I am a second-generation Holocaust survivor. My mother, Lea, was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1925. Luckily, she spent the war years with her parents and brother hiding as a Catholic in Chateauneuf-les-Bains, France. My dad, Murray (Mordkhe, Motek) Berliner (1912–2008), born in Dąbrowa Górnicza, Poland, survived Klettendorf Zwangsarbeitslager, a forced labor camp for Jews located near Breslau, and then Waldenburg Arbeitslager, a slave labor subcamp of Gross-Rosen.

Dozens of Berliners lived in pre-war Dąbrowa; some were my dad’s nine siblings and three half-siblings, their spouses, and their children (including my dad’s murdered wife, Laja Wajsfeld, and their daughter), aunts, uncles, cousins. Only five of those Berliners emerged alive after the Shoah: my dad; his brothers, Chaim and Wolf; sister, Esther Reyzl Lopiansky; and a niece, Rushke (Shoshana) Widzynski. Although he lived to be 95, my dad remained silent about his tragic experiences.

In 1994, after finishing a doctoral dissertation on Sholem Asch, my dad’s favorite writer, I began compiling whatever information I could about the family history. My uncle, Chaim Berliner (1905–2006), unlike his brother, was compelled to talk. I visited him in Brooklyn weekly carrying a portable cassette recorder. These were not easy sessions for my uncle, who had also gone through the camps and lost a wife and daughter, but we continued these priceless conversations until he moved to Monsey, New York, and then New Jersey. Over the course of years, I diligently typed up the transcripts with my Yiddish typewriter and sloppily translated them into English, leaving the polishing for later. Slowly, I began to assemble the beginnings of an account of the Berliners in Dąbrowa Górnicza. My main goal had always been to find out what had happened to them during the Holocaust.

While sitting shiva (seven-day mourning period after a death) after my father died last Passover, I shared my notes for the first time with my family. All were happily surprised, and I felt the importance of preserving the family stories in print.

Back at my transcripts, I had difficulty making out a word in one of my Uncle Chaim’s sentences used in the context of Jews not having rights during the days of the Russian Empire. Happily, genealogical technology and research has progressed much more steadily and far more rapidly than I. In August 2008, I posted my request to JewishGen for a translation of rashnayste, quoting that when my grandfather “bought a house in Dąbrowa Górnicza around the turn of the century, it was rashnayste, no Jew was permitted to buy.”

A Phone Call from Gloria

Stanley Diamond, executive director of Jewish Records Indexing-Poland (JRI-Poland), responded to my query with a detailed note, advising me that JRI-Poland had indexed Jewish vital records in Dąbrowa Górnicza. He also telephoned me from Montreal to give me more specific information about some of JRI-Poland’s wonderful on-going projects. “Does the name Gloria Berkensztat¹ Freund ring a bell?” he asked in a follow-up message soon after. “I have never heard of Gloria Berkensztat Freund,” I promptly replied.

A few days later, I had a strange message on my phone answering machine: “Hello, cousin; this is Gloria.” As it turned out, Gloria, a serious genealogist, had been looking for her Berliner connection for some 18 years. My paternal great-grandfather, Abram Aron Berliner, she told me, was born in Nowa Brzeznica and married her grandmother Krajndla’s sister, Brajndl Berkensztadt, in 1865. In addition, Abram Aron’s son, my great-uncle, Jankiel (Jakob) Berliner, married her great-aunt, Brajndl Berkensztadt, in 1896 in Nowa Brzeznica. Because cousins in Gloria’s family married each other (as they did in mine), she calculated that we are third cousins on her mother’s side and fifth cousins on her father’s side.

I was stunned. Gloria also provided me with an additional link, another relative in Australia, Allan Jankie, who similarly was looking for the Berliners on his family tree. Until that point, I had been interested not so much in genealogy as in my family history, or the creation of “mini-biographies,” as Sallyann Amdur Sack aptly defines it.² I had never heard of Nowa Brzeznica before. Now, however, I am happily aware that my grandfather, Pawel vel Fajwel Berliner, came from this small shtetl 63 km southwest of Łódż, formerly known as Brzeznica-Nowa Osada. He married my grandmother, Laja Szwajcer from Będzin, then settled in the unlovely mining town of Dąbrowa Górnicza. He and my grandmother had 12 children together, one of whom was my dad.

Gloria Berkenstat Freund, I have since learned, is very active in the Jewish genealogical community serving a number of roles locally, nationally, and internationally. Gloria also is a Yiddish translator and has translated articles in yizkor books for Radomsko, Chelm, Będzin, Częstochowa, Lithuania, Krasnik, Kolomea/ Kolomyya, and Goniadz that appear on JewishGen. I say “amazingly” because I, too, have been translating yizkor books (Amdur and Dąbrowa G.) from Yiddish. Other similarities include the facts that both our very handsome dads were named Mordka, possibly after the same uncle, and both Gloria and I use our maiden names as middle names. We both are New Yorkers born in the Bronx. She graciously invited me to brunch in her Manhattan apartment, where I was pleased to meet her and her husband, Larry Freund, also an accomplished Jewish genealogist.

