The deeds of man, when unconfirmed by the voices of the witnesses or written documents, are bound to pass swiftly away and disappear from memory.
Prince Boleslaw V the Pious
The history of the Holocaust is never ending. Every time we think we are close to the last chapter, a new perspective, a new venue of research has surfaced. Not only was the Holocaust the universe in which six million stars were ruthlessly extinguished; it also involved galaxies of internal and external connections, psychological motivation of behavior, and the drama of individual survival— all against a backdrop of the tragedy of millions of deaths. A new direction of research may originate from a single document found in a forgotten archival box, from an occasional phrase in a conversation or, as in this case, from a letter of another researcher. To these truthful words can only be added that too often the voices of the witnesses are blocked by the turbulence of years, and written documents are hidden from the eyes in the forgotten corners of archival shelves or private attics and basements. The skills, patience, and passion of the researcher are needed to bring them back from oblivion. Then we can see how, by reading dusty, crumbling, yellowed paper, a real flesh-and-blood life is rejuvenated as if it had never ended. This is exactly what happened to a man whose life was completely forgotten until it was reconstructed, whose deeds were confirmed by the documents and witnesses, and who thus returned to our memory.
An Inquiry to HIAS
This time the inquiry to the HIAS Location Department came from France. А man was researching the history of his family. He had heard of someone named Grisha Meisler, a distant relative who survived the Holocaust and, after the war, had served as a director of a HIAS office in Bremen, Germany. In 1950, Meisler repatriated to Israel with his wife and daughter, Rachel Hias (!) Meisler. The inquirer asked if HIAS had more information related to Grisha Meisler. I started the investigation by locating Rachel Hias. To find a HIAS namesake was not difficult, since Batya Unterschatz is still the best sleuth in Israel. Rachel Hias Meisler still lived at the same address her family occupied after arriving in Israel, and I spoke to her by telephone. She knew little about her father because he died in 1953, when she was only six years old. Rachel was born in Germany, and she knew that her father worked for HIAS at that time. Her mother, Gisela, worked for the same agency, but she also had died. Rachel also knew that her father, Gregory Meisler, a Polish army officer, had spent six years in a German prisoner of war (POW) camp.
From this conversation, my interest in Gregory Meisler grew exponentially with each new piece of his history I was able to unearth, a story that developed from no information to a comprehensive biography of an outstanding man—a Jew, a warrior, a Polish patriot.
Rachel sent me an article with a picture of her family before they left for Israel, and I recognized it as a page in the information brochure Rescue, published by HIAS in the 1940s. The caption under the photograph praised Gregory Meisler as a capable worker who had helped more than 30,000 Jews emigrate from Europe. This was the end of a chain; now I needed the rest of the story. The results were astounding.
Early History of Gregory Meisler
Gregory (Grzegorz) Meisler was born in 1900 in Poland and died in 1953 in Israel. During the 53 years of his life, Gregory participated in all the major conflicts, revolutions, and wars that embroiled Europe during his lifetime. Because he was a Polish Jew, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust were among the tragedies he endured. He told no one about his life, but in all the events in which he participated, Meisler left the mark of his personality and his soul, thus enabling us to reconstruct his life.
I found that Grisha/ Grzegorz/Gregory Meisler lived five lives—five times he started his life from scratch, dramatically changing its direction each time. Despite all these turns, he preserved outstanding integrity as a Jew, a warrior, and a Polish patriot. Thanks to helpers in England, France, Israel, Poland, and the United States, I have been able to assemble the various pieces of his life.
From the start, I directed my research into three venues. Meisler was a HIAS employee, so the HIAS archives should be studied. Meisler was an officer in the Polish army, so I needed to know about Jews in the Polish military. Finally, Meisler was a POW, so I began to seek information about Jewish POWs during World War II. A fourth source of information was Gregory’s 93-year-old cousin Claire who lived in France, located through Rachel Hias, Meisler’s daughter. After my long and persistent requests for more information, Rachel finally found, among other papers, a letter Claire wrote to Gregory in 1952. Her address was still the same, and my correspondent in France learned from her some information about Gregory’s family.
