the cancer was treatable and he underwent surgery at Jewish Memorial Hospital. He came home to recover, tended by a visiting nurse, my grandmother and at times his granddaughters. While he recovered, his days as a butcher were most likely over.

Once the war in Europe ended, he searched for his family’s names in the lists of survivors published in the Jewish press. But word of their fate arrived shortly after the war’s end. According to my aunt, two sisters wrote a letter from Australia to the Zembrover Society (Zambrow landsmanshaft organization) in which they told of the transport of Jews on trucks and trains to Treblinka. They reported seeing Chone’s family being “undressed, poisoned, gassed, and burned to death on the 12th of Shvat, 1943 (January 18).” A representative of the Zambrover Society delivered the terrible news to the family on a Saturday night, extinguishing whatever hope that they had somehow survived.

The entire family gathered at my grandfather’s home to sit shiva. The next Sabbath, Chone took out the candlesticks he had saved for his wife. He asked my grandmother to begin lighting them every Shabbat. The keepsake had become a memorial to his murdered wife.

Chone tried to continue living. He studied gemera and attended prayer services.

But he was never the same. His temper, his daughter reports, became short. He would become angry when he saw his family members enjoying themselves. He went into a state of perpetual mourning.

According to the voter registration list of 1945, Chone was still living at my grandparents’ apartment on Sheriff Street.

But he felt he needed to move out and, possibly, remarry. No one could ever replace his beloved Sheindl, but he needed someone to take care of him. Who could he marry?

As it turned out, his son, Shmulke, knew someone: his own mother-in-law. Shmulke had married Eva Richman in 1933, a woman he’d met in Cuba before coming to the United States. Eva’s parents were Joseph Richman and Ethel Baron. They’d married in 1896 and had five children. In 1934, after 35 years of marriage, her husband died.

The match seemed good, at least on paper. Ethel was three years Chone’s junior. She was also from Poland, from the town of Iwaniska, in southeastern Poland. Within a few years after finding out about his murdered wife—perhaps as early as 1946—they married, as, by 1946, Chone had moved out to a nearby apartment on Jefferson Street.

While doing research for this piece, I came across a family tree of Ethel’s family on the Ancestry.com website. In addition to Shmulke’s wife, Eva, Ethel had a daughter named Esther. Esther married Bernard Kranz. Bernard and Esther had a daughter, Faye. (That would make Faye the niece of my great uncle, Shmulke.) Faye is now 95 years old, and, with the help of her son, Ron, I was able to speak with her.

Faye remembers that, after her husband died, her grandmother married two men, both of whom had serious health problems. She had to take care of them, not an easy task. Apparently it was a marriage of convenience rather than one of love.

Chone himself appears to have had mixed feelings about marrying Ethel, for after extensive research, I’ve found no record of the marriage, indicating that they never registered it. The marriage was apparently confined to a small religious ceremony.

I have but one photograph of Chone and his new wife, from the 1949 wedding of my mother’s eldest sister, Sara.

Chone sits at the far right hand side, next to his son. Next to him, at a remove, is his new wife. There is no sign of closeness between them. She appears as an appendage to Chone and his family.

What must have been Chone’s state of mind as took part in celebrating his granddaughter’s wedding? No doubt he was thinking of his true wife, Sheindl, and his daughters and grandchildren who’d been murdered while he himself lived in safety thousands of miles away.

Chone lived four more years. Lonely years of declining health. A man who had been rescued just before the war, but who was shorn of his identity, even his own last name. A man from another world who his son had helped to save, just in time to avoid becoming another victim of the Holocaust. But, he may have thought, to what end?

Chone died on March 17, 1953, nearly 15 years after arriving in New York. He is buried in the Zambrow section of Beth David cemetery in Elmont, Queens, remembered as an honest, upright man and a beloved father and grandfather.

His grave stands alone, separated from the world of his ancestors and his descendents. (My grandfather and his wife are both buried in Israel.) A grave that bears witness to his survival as well as to his loneliness.

I was born about two years after Chone’s death, and my parents named me after him. This piece is dedicated to his memory. Just as Chone carried the memory of his family throughout his American life, I have tried to carry and preserve his memory and those of his murdered family. May his and their memory be for a blessing.