• About
  • The Photo that Started it All

Uncovering Jewish Heritage

Uncovering Jewish Heritage

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Roberta’s Family Lived in Pshaytsh

11 Friday Nov 2022

Posted by Marysia Galbraith in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Report #7 about Roberta Books and Marysia Galbraith’s trip to meet Polish partners in preparation for the ADJCP‘s memorial visit to central Poland. Roberta was the main author of this report.

Kłodawa, September 10

Roberta tells a story: For a long time, she couldn’t locate the town of her Buks ancestors, until finally someone told her that the place she called Pshaytsh is known as Przedecz in Poland. The town’s Yiddish name had been passed down in her family.

Marysia and Roberta started our tour of Przedecz on September 7th, 250 km away in Bytom. We visited Halina Ziecik, who for years has collected archival records and personal stories about the Przedecz Jewish community. Roberta met Halinka on her first trip to Poland in 2019. When Halinka was a child, she spent many happy summers visiting her grandmother in Przedecz. Her strong interest in the history of Przedecz Jews began when the priest of the local Catholic church asked her to write a history of the church to commemorate its 100th anniversary. Through her research, she discovered that Jews had been housed in the church for three days without food, water, or proper sanitation before being transported to the death camp in Chełmno. 

The priest was horrified when Halinka told him about this. His reaction was: They defiled the church! Halinka was shocked by his disregard for the suffering of the Jewish captives. She tried to explain to him that they were forced into this horrible situation, but the priest was unrelenting in his disgust at the desecration of the church. That prompted Halinka to interview anyone she could find in Przedecz about Jews and Jewish life in the town.   

An eyewitness report of those three days can be found in the Przedecz Yizkor Book, written by a teenager who had been home on leave from a work camp. After being confined in the church with her family, she was allowed to return to the work camp. 

We asked Halinka if she could share her extensive collection of information with us. She showed us some photos and some of her notes, saying she just needs to organize it all so she can publish it. Here are some photos that show historical buildings and the current appearance of their locations:

Halinka put us in touch with Halina Mądrzejewska, a Przedecz resident and retired employee at the civil records office. On September 10, Marysia, Yosef and Roberta met Halina outside her home in Przedecz. 

We stopped at the nearby site where Roberta’s father and grandfather had lived, although a newer masonry home had been built on the site. Her grandfather’s brother, his wife and child had lived there and continued to operate a butcher shop where meat and live animals were sold, until being sent to the Chełmno death camp. Roberta said that on her first trip, she went into the store on the property that she imagined was where her grandfather had his shop. She bought a red hat, even though she never wore it.

Are people living in these towns occupying plundered property, Roberta pondered? On one hand, it’s normal. The buildings stood empty, most of the owners dead. Who else was going to live there? Life went on in these places, even though Jewish life did not. Yes, it’s understandable, but it’s also discomfiting.

On the outskirts of town, we visited the Jewish cemetery, unfenced flat terrain with large trees and grass underneath. Small, rotting fruits lay on the sparse grass under several massive pear trees near the road. A plaque mounted on a boulder sits near the road. The Polish inscription says:

Jewish Cemetery

Site is legally protected

Respect this place of rest for the dead

The plaque in the Kłodawa cemetery has exactly the same inscription. This stone is different because an added English-language plaque remembers Buks family ancestors.

Halina at the Przedecz Jewish cemetery
Roberta behind the memorial plaque
Pzedecz cemetery memorial plaque

The plaque had been put there in 1993 by cousins of Roberta with the help of the historian/archaeologist working at the Chełmno Memorial Museum. Jack and Josef Buks had spent the war years in Russia and returned to live in Poland (but not in Przedecz) after the war. Both brothers later emigrated to and died in the US.

The actual footprint of the cemetery is larger than the current plot. Michael Schudrich, the Chief Rabbi of Poland, sent Roberta a map. It shows that the garages beside the neighboring apartments are built on cemetery land. Also, at the back end, a rectangular bump-out is incorporated into an agricultural field. According to Schudrich, the Przedecz cemetery is now owned by the Jewish community of Wroclaw. Unfortunately, the Jewish community got back most but not all of the entire cemetery, and the garages were built illegally. 

Przedecz Jewish cemetery boundaries
Garages, seen on Google street view
Aerial view of Przedecz cemetery, from GoogleMaps

If we want a fence to be built around the cemetery, we should first see about including all land within the legal boundaries, and removing the garages. According to Schudrich, in the case where we can build a fence only around part of the cemetery, we should build a proper fence/wall along the historic boundaries and a different looking marker along “the non-historical boundaries.”

