History of the Jewish Community of Schneidemühl 1641 to the Holocaust, by Peter Simonstein Cullman. Hardcover, 390 pages + x. Bergenfield, New Jersey: Avotaynu, 2007.
The title of the book really says it all. Peter Cullman has meticulously studied five centuries of Schneidemühl’s Jewish history in the context of the entire community. Peter Lande’s foreword and Cullman’s preface present a wonderful outline of what to expect in the following six parts—a detailed history of Schneidemühl and its interaction with Germany and Greater Poland when, at different times, it belonged to each because of political boundary changes; stories of the town’s Jews from old letters, written histories and living survivors; and the Holocaust’s effect on the community during and after World War II.
The calendarium, epilogue, pictures and illustrations and valuable appendixes include much statistical information about the Jews of Schneidemühl, now called Piła, Poland. In the appendix, researchers will find a chronological history of the town, a yizkor catalog of names of those who perished in the Shoah, those whose fates are unknown, and a list of those who escaped the fires of hell in their town. Also included are lists of burials in Schneidemühl and surrounding towns during the period 1915–39, burial records of the Jewish cemetery with a few epitaphs, extracted names from the 1774 census and the 1939 minority census, and the town’s street names (then and now).
In chapter 25, “Schneidemühl Under the Swastika,” I found a reference to my cousin’s father, Ernst Simonsohn. He paraphrases some material Cullman acquired from genealogist Karen Franklin (“Memoirs of Nelly Levy Berg”):
…on another occasion, they marched through the streets [of Schneidemuehl] two Gentile girls whose heads were shaven because they were dating Jews. One of them was Annie Krueger who dated Ernst Simonsohn.
Cullman wrote to me in an e-mail message, “I would think that nobody could ever have spoken later of that incident in the Simonsohn family.” But, another reference in the book tells a different story, one I think the family would have been proud to know, that Ernst’s father, Max Simonsohn, was chairman of the Schneidemühl chevra kadisha (burial society) before Hitler changed the face of Schneidemühl and the world.
Cullman’s book is a well-researched, well-written, historical record of a town’s Jewish community once vanquished, but reborn in Peter’s words.
Carol Davidson Baird
