I watched the latest WDYTYA? episode about Lisa Kudrow as it aired on Friday night. I have a lot to say about this from many different aspects. As usual, my thought may be a bit scattered but I hope you can follow along.
1. I watched the show with my wife, who I have to say has been a trooper and has willingly watched the first two episodes with me. But I think this may be the last one she watches. I think it was just the expectation that this was going to be a family history and discovery show and not a grueling reminder of the atrocities of the Holocaust. I think the graphic descriptions of what happened to Lisa's family and the Jews of Ilya were a bit too much and may have missed the target audience. I can see this kind of discussion coming up in a Holocaust documentary, as it should. But on an 8pm, Friday night, national TV show? A bit much.
2. My first point does not in any way mean that reminding people what happened during the Holocaust is not important. It certainly is. And the best example of why it is important is Lisa herself. How can a descendant of Holocaust victims have absolutely no idea what went on? It could be the suburban, southern California upbringing. But in a Jewish family? I find that hard to believe. I hope for her sake her discussion with her father was staged for the show because otherwise she should be ashamed.
3. 6 of my 8 great-grandparents perished in the Holocaust. My father grew up without ever meeting or knowing his grandparents. My mother only knew her maternal grandparents because they fled from Beltsy, Romania (now Moldova) to Tashkent, Russia. You grow up knowing these things, even though none of my grandparents ever talked about their parents. Not once that I can recall. You could see how painful it was for Lisa's father to bring up these memories and he had never met his grandparents either. But my grandparents said where they were from and did discuss a little about their families. I remember that my grandmother had an Yizkor book about her town, Dolhinov (Dolginovo). I remember reading it as a teenager. I guess growing up in Israel makes the Holocaust a lot more real than it does anywhere else.
4. Speaking of Yizkor books, the New York Public Library has the Ilya book. If you go to image 316 which is page 312 you can find the names of Lisa's Mordechevitz family:
Mordechovitz Mera
____"____ Liba
____"____ Avraham
If you go a few pages further to image 321 which is page 317 you can read the article that Lisa read in the market square. It's the testimony of David Rubin and it's in Hebrew (it was translated on the screen by Eilat Gordin Levitan who is a very active member of JewishGen, managed several of the shtetl pages and has many websites with wonderful photographs and other information). I couldn't find this specific translation on the Yizkor pages on JewishGen, but there are several others.
UPDATE: Miriam Robbins Midkiff, from the excellent Ancestories blog, left a comment with the link to the translated page that Lisa read. It's after the list of martyrs (which also lists the Mordechovitz family). Thanks Miriam!
4a. I am going to email Eilat and see if I can get a copy of the article she translated so I can share it with my readers or at least point you to a link.
4b. I am in touch with another Rubin from Dolhinov and I sent him an email to see if he is related to the David Rubin who wrote the chapter in the Ilya Yizkor book.
5. I wonder why Ancestry did not play up it's relationship with JewishGen for this episode. Strange. I think that would have been a huge win for all involved.
6. Now just to show how much this episode hit home for me, if you look at Eilat's website and check out the map, you will see that my grandmother's shtetl, Dolhinov (number 1 on the map), is right next to Ilya (number 19 on the map):
7. Doing the kind of research that Lisa did during this show in the Polish and other state archives is not as easy as it seems. From what I know, nothing is online and most records of anything less than 100 years old is not accessible to the general public. You would either need to go there in person and hire someone who's got the right connections or you may be able to do it remotely by hiring a local person, which is probably not something regular family historians can do.
8. I loved how the Polish archivist just plopped down a phone book in front of Lisa. There's no easier way to look for living relatives right?
9. I would have liked to see how Yuri/Boleslaw was related to Kudrow. They kept referring to him as a cousin, but only at the end did they say that Lisa's grandmother was his Aunt.
10. Another important part of the show was when Boleslaw said he wasn't there in Ilya to see the massacre. He only heard about it. But the family had lived for 60 years thinking that he witnessed it. This is a recurring theme with oral histories that are handed down through generations.
11. So how did Boleslaw escape the fate of the rest of his family in Ilya? He escaped to Russia and joined the army. This is pretty much what my own grandfather did. But my grandfather lived in Warsaw, not Belarus. So "escaping" from Warsaw was not going to be as easy. I will need to get to the bottom of this story on my next visit to Israel. I am not sure how much my grandmother will be able to tell me, but I have to ask.
