My first afternoon in Warsaw raised an essential question: Am I exploring the history of Jews within Poland and among Poles or vis-a-vis Poland and Poles. At first impression, it seems more the former than the latter. Consider the deep historical similarities between the two peoples. Poland is an ancient land that is located between …
Author: Chanan Kessler
Getting ready to leave
I’m a few hours away from setting out on an Air France flight via Paris to Warsaw. I’m an anxious traveller, an even more anxious flier. Yet as I prepare to embark on this journey of discovery, perhaps self-discovery, I am more nervous than usual. In my mind I know I will be seeing things …
Learning the geography of Poland
One of my tasks in preparing to visit Poland is to learn the location of various places there. Having studied the history of Jews in Eastern Europe, I know that the borders of Poland changed over the years. In fact, when my Zeidy was born in Zambrow in 1900, Poland was not even a country. …
Poland: it’s complicated
I am the first in my immediate family to go back to Poland since my Zeidy (grandfather) left in 1920. My mother had some desire to see Zambrow, but she and my father focused their travels on places they really wanted to see and experience, such as Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada. The idea …
Preparing for Poland
I have not written anything for a while. For the past few months, I’ve been working on my plan to visit Poland. The tickets for my wife and I have been purchased, and we leave in eight days. We will be arriving and staying in Warsaw, then traveling to Krakow for Shabbat, then moving on …
Treblinka or Auschwitz?
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 …
A Yahrzeit observed
Last sunday, the 12th day of the Hebrew month of Shvat, I observed the yahrzeit of my Zambrow family. This was that date that, in 1943, 72 years ago, my great grandmother Sheindl, my Zeidy’s mother, and three of his sisters and their families, were murdered by the Nazis. At least I believe this was …
Board meeting
Last Sunday, the board of the Zambrow Landsmanschaft met at a deli in Manhattan. We came together to discuss the various projects in which the organization is involved. Our connection with each other is through our ancestors, parents and grandparents, who lived in Zambrow. We represent different religious outlooks and live in various places in …
The Yizkor Book project
As I mentioned in a previous post, I now serve as a board member of the Zambrow Landsmanschaft. Once a year we have a membership meeting. A few years back, the president asked for someone to volunteer to assume responsibility for overseeing the translation of the Zambrow Yizkor Book into English. I’d worked as an …
Lost connections
Exploring the past, especially one’s European Jewish past, necessarily means trying to reach across generation and continents to connect with the pain they must have felt. And here I’m not even attempting to imagine the last days of my great grandmother and my great aunts, whose lives were taken in the most horrific manner possible, …