Roberta’s cousin Michuel Przdecki (later changed to Pizer) from Kłodawa, who also survived the war years by escaping to Russia, had told Roberta stories about making sure that his deliveries to Przedecz were late in the day, so that he could go swimming in the lake. He said that it took him half a day to make the trip from Kłodawa by horse and buggy. The lake is large, wrapping around two sides of the town. Halina said that the lake used to be much deeper, but it has been drying out over the years.

Yosef photographing the Przedecz lake

We also visited the Catholic church and the medieval tower that are the most significant landmarks in Przedecz. On a previous visit, Roberta had gone to the top of the tower and visited the inside of the church. In those days, there had been a small museum in town, but Halina said the museum no longer existed. 

Skierniewice Map Translations and More

12 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by Marysia Galbraith in Skierniewice, Uncategorized, Yiddish

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

map

A few readers have helped me translate the Skierniewice map I posted recently. Thank you Pnina, Ellen, Wendy, Marion, Mark, Roberta, and the reader els! It’s taken me a while to figure out Photoshop, but here is the hand-drawn map with English translations:

SkierniewiceMap_Yizkor_translationfinal

Hand-drawn map of Skierniewice with English translations

I found the map in the Atlas of Memory Maps virtual exhibit, but a reader located a better resolution digital copy in its original source, the Skierniewice Memorial Book by Sefer Skernievitz, available in the New York Public Library Digital Collections. (Thanks els who shared this link with me).

Even with all the help I received, figuring this map out has been tricky. I cross-referenced what translators told me with the current Google map of the city, as well as this map of Skierniewice from 1915, from the website Mapster (again, thanks els for the info):

SkierniewiceMap1915_GermanMapOfRussianPartition_annotatedfragmentfinal

Detail of 1915 Skierniewice Map. Blue lines indicate the boundaries of the hand-drawn map

As best I can tell, the hand-drawn map distorts some dimensions and locations. It draws the river parallel to the downtown blocks, when in fact, the river veers off from the downtown grid at an angle, so it’s much further away toward the southwest than the northwest (see the blue lines on the map). Considering the map in the Yizkor book was drawn from memory, it’s no surprise such inessential details would be distorted. Have you ever tried drawing a map of a place you used to live? It must have been even harder when you didn’t see it on a digital map all the time.

The word labeled “barrack” in the lower left was a tricky one. My cousin Pnina, who remembers some Yiddish from her childhood, translated it as “Kasharen. ” Roberta confirmed that “Kosharn” means “barracks.” I also found an article in a regional newspaper about the demolition of the last barrack buildings in March 2020. They were located in this same part of the city, between the river and the downtown area on 1 Maja Street. Other landmarks that still exist include the Archbishop’s Palace (Pałac Prymasowski) to the north, as well as the Market Square and Senator Street.

I’m still not sure of the location on these maps of the synagogue building that survived and currently houses a plumbing supply store. Based on the street grid, it appears to be the Torah Study Place on the Yizkor map. But what about that building on the 1915 map that appears to be shaped like connected large and small circles and positioned right inside the intersection? I’ve labeled it “synagogue?,” and similarly Pnina suggested the building in that position on the Yizkor map, labelled with a Star of David, might be a synagogue. I wonder though. Might this have been the mikvah? After all, it’s on what’s labelled Mikvah Street, and Virtual Shtetl also says the mikvah was on this street (its contemporary name is Okrzei Street).

UPDATE: My cousin Pnina told me today that the building I labeled “synagogue?” on the first map was definitely a synagogue. The small box in the lower left of that block has a Star of David and above it is written “The Shil,” which means “the synagogue” in Yiddish. So could that mean that the intersection was altered after the war so the synagogue ended up on the opposite side of the street? She also says that the “Torah study place” was probably a school, not a synagogue. If anyone reading this knows anything that might clarify things, please let me know!

Livestream of the ‘Unforgotten’ Event About Renia Spiegel’s Diary

08 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by Marysia Galbraith in Memory, Przemyśl, Survival, Uncategorized, World War II

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ariana Spiegel, Elizabeth Bellak, Renia Spiegel

I’m counting down the minutes before I tune into this event at the Smithsonian Institute today:

80 Years after Kristallnacht: Diarists of the Holocaust

This is Renia, who was murdered on the streets of occupied Przemyśl at the age of 18 in 1942. She left behind a diary that through some miracle found its way to her family in New York.

NOV2018_N14_SpiegelDiaryPrologue.jpg

Renia in Skole in the 1930s (Courtesy of the Bellak family)

I grew up calling Renia’s sister “Aunt Elizabeth,” but she never mentioned her sister until a few years ago. Encouraged by her daughter Alexandra, they started looking for someone to translate the diary from Polish to English, and Elizabeth started talking about her hidden past. It’s an extraordinary story about two extraordinary sisters. Both Elizabeth and Alexandra will share their stories at 1 PM eastern time today, November 8, 2018.