My other newly found relative, Allan Jankie, is a native of Victoria, Australia. Like me, he is a child of Holocaust survivors. As he explained:

My father Adek Jankielewicz (changed to Abe Jankie in 1958) was the only member of his immediate family to survive the war. Born in Łódż in 1924 to Aaron Jankielewicz and Regina Engel, he had two younger brothers. The family was taken from the Lodz Ghetto on August 30/31, 1944, to Auschwitz. His mother and two brothers did not survive Selection. He and his father were at Auschwitz for about one week and then marched through various camps (including Gross-Rosen) until eventually arriving in Ebensee (a subcamp of Mauthausen) in Austria in January of 1945.

My grandfather died in the camp in February, and Abe (Adek) was liberated by the U.S. Army at the end of April 1945. Adek went to Munich, where he worked for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. The “Joint,” as it is commonly called, distributed American funds to Holocaust survivors and enabled many to get to Palestine. He took a trip to Geneva, where he registered his name as a survivor and found that a first cousin of his had also survived. They contacted each other and decided to write to an uncle who had emigrated to South Africa before the war. The uncle advised them to go to Australia, as it would be easier to get into South Africa from there. They did migrate to Australia, penniless, where they decided to stay.³

Allan’s mother suffered a different fate:

My mother, Roza Pruzanski, was born in Krynki, Poland—a little town between Białystock and the Russian border. She and her family were taken by the Russians and sent to Siberia, where they spent the war years. After the war, they returned to their home but found that the local Poles didn’t want them. They then decided to immigrate to Australia where a number of relatives had gone 20 years earlier. So my mother, accompanied by her parents, elder brother, and elder sister migrated in 1948. All apart from Mum have since passed away.

Dad arrived in 1951. They were introduced and married in May 1952. I was born in 1954, my brother Jeffrey in 1957, and my sister Regina in 1960. I am married to Helen and we have three sons. My father passed away suddenly in 1996.⁴

Allan and Helen used to import American specialty foods for distribution in Australia. They now supply the childcare industry with disposable diapers (or “nappies,” as Alan calls them), disposable gloves, paper towels, and other products.⁵

Allan introduced me to CRARG (Częstochowa-Radomsko Area Research Group) run by Daniel Kazez. Allan is related to Jachetka Buchman, sister of Szmuel Berkensztat’s father-in-law. Szmul Berkensztat was the father of Brajndl Berkensztat, who married Jankiel Berliner, great-uncle to both Gloria and me. Allan, Gloria, and I are working on unraveling the tangles: There were many Brajndl Berkensztats from Nowa Brzeznica; my great-grandfather, Abram Aron Berliner, may have had a former wife, Sara. There appears to be partially incorrect testimony in Yad Vashem left by another surviving Mordekhai Berliner, who was born in “Brzezina,” and was the son of Brandl Berkenstat and Avraham Berliner (the inconsistency is that “Sara” is given as his mother’s first name).⁶

According to my Uncle Chaim, his uncle, Yankl [Jankiel] Berliner, was a shoemaker who sold fruits to get by, mainly apples and pears. He and his wife, Brajndl Berkensztat, had a number of children. Two of their daughters, one of whom was named Frimetshe, escaped to Palestine in 1939. In Częstochowa, they had been members of Gordonia, a Zionist Socialist youth movement that had received some financial support from the World Zionist Organization as well as “a high number of visa certificates for Palestine.”⁷ Chaim, who was clairvoyant himself, often related how his father, Fajwel (my grandfather), foretold his own death: he had declared that he would die the first day of Rosh Hashonah and that he would be buried the following day next to his brother, Yankev, in the cemetery in Dąbrowa Górnicza. This came to pass. My grandfather and his brother died in the Dąbrowa Ghetto in 1941. They were very lucky to have obtained plots in the overflowing cemetery. Brajndla had succumbed the winter before, in February 1940. The Poles have since destroyed whatever had remained of the cemetery.

As we are all steeped in the genealogical ashes of our family members, most of which were spewed from the Nazi crematoria in Poland, it is wonderful to connect with generations of those who did survive, to learn names and not just numbers, to share stories, and to appreciate our ancestors as Jews who lived their lives before the catastrophe. I never did find out the literal translation of “rashnayste” but, of course, I gained far more.

Notes

1. Gloria actually spells her name without the z: “Berkenstat”
2. Sallyann Amdur Sack, “As I See It,” AVOTAYNU, Vol. XXIV, No. 1 (Spring 2008), 2.
3. Allan Jankie, e-mail to HBF, 29 September 2008.
4. Ibid.
5. Allan Jankie, e-mail to HBF, 22 December 2008.
6. “Berliner Brandl,” Yad Vashem, Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names
7. Gershon David, ed. Hundert, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)

    Hannah Berliner Fischthal, PhD, is professor (adj.) of English at St. John’s University, New York. She has published widely and is co-book review editor of Studies in American Jewish Literature. She has been a volunteer translator of Yiddish portions of the Dąbrowa Górnicza yizkor book appearing on JewishGen.