LOST AND FOUND, A Family Memoir. SARA APPLEBAUM

birth certificates. My mother warned me that I was unlikely to find anything on my dad’s side. When I asked why, she told me that Lodz, with it’s large ethnic German population didn’t resist like Warsaw did. In her words…”they practically turned over the keys to the city.” I received my mother’s birth certificate within a couple of weeks. I never got my father’s.

      As it looked in 1945

      Old Warsaw rebuilt

      LOST

      I remember my mother saying “Like a stone…alone” many times. I somehow understood it had a deep meaning for her but never asked her directly what it meant. She suffered from a profound loneliness and I think I took in that feeling. I understood that the world was a dangerous place where anything you had or anyone you had become, could disappear in a moment. In her life, it had.

      In spite of her evident intelligence, capability and strength, my mother was immensely insecure. She was only eleven years old when her own mother died. My grandmother, Bina Laja, had been a kind and caring woman. She gave of herself generously, she nursed family who had fallen victim to an epidemic, typhoid I think it was that last time; it killed her at 41.

      My grandfather, Szlomo, whose wife was his everything, gave up on life when she died. Because of that, my mother was doubly orphaned, in spirit. Her older siblings were grown and away. A year later, her younger sister, Dora, died at eight in my mother’s arms. That was her second loss.

      In time, she grew up and met my father and married. My sister, Lili, was born first and then, 18 months later, my brother Mark.

      Mother developed a career as a business woman. She created something akin to an early Wedding Registry where young couples could pay a little at a time for their trousseaus, monogrammed linens, household goods…all the things they needed to set up a home. She extended credit, dealt with merchants…all this in the nineteen thirties.

      She and my father built a family and some security together, but it was taken from her too, by war.

      This is a rare picture of dad before the war, probably in in twenties. He is standing next to a cousin

      My mother, Yachet Szaja Borczuk

      Mom with Lili or Mark

      Mom with Lili on Visa Application to go from Poland to Belgium. Lili was just about a year old.

      In the 1930’s, my mother’s sister, Betty, who was childless, was living in Antwerp, Belgium. She and her husband owned a fashion house called ”Maison Betty” and lived in a grand home with marble staircases, glistening wooden floors and Persian carpets. She invited my mother to come for a nice long visit.

      It was many years before I found out what happened to my sister. When it was spoken of, which was rarely, it was always in roundabout ways….with a feeling of profound sadness and pain.

      As I grew up, I was told that Lili had stayed with her aunt while my mother went back to Poland to wind up things there in preparation for moving the family to Belgium.

      As far as I can determine, there must have been two trips to Poland. The first entry into Belgium appears to have been May 15, 1932. Mom would then already have been pregnant with my brother Mark, who was born January 28,1933. The second trip appears to have been August 1, 1936. My sister then would have been barely five.

      It seems remarkable looking back at it that I lived with this nebulous uncertainty of the facts, but it was such a sore spot that it seemed cruel to keep reopening the wound, so I did it rarely…gingerly…and never really got the whole story. Now all the witnesses to the whole truth are gone and the documentary evidence only suggests possible answers.

      The number of days I actually remember spending with my sister, I can count on my fingers. I was about four and a half when I met her and she was about sixteen. She spoke French, I didn’t. I knew something tragic had happened but no-one explained it to me and I wouldn’t have understood anyway.

      September 1939, Warsaw was attacked and World War II was on. Then came escape. When my aunt and uncle were informed that we had somehow survived the war, they had already raised Lili for many years and regarded her as their own child.

      Our return caused intense feelings all around. On their part, a fear of loss of one they considered their child. On my parents’ part there was a sense of betrayal. Even though Lili survived and my parents survived, they were, in effect, lost to one another.

      Lili was a teenager who believed she had been abandoned. We never knew for sure if she was told this deliberately or not. Lili died tragically at the age of 43 and I know the issue was never completely resolved, adding to her pain and to the loss we all felt at her deathbed.

      The sadness came from the fact that somehow my parents & brother were separated from my sister and the situation in Europe was dire. My parents weren’t allowed to return to Belgium and my aunt wouldn’t bring Lili to Poland. She said it was too dangerous.

      It’s hard to know what the travel limitations were then or when it became imprudent or impossible, but Europe was definitely in turmoil long before Poland was actually invaded.

      In 1935 Germany broke the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1936 German troops reoccupied the Rhineland and the Rome-Berlin Axis was signed. In 1938 was the ‘Anschluss’ with Austria and the Sudetenland was handed to Germany as a result of the Munich conference. 1939 The rest of the Czech lands were occupied by Germany and Germany invaded Poland. World War II began.

      Several years ago I asked Lili’s husband if he might have any documents related to Lili that might be helpful.

      Evidence of adoption

      The document registered the birth of Lili’s son, Daniel. with it was a document of Nathan and Lili’s marriage. It names the groom, NATHAN NEUTEL born on December 7, 1931in Antwerp, Belgium. He was the son of Henryk Neutel and Chana Laja Rosenbaum.

      It lists the bride ELZBIETA KUPERSTYCK, born on June 20, 1931 in Warsaw, Poland and says she is the daughter of Abram Borczuk and Jachet Szaja and “adopted daughter” of Abram Ber Kuperstyck and Blima Szaja.

      The document states the date of their marriage as December 1955, three and a half years after we left Blegium. Unfortunately it doesn’t give the date of the adoption, so I don’t know if it happened during the war when my aunt and uncle thought we were all dead, or if they adopted her after our return, perhaps to insure that they didn’t lose her.

      My parents never spoke of it and I don’t believe they ever knew.

       This document was the first evidence I saw that my aunt and uncle had adopted Lili, and it was the first time I ever knew Lili’s legal name ELZBIETA KUPERSZTYCK. I had only known her as Lili.

      Lili was probably between 11 and 12

      This picture brings