He was born to the family of a Łódż merchant. His parents were pious, and Gregory spent the first 16 years of his life in the Jewish spiritual atmosphere of a turn-of-the-20th-century Polish Jewish community. Gregory was very religious himself, but a rebellious spirit pushed him out of the narrow circle in which his life was enclosed. Among friends, his nickname was Berek, after Colonel Berek Joselewitz, a Polish Jewish national hero.1 At age eleven, Gregory announced that he was going to attend a public school, the Russian gymnasium. The family was outraged. “Are you going to become a “goy”? they asked. Grisha was adamant and got his way. He was not the only Jew in the gymnasium, but the only one who responded to the anti-Semitic insults. As a result, he was constantly beaten up, but he held his ground. Thus, the nickname, of which he was very proud, was bestowed.
His wish to attend Russian gymnasium instead of a traditional yeshiva, in defiance of his family’s wishes, was only the beginning. Everyone was shocked in 1916, when Gregory tried to enlist in the army of the then non-existent Polish state. For a Jewish boy to enlist in one of the most anti-Semitic armies was a shame to his family. His mother fell seriously ill, but again Grisha’s will prevailed.
His Military Career
All these remembrances of his cousin Claire, and more, were corroborated by a document we received from the Central Military Archives in Warsaw, Poland. It was not a complete military file of an officer, but a claim filed in 1937 by reservist officer Grzegorz Meisler for the Medal for Independence, a claim that the “Medal Committee” denied two years later as “unmerited”—(possibly because he was Jewish?). This document enabled us to follow Gregory’s military career to 1922, his participation in the disarmament of the German troops in 1917, and fighting with the Red Army in the war of 1918–20. It also confirmed that Grzegorz Meisler made his first attempt to enlist in the Polish Army in April 1916. He was not admitted because he was too young, but he successfully registered with the Polish military in April 1917. The document also listed the decorations Gregory received for his service.
Despite the rabid anti-Semitism of the Polish army, Gregory became an officer. He grew a moustache, a la Polish nobility, and according to his cousin Claire, he liked to strut the streets of his native Łódż in uniform, arm-in-arm with his Hasidic friends loudly speaking Yiddish with each other. Confronting other officers, Grisha snapped to attention and saluted them. Automatically they responded with the same military salute, only later realizing that they had greeted a bunch of Jews. Gregory left the army in 1922, and there is no record of his activities during the 17 years until he was recalled in 1939. A Łódż business directory of the 1930s lists him as “a trader.” Recently, I received an excerpt from the Frankental’s Lexicon, which notes that in 1924–25, Grzegorz Meisler was Deputy Chairman of the Łódż Unit of Riflemen Association, a patriotic paramilitary organization, the chief commander of which was Marshal Pilsudski. Gregory also published articles related to community life in the local Jewish press, (Lodger Tageblatt and Najer Folksblat).
As we see, Gregory was consistent; even after he left the army, he preserved connections with military circles. Looking for further sources of Gregory’s life, I turned to London, where the Polish government-in-exile was located during the war years. Thanks to genealogist Saul Issroff, I established contact with the division of Polish Inquiries in England, which holds the records of the Polish troops during the war. After paying an amount equivalent to 30 English pounds, I received an English translation of the document, his file.
Documents from England included a time line of Gregory’s career. I was surprised to read that, having left the army in 1922, he was called back in 1930 to become a commander of a legion named after Berek Joselewicz. The very idea that anti-Semitic Poland, and even more, the anti-Semitic Polish army, would have a detachment named after a Jew, seemed preposterous, even if this Jew were a Polish national hero. At this point, I requested a copy of Gregory’s original file to be sent from England and paid particular attention to the abbreviation PW preceding the name of the Joselewicz Legion. If this abbreviation referred to Polish Army, Woisko Polske, then why was the order of the letters reversed? Upon reflection I was more inclined to think that it meant Polski Weterany (Polish Veterans). An organization of Polish Jewish veterans, named after Colonel Berko Joselewicz, sounded like a plausible idea. Plausible, yes, but absolutely wrong. The correct answer came from Yale Reisner, who heads the Ronald Lauder Genealogical Group at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Not only did Reisner give me the correct interpretation of the abbreviation PW, he but also sent a copy of a few pages from the book Jewish Fighters for Polish Independence, first published in 1937 and reprinted in 2002 under the title Polish Jews in Service to the Republic.