 

For cousin Ellen

10 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by Marysia Galbraith in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Here we are in the Skierniewice Jewish cemetery at just the moment you wrote to me. I’ll write more about our visit soon.

Categories

  • Anthropology (32)
    • Archives (13)
    • Fieldwork (7)
    • Research Methodology (7)
  • antisemitism (12)
  • Association of Descendants of Jewish Central Poland (16)
  • Catholicism (8)
  • Conference (1)
  • Discrimination (1)
  • Family (66)
    • Bereda (17)
    • Kolski (13)
    • Piwko (22)
    • Rotblit (3)
    • Walfisz (3)
    • Winawer (7)
  • Genealogy (11)
  • Heritage work (50)
    • Commemoration (18)
  • Identity (17)
  • Israel (5)
  • Jewish Culture (72)
    • Cemeteries (38)
    • Museum (6)
    • Synagogues (29)
  • Jewish immigrants (8)
  • Jewish Religion (1)
  • Memory (59)
  • Names (14)
  • Photographs (6)
  • Pifko-Winawer Circle (5)
  • Poland (105)
    • Baligród (1)
    • Bolimów (1)
    • Brześć Kujawski (5)
    • Buk (1)
    • Dukla (2)
    • Dąbrowice (1)
    • Gdynia (1)
    • Gostynin (1)
    • Gąbin (1)
    • Izbica Kujawska (1)
    • Kazimierz (4)
    • Kowal (1)
    • Koło (1)
    • Krakow (7)
    • Krośniewice (1)
    • Kutno (6)
    • Kłodawa (1)
    • Lesko (8)
    • Leszno (1)
    • Lubień Kujawski (1)
    • Lubraniec (1)
    • Lutowiska (3)
    • Piła (3)
    • Podgórze (2)
    • Poznan (11)
    • Przemyśl (2)
    • Radom (1)
    • Radymno (1)
    • Sanok (1)
    • Skierniewice (5)
    • Sobota (2)
    • Tarnów (2)
    • Warsaw (18)
    • Wielkopolska (1)
    • Wronki (7)
    • Włocławek (18)
    • Zasław (2)
    • Łódź (1)
    • Żychlin (15)
  • Polish Culture (10)
  • Polish-Jewish Heritage (50)
  • Polish-Jewish relations (49)
  • Post-World War II (22)
  • Pre-World War II (18)
  • Reclaimed Property (1)
  • stereotypes (3)
  • Survival (9)
  • Trauma (3)
  • Uncategorized (4)
  • Victims and perpetrators (1)
  • World War II (37)
    • Jewish Ghetto (8)
    • Nazi Camps (3)
    • Polish Underground Army (3)
  • Yiddish (4)

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Your email address will not be shared.

Archives

  • January 2023 (2)
  • December 2022 (7)
  • November 2022 (2)
  • October 2022 (5)
  • September 2022 (1)
  • January 2022 (1)
  • August 2021 (1)
  • December 2020 (2)
  • July 2020 (1)
  • May 2020 (3)
  • April 2020 (1)
  • March 2020 (1)
  • January 2020 (2)
  • May 2019 (1)
  • February 2019 (1)
  • November 2018 (1)
  • September 2018 (1)
  • August 2018 (3)
  • July 2018 (1)
  • June 2018 (1)
  • May 2018 (1)
  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (2)
  • January 2018 (2)
  • December 2017 (2)
  • November 2017 (2)
  • October 2017 (1)
  • September 2017 (3)
  • August 2017 (3)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (3)
  • April 2017 (1)
  • March 2017 (2)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (2)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (4)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (6)
  • August 2016 (2)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • May 2016 (4)
  • April 2016 (2)
  • March 2016 (3)
  • February 2016 (4)
  • January 2016 (3)
  • December 2015 (3)
  • November 2015 (5)
  • October 2015 (5)
  • September 2015 (3)
  • August 2015 (4)
  • July 2015 (3)
  • June 2015 (3)
  • May 2015 (4)
  • April 2015 (9)
  • March 2015 (3)
  • February 2015 (2)
  • January 2015 (5)
  • December 2014 (4)
  • November 2014 (9)
  • October 2014 (2)
  • September 2014 (1)

Copyright Notice

All original text and images are copyright © Marysia Galbraith. Please contact the author before quoting.

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Uncovering Jewish Heritage
    • Join 109 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Uncovering Jewish Heritage
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...