LOST AND FOUND, A Family Memoir. SARA APPLEBAUM

      

      INTRODUCTION

      I’ve heard that, according to Jewish tradition, a person dies two deaths.The first is the death of the physical body, the second is when he is no longer remembered. Who will keep the memories of my ancestors when I am gone?

      The first time I remember seeing a number tattooed on a person’s arm and thinking of what it meant, I was thirteen years old. Mr. Zilber and his wife were dear and loving family friends. It was sad that they never had children, I thought. They would have been wonderful parents.

      I remember the shock I felt when the reason for their childlessness and the tattooed number were explained to me; a Nazi concentration camp and medical experiments there.

      I was too young to remember the horror of World War II. Lucky for me! My brother was much older…not so lucky for him.

      My parents are long gone now. They can’t answer the questions nagging at me. What was it like? What happened to my family? What about the grandparents I never knew, the cousins and uncles and aunts I should have had as part of my life? Who could tell me my own early history?

      I was watching the television series, “The Holocaust” and was frozen by images of the horrors as they flashed before me. Memories emerged which I had been too young to understand, or make sense of before. The Second World War was spoken of only rarely, never purposely, in our home. Like so many survivors, my parents “protected” me from the painful memories.

      As I watched the episodes, it evoked some of those rare conversations. I started with my brother, Mark, who is nine years older than I am. I asked if he had any recollections of the beginning of the war.

      He was almost seven on that September day in 1939. I was amazed at the vividness of his description and the power of his account. I started to campaign in earnest for him to share his memories but he found it painful and didn’t want to remember, much less talk about it.

      With encouragement from my water aerobics buddies, who are heavily into genealogy, and other “mavens”, I took my first steps in the search for answers. There were moments of wonder and moments of complete frustration, when I hit brick walls.

      There were funny moments too. I contacted a distant cousin at his medical office in Orange County and left a message with his receptionist explaining the reason for my call. I briefly explained our relationship and said that, as the family genealogist, I was inviting him to sign on to Geni.com, which is a web based genealogy database. I asked him to call me back if he was interested.

      I eventually got his call. After chatting a while, he asked me what a family gynecologist was exactly? I guess the receptionist was used to medical terms more than genealogy and took the message down as she understood it.

      There were days and weeks when I worked as one obsessed. At other times, frustration made me shut down. Other moments were sublime. At our last Passover Seder we recited the names of 27 family members whose fate I found described in Yad Vashem’s “Pages of Testimony”, the database of the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. At the Seder, as our family called out their names, they were remembered once again!

      FAMILY

      Below is a Page of Testimony about Rishka Borcuk, the mother of my dad’s half brother. My uncle Shea, who lived in Israel, submitted the information.

       Full Record Details for Borczuk, Rishka ( Shea’s mother )

      

       Source Pages of Testimony

       Last Name BORCZUK

       First Name RISHKA

       Father’s First Name AVRAHAM

       Mother’s First Name FEIGA

       Gender Female

       Age 55

       Place of Birth WYSZKOW,POLAND

       Marital Status MARRIED

       Spouse’s First Name MEIR

       Permanent residence WARSZAWA, ,POLAND

       Place of Death WARSZAWA,GHETTO

       Date of Death 1942

       Submitter’s Last Name BORCHUK

       Submitter’s First Name YEHOSHUA

       Relationship to victim SON

      The Image of the Original Page of Testimony in Hebre

      ISRAEL

       My dad’s siblings, Shea, Hershel and Esther Borczuk, all made it to Israel. So did my mother’s brother Avrum Szaja, but it would be many years before I knew of them and more until I actually met them.

      Shea Borczuk

      Borczuks,Esther & husband, Shea, Hershel & in front, Shprinze with Hagit & Ran

      Hershel Borczuk

      Tel Aviv Beach, Shprinze, Shea, mom, dad & Avrum

      Esther Borczuk

      Mom’s side of the family, the Szajas. Dad has on sunglasses next to him is Abram Szaja with a hat on. This is in Akko, Israel (near Haifa)

      WHERE THEY CAME FROM

      My mother’s family came from Lodz, Poland. I’ve now traced the Szaja/Bendkowski line back to the 1790s. It seems that Bendowski means a person from the town of Bendkow/Bedkow and there is such a place, Latitude 51 35’, Longitude 19 45’; what’smore, it is in the same vicinity as a half a dozen towns where the family lived for 4 or 5 generations…Sulejow, Belchatow, Przyglow,Lodz, and Piotrkow ,where my earliest known ancestor is buried.

      A few years ago, I managed to get to Lodz in Poland and found the house where my great grandfather, Abram Icek Szaja, lived at 81 Pomorska Street until he died on November 6, 1892. That was the year of a devastating Cholera outbreak. So many also died of Typhus, that a lot of victims were buried in mass graves.

      Last house my great granfather lived in on 81 Pmorska Street in Lodz,Poland in 1892. I took this picture in 2005

      My great grandfather, Abraham Icek is listed on the Constant Citizens Register of Lodz. It lists his birth on March 8, 1842 in Zgierz, just North of Lodz.

      My father’s side of the family came from Warsaw. The city was so badly bombed that parts of it were literally rubble. The city center has now been rebuilt to look like it did before the War.

      Many years ago, when