From this book, I learned that, in 1930, Gregory Meisler, a reserve officer in the Polish army, founded the only national Jewish paramilitary organization (PW, which stands for Przysposobienia Wojskowego), the Berko Joselewicz Legion. The legion existed until 1939, when the army recalled its commander to fight for his country. The legion’s headquarters was Gregory’s native town, Łódż. The mission of the organization was to instigate patriotic feelings among young Jewish Poles, but having come to know Gregory’s mind set, I think that, along with patriotic feelings, he wanted to teach young Jews to defend themselves and their people from anti-Semites. Moreover, I dare to speculate, Gregory Meisler used this opportunity to prepare young Jews for a future life in Palestine, which he likely, as a military man, did not expect to be peaceful. I even suspect, although I do not have any evidence of my speculation, that those legionnaires, who survived the Holocaust, played a significant role in protecting the newborn State of Israel.
We learned from the file that Gregory Meisler was called back into the army on September 1, 1939. This same day, at 4:40 a.m., the German air force began to bomb Warsaw and other Polish cities. No Polish force could stop the enemy; to make matters worse, Stalin’s knife struck in the back, as the Soviet Army occupied Eastern Poland. Gregory’s military service at this time was extremely short. On September 18, after the battle at Kutno, he was taken prisoner by the Germans—and his third life began.
His Life as a POW
It is worth noting that Gregory Meisler and the other POW Polish-Jewish officers were lucky to fall into German hands. The other option, the Russians, would almost inevitably have brought them to the deadly trenches of the Katyn Forest.2 To try to learn what Gregory experienced as a Jew in the Polish army and later as a POW, I searched for some general information.
The only relevant sources of information about Jewish POWs from the Polish Army I could find were two books by Benjamin Meirtchak: Jews: Officers in the Polish Armed Forces, 1939–1945 [Reprinted and available through Avotaynu] and Jews: Officers and Enlisted Men in the Polish Army, Prisoners of War in German Captivity, 1939–1945. Unfortunately, I could not read the few Hebrew-language books on the subject published in Israel; I could not access them.
In both books, Gregory Meisler was mentioned as a POW kept in a Offlag VIIA-in Murnau, which was a German Army POW camp for Polish Army officers and generals during World War II. It was located in the Bavarian town of Murnau am Staffelsee. He had a number, 864. There was also a report of the two Swiss Red Cross visits to the camp, one in 1942 and another in 1944. The report stated that “the senior Jewish officer, George Meisler” in April of 1944 demanded from the camp authorities siddurim (prayer books) in Hebrew and the Bible in German, Hebrew, and Polish. Incredibly, in 1944, with the Holocaust at its peak and millions of Jews rendered into smoke and ashes, a Jew incarcerated in a German camp demanded from the Germans a prayer book in Hebrew!
The Swiss Red Cross also revealed that the Germans attempted to deport Jewish prisoners back to Poland in early 1940. Only when the Polish self-rule commanding officer, Antoni Szyling, vehemently protested, the attempt was aborted. The protests of the Polish officers against keeping the Jews in a special ghetto on the camp territory separating them from the rest of the prisoners did not suc-
| Meisler’s memo about the life of the Jews in the POW camp. Not dated. HIAS Archive |
ceed. This was a violation of the Geneva Convention of July 27, 1929, and of an order of the OKW (Supreme Command of the German Army) of June 1, 1941. Nevertheless, all Jewish officers survived the incarceration. It is worth noting that in similar circumstances, French officers demanded of the camp authorities separation from their Jewish “brothers-in-arms.” Naturally, their demand was gladly met by the Germans.
