Who Will Remember Them?

The faded postcards are hidden safely in an envelope inside my desk. The fronts of them feature pictures of a variety of people that I never met, all of them died before I was born. The backs of the cards are scrawled with writing in languages I cannot read.

For years my grandmother held onto these as a reminder of her husband, dead since 1946. It was his family. The family he was born into and lived with before coming to America in 1911. She had only these photos and her two daughters to remind her of whom her husband had been.

We often wondered who these people were. We had no idea of their identity except that one of them was my grandfather's sister.

In 1996 I began the quest, with the aid of the Internet, to find the roots that my mother had been denied her entire life. I knew the truth would probably not be pretty when it came to the fate of Jews in Poland, but my mom needed answers now that her mother and sister were gone.

I began querying various genealogy groups with the little information I had. After posting a rough equivalent of what the name my grandfather had signed on his naturalization certificate looked like a wonderful stranger came through with his real name. He was no longer just Charlie Friedman. He was also Chaim Frejdovich. I was also able to scan and fax the writing from the cards to people who were able to translate the words. This was especially fortuitous since I'm not sure where in Oklahoma I would have found anyone who could read Yiddish. The cards were written in Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish.

After finding these things everything else fell into place quickly. I found out from another Internet poster that there was a man named Dr. Felix Zandman who had authored a book that told of his family during the Holocaust. When I told the gentleman that I didn't know about the book he personally went to a bookstore in New York City that handled out of print books, bought a copy, mailed it to me and refused to accept any kind of payment for it.

When I opened that book, "Never the Last Journey" to the center section my jaw dropped. There were pictures of the same people my family had been looking at for the last 50 years, having no idea who they were.

After I made contact with Dr. Zandman I discovered that his grandfather, Nochum and my grandfather were brothers. Felix and his uncle Sender, along with a few other Jews had survived the Holocaust by living in a hole dug in a floor under a Polish family's home. This heroic family had been the caretakers of the Frejdovich family's summer cottage and did all that they could to ensure that as many as possible survived.

Through his book I gained the knowledge that the one woman featured in most of the photos was, indeed, my grandfather's sister, Sonya. The beautiful girl with her was her daughter, Raya. Sonya and her husband had actually been living in the United States and had the unfortunate luck to return to Poland to help bring other family members just before the Germans invaded. They were trapped.

Reading this book brought an understanding of what their lives had become that was unpleasant at best and horrifying at the worst. The tears fell on the pages as they were read. The indignities that I already knew about became harder to bear when I knew they were committed against the people in the photos in front of me.

Ousted from a comfortable life as respected merchants in the Jewish area of Grodno, the family was forced to live in the Grodno ghetto and put in grueling hours at a work camp.

The Nazis were brutal. A cousin, Rebecca (Rivka) was shot in the head in front of her entire family. Aunt Sonya was beat about the head with a bead-tip whip until her scalp split open. The thought of that happening to the lovely lady in the pictures turned my stomach. Sonya was later murdered at Treblinka.

While living in the ghetto, the family had a false wall built into their apartment. When the Germans would raid the apartments to round up people to take to the concentration camps the family hid behind the wall. Unfortunately, the babies and small children would often cry. In an effort to stifle a baby's cries, a mother accidentally smothered her child.

One tragic evening the Nazis were rounding up Jews in the ghetto. The babies would not stop crying, so my grandfather's brother Nochum, took these little ones and sat with them in the middle of the room. They were taken away when the apartment was raided.

Later when the enemy was gone and everyone gathered to find out who was missing, many people reported having seen Grandpa Nochum and the babies being taken away by the Nazis in a sleigh. They were never seen again. My heart breaks when I think how that man knowingly went to his death in an attempt to save the lives of his family.

The beautiful Raya was married to a judge. This was quite an esteemed position for a Jew to hold. She, her husband and son disappeared without anyone ever knowing what became of them.

If not for the survival of Felix, these people would have sunk completely into anonymity. You find yourself thinking of how many families had no survivors and now no one will ever know their stories.

We were lucky to find the story of our family. We can remember them and honor them for the sacrifices they made. We can tell their stories to our children and grandchildren so they will not be forgotten.

It is said that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. If we impart our knowledge of the horror that these ancestors suffered then perhaps we can avoid a repeat of such an atrocity in the future.