For nearly 21 months, from the end of September, 1939 until June 22, 1941, the residents of Zambrow lived under the control of the Soviet Union. In retrospect, this period was but an interlude between the initial Nazi occupation in September, 1939, until their 1941 reoccupation, during which they would destroy Zambrow’s Jewish community. Yet, …
Author: Chanan Kessler
Zambrow During the War Years: Part 1–September, 1939
When World War II began on September 1, 1939, my great grandmother Sheindl Wierzbowicz, her daughter, Paiche (pronounced pie-che), Paiche’s husband Shimon Rosenbaum, their 10 year old son, David, as well Sheindl’s teenage daughter, Hinde, all lived in Zambrow, Poland. By January, 1943, they had all been murdered. What was their experience–the experience of Zambrow’s …
Sketching a lost life: my great aunt Paiche
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 …
The List
People create lists for all kinds of reasons. Projects to complete. Things to do. Shopping. As the owner of a paper goods store on the Lower East Side, my grandfather, whom I knew as Zaide, must have created all kinds of lists. Inventory. Expenses. Receipts. These lists, like the store itself, no longer exist. All …
Peeling off layers of the past
I am drawn like a magnet into my family’s past. Not out of nostalgia, but as a way of projecting my own future, a future rooted in deep history. Yet much of that history is clouded and, to my sorrow, mostly unrecoverable. My grandfather’s generation is gone, having died in America or been killed by …
The organizations that mattered (part 1): HIAS
It’s difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of my Zaide’s (grandfather’s) generation. Their lives were uncertain, preoccupied with the issue of migration. For one central feature characterized the lives of so many Jews before World War II: dislocation, and the attendant struggles to leave Europe and redefine themselves in a new land. Having experienced …
Immigration strategies: the New World option
Half of my grandfather’s family made it out of Poland before World War II. The other half didn’t and were killed. My grandfather’s brother was one who did leave Poland. He was known as Shmulke (Shmuel or Sam) Wierzbowicz, and in this post I explore his journey from Poland to America. As with most Eastern …
Poland-Palestine-America: A journey to U.S. citizenship
My relatives didn’t arrive in the U.S. during the period of mass immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe from 1880-1920, when over 20 million people, including two and a half million Eastern European Jews, arrived on these shores. As the doors of immigration to the U.S. began closing after 1920, my grandfather’s entire family–his parents, …
From Germany to Palestine: 1920-1922
I begin with a photograph. It’s the first photo I have of my grandfather, Yosef Weirzbowicz (Waxman). It was taken in 1922, in Berlin. Next to him sits his mother, Sheindl. Standing alone, a photograph is lifeless, unreal, imprisoned, as Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. To bring it to life, a story needs to be told, …
From Poland to Germany
Sometime in 1920, about a year after being drafted into the Polish army during the Polish-Soviet war, my Zaide (grandfather) absconded and made his way to Germany. In this post I explore why and how he made this fateful decision to leave his family and native land and to enter, illegally, into Germany. When he …