In his book Jews: Officers and Enlisted Men in the Polish Army, Prisoners of War in German Captivity, 1939–1945, Benjamin Meirtchak tells the following story. In 1944, Jewish POWs complained to a Red Cross delegation that they were deprived of any relations with their families. The members of the Red Cross promised to prepare the list of relatives in Geneva. Evidently, the camp inmates did not know about the devastation of the European Jewry, and this report was accompanied by a short comment by the book’s author, “In 1944, Polish Jewry did not exist.”
Although not much information exists about Jewish POWs, websites related to the Gentile Polish POWs are numerous. Memoirs of the former inmates of the Offlag VIIA in Murnau included a detailed description of the camp, the story of how the camp was liberated (on April 29,
1945, by the American 12th Armored Division), and even photographs of these moments.3 I found one former inmate and spoke with him by telephone. He remembered that there were Jews in the camp, but that they were separated from the other officers and lived in a special ghetto.
Although a number of Polish POWs’ memoirs depicted life in captivity, I could find no memoirs written by the Jewish POWs. For a long time, I wondered about the reason for the complete silence until I read another set of documents sent to me from the Institute of Jewish History in Warsaw. These documents told the story of what Gregory Meisler was doing immediately after he was freed from the camp. I have to admit that everything beyond the facts these documents provided is a product of my assumptions and should be accepted as such.
Post-war Activities
After liberation, Gregory Meisler continued to serve in the Polish Army under British command. He received an order to review the current conditions at the German concentration camps, and he reported on his findings. He accomplished the assignment by writing up the reports describing conditions in the camps he visited. For the first time he understood in full the meaning of the word Holocaust. It is not difficult to imagine that an immense guilt of a survivor overwhelmed Meisler. Perhaps, what he and other former POWs saw and read about the fate of the European Jewry in general and Polish Jews in particular was enough to seal their lips forever. They may have compared their relatively safe lives with the suffering of members of their families. What were their inconveniences compared with the tortures; what was the smell of rotten food compared with the stench of burning flesh? How could they complain about the lack of correspondence—if no one were left to write? My guess is that this is the reason we have no memoirs from Jewish POWs.
Immediately after the war, Meisler became an employee of HIAS and began his fourth life, a military man immersed in paper work, preparing the documents for displaced Jews to emigrate from Europe. HIAS kept offices in Austria, Germany, and Italy to help surviving Jews to leave blood-soaked Europe. The HIAS archives has many job-related documents related to this period of Gregory’s life. When studying the microfilms, I found a document in which Gregory describes briefly, but comprehensively, how the life of Jews in a POW camp was different from that of the Gentile prisoners. For 37 of the 67 months he spent in captivity, Gregory was in a ghetto; he and his Jewish comrades were placed in the cells that lacked windows and had no heat in the winter.
When I was looking for the hundredth time through Meisler’s documents, I noticed on the back side of a page in his English military file a few lines I had missed earlier. Here were the names of two people who should be contacted in case of emergency. Whom do we designate as emergency contacts? Usually close relatives or close friends.
| Jews As Prisoners of WarA Jew in a POW camp? The list of Holocaust-related works is long and extremely diverse: Jews in the concentration camps, Jews in resistance, Jews as rescuers of other Jews, Jews in the military of the Allied armies, and even Jews in Axis armies—all of the above and more topics have attracted the attention of researchers and historians resulting in thousands of impressive and exciting publications. Much less is known about Jewish POWs (prisoners of war). By and large, Jews who served in the Allied armies and were taken prisoner by the Nazis were treated the same as non-Jewish prisoners and shared the hardships of the captivity with their Gentile brothers-in-arms. It was not without anti-Semitic undertones, but in general they were safe, as the Germans observed international regulations regarding POWs.It was different for Jews who served in the Red Army. Stalin never signed the Geneva Convention regarding POW treatment; he considered that any Soviet soldier or officer taken prisoner was a traitor. Thus, when Soviet officers or soldiers were taken prisoner and recognized or reported by other prisoners as Jews, the Germans killed them on the spot; non-Jews were sent to the special camps, where the majority died from starvation and slave labor. Often, the Jews who tried to hide their nationality were betrayed by their “comrades-in-arms.” |
Here, was the name of Gregory’s wife, quite understandable; the other name, however, was not understandable. The other contact was not even in Europe. Remember that at the time Gregory was in Germany and France. Nevertheless, another contact resided in America, in Connecticut, a person named Arthur Szyk, a renowned artist. How were Meisler and Szyk connected?
