An Exploration of History, Memory and Connections Past and Present
How can I memorialize the lives of my Polish ancestors who died in the Holocaust? The generation of my Zaidy (grandfather) is gone. So too are their children, my mother and her two sisters. But I am trying to recover as much of their lives as possible. In this post, I record the search for …
If you want to explore your roots, there’s no escaping entering the world of genealogy. When I began this project, I knew only the names of my great grandparents, my grandfather Elchanan, who was called Choni, and after whom I am named, and my great grandmother Sheindl, who was murdered in Treblinka or Auschwitz. One …
Can the past be buried and erased completely? Or does the past continue to live on and course through the present like an unsuppressable force? Consider the following: In the Winter 2017 edition of the Jewish Review of Books, there was a fascinating–and deeply disturbing–article by Devin E. Naar. His piece explores the author’s connection …
A few years back, at a meeting of the membership of the United Zembrover Society, I volunteered to take over the job of editing the translation of Sefer Zambrow, the memorial book to the murdered community of the Jews of Zambrow. The project involved working with the translator, Dr. Jakob Berger, and making sure that …
Zambrow had a beautiful synagogue. I’m sure that my Zaidy and his father and his mother from the upstairs balcony davened (prayed) there. I’m sure its walls echoed the voices of prayer and the cries and “shries” on Yom Kippur, when the Kol Nidrei prayer began the service and the women would wail when the the …
One goal of my journey to Zambrow was to see if I could find the home in which my grandfather, whom I called Zaidy (Yiddish for grandfather), grew up. My Zaidy was born in 1900 and left Zambrow in 1920. As far as I know, his parents continued to live in the same home until …
“Zambrow” (pronounced Zembrov) was part of my childhood. The town was mentioned whenever the topic of family history came up. It was where my Zaidy (grandfather) was born and, in 1920, at the age of 20, left. Other than Warsaw and, maybe, Krakow, it was the one place in Poland I had heard of. But …
Our visit to Zambrow included sites near Zambrow that related to the history–actually the end of the the history–of Zambrow’s Jews. I had done a lot of research before leaving for Poland about how the last Jews of Zambrow died. I was aided by my work as editor of the English translation of Sefer Zambrow–the …
I need to take a break from describing mass murder sites, so here’s a more uplifting story from my travels in Poland. To be sure, for a Jew, a visit to Poland is going to focus a lot on loss. Each place you visit has its Holocaust story. (I never liked the word “story” to …
So far I have described various places where we encountered Jews who had died, either of natural causes or by Nazi murder. The state of these cemeteries varied, to being mostly intact to being completely desecrated and destroyed. But there are other places were murdered Jews rest, mass murder sites and death camps. The differences …