The search started again. Coincidentally, a few months earlier, Rhoda Miller, a genealogist and an expert on Arthur Szyk, had asked me to translate Szyk’s birth certificate and I still had it in my computer. I compared Szyk’s certificate and Meisler’s certificate; they looked almost identical. The same people signed both certificates, although Arthur Szyk was four years older. They grew up in the same Łódż neighborhood, shared the same Zionist ideas, were both Polish patriots and both participated in the war against Soviet Russia. Miller also discovered and sent to me a copy of a page from Arthur Szyk’s notebook with the name of Gregory Meisler on it.
His Brief Life in Israel
Gregory Meisler lived his first life as an Orthodox Jew—the same as millions of other Polish Jews. When Meisler joined the Polish Army, he started his life anew—a life with nothing in common with his first. Gregory lived his third life in captivity, where he demonstrated courage as both a military man and as a religious Jew in equal measure. After the war, he blended into a peaceful environment by helping Holocaust survivors to reach a safe haven. During this time, he married and a daughter was born. The future promised some happiness. He wanted to start a fifth life in Israel, and in 1950 he and his family repatriated to Israel, where he worked on a chicken farm. He took the Hebrew name Zvi, a deer. This should have been his fifth life—that of a free man in a free land. Unfortunately, Meisler was exhausted; he died of a heart attack in 1953 at the relatively young age of 53.
Conclusion
End of story? Not so fast. While reading the English translation of Meisler’s military file, I came across a short note:
Medal entitlement:
British: The War Medal 1939–45.
A call to London confirmed my guess. Gregory Meisler was entitled to, but had not actually received, the award. Gregory Meisler had worked for HIAS and, in fact, had named his daughter after Hias. I thought that it might be a mitzvah (good deed) to accept the award for him posthumously. After short, but productive, negotiations with British colleagues, I received the medal, which now reposes in the HIAS Hall of Fame in New York, along with a portrait of Meisler. With Gregory’s deeds rescued from oblivion and confirmed by the documents, I look upon this as Gregory’s sixth life—maybe his longest.
Once, when I was working in the HIAS archive with the documents of post-war Europe, I coincidentally found a copy
of a statement written on a small yellowed piece of paper. The only evidence that Gregory Meisler had been unconditionally happy at least during one period of his life, the statement read:
Our daughter RACHEL HIAS was born on the 22nd of April 1947
GISELA AND GREGORY MEISLER
Bremen, Germany
Note
- Berek Joselewicz (1764–1809) was a Polish Jewish merchant and a colonel of the Polish Army during the Kościuszko Uprising. Joselewicz commanded the first Jewish military formation in modern history. He became a Polish national hero. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berek_ Joselewicz>.
- The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre, was a mass murder of thousands of Polish prisoners of war by Soviet NKVD. The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Katyn_massacre>.
- <http://hollow.one.free.fr/informations.html>
Valery Bazarov is the director of HIAS Family History and Location Services helping immigrants of different generations find family members and friends—often in other countries—with whom they have lost contact over the years, sometimes decades. He is committed to finding and honoring the heroes, Jewish and non-Jewish, who rescued European Jews during the Holocaust. Bazarov researches HIAS history, presents his findings in lectures and publications, and is a frequent lecturer at the international and national conferences on Jewish genealogy. He lives in New York City.