12. I had more thoughts during the show, but I can't remember them now. Overall, I thought that while the subject matter was extremely dark (yet extremely important), the show itself was fairly lacking when it came to actual research. Why had they not talked more about Ilya's history? What about the generation of Jews who lived there for centuries before the Nazis ended it all? I also felt that the constant recaps and previews were too much. There was very little actual footage that wasn't reused several times.
I'm looking forward to the rest of the season of WDYTYA? but I have to admit that this format is starting to get a little tiresome. Maybe they can tweak the format if they get a second season going.
I finally finished reading "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million"
The other point I need to make is that the author goes through the first few stories in the bible and draws comparisons and contrasts from them to his stories about total annihilation, siblings rivalry and so on. He also analyzes the works of two famous biblical scholars and comes to his own conclusions. I found this part pretty annoying since, by his own admission, he has not studied the bible past these first few stories and I wasn't always sure I understand the repetitive nature of his analysis.
Speaking of repetition, there's a lot of that in the 500+ pages of this book. I could have done with less, but I guess it's one way of getting the reader to remember the characters and events.
All right, let's get to the actual story and why I found it so appealing. The book is focused on the authors quest to find information about his grand-uncle and his family who lived in Bolechow, Poland before the holocaust. He does this by detailing his early childhood memories and then his recent travels around the world to interview the few living Bolechowers who may or may not have known Uncle Shmiel Jager, his wife and 4 daughters.
Through this journey he goes into a lot of detail (some of it shockingly gory) of the fate of the Jewish community in Bolechow. I've heard similar stories before during history lessons in high-school and through reading holocaust survivor testimonies and interviews. Still, reading it again and getting the vivid descriptions made me think about a lot of things and try to draw similarities/contrasts to my own family's history:
- For instance, whereas almost all of the author's family had immigrated to the US prior to the war and only one brother stayed behind with his family, my maternal grandfather was the sole survivor from his family.
- Where Bolechow is a small village with several living survivors, my grandfather's family lived in Warsaw, the largest Jewish community in Poland and finding information about them is going to be next to impossible.
- Mendelsohn started his research about 20 years ago and I am just getting started now.
- The author's grandfather was a great story-teller and while he hid most of the family history from his grandson, at least he had a basis for his research as well as additional family members who remembered details. My grandfather never spoke about his family or the war. I was probably too young to ask and the holocaust seemed to be a taboo subject that was never really discussed.
The book's ending left me a little disappointed, but I won't spoil it for those who have not read it yet. It's not the research result, but more the methodology and reaction of the author. If you would like, we can discuss it in the comments.
So while reading a holocaust story about a now-not-so-anonymous family wasn't an uplifting endeavor to say the least, it did spark my interest in trying to research my grandfather's family again. I will have to figure out if there are any related Dombek family members who are somehow related. I will try to dig again in the archives for all the awkward spellings of this not-so-common Polish surname that is not necessarily Jewish. I will try to uncover whatever I can, but I won't keep my hopes up just yet.
I recommend this book to anyone who wants to re-live what it's like methodically going through a research project that involves a lot of travel and face to face interviews. I have started reading another holocaust memoir called "Defiance: The Bielski Partisans
" about the Bielski Brothers that was recently made into a movie with Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber. I'll have a review about that when I'm done.
Yesterday afternoon we were blessed with another beautiful baby girl. We decided to call her Bella Brannon Dekel which is a great combination of her ancestry and a very cool name. My wife's maiden name is Brannon and that lineage can be traced back 11 generations. The Dekel family name is relatively new and was changed from my father's Kilchevsky (Kielczewski) by his father. But the name Bella is a whole other story.
Bella "Beile" Kreplak was my great-grandmother. I have very little information about her and most of it is from oral interviews and a single page of testimony in the Yad Vashem Database. Here is what I know (treat this is unsourced information, but it's as good as I can get right now):
Bella was born in Warsaw about 1884 to Avram Kreplak and Dobe Jablonka. She was one of 8 children in her family (Moshe, Bella, Yossel, Rivka, Haya, Esther, Meir & Noeh). She married Hanoch Meir "Heynoch" Dombek probably in Warsaw before 1905 (when her first child was born). Heynoch and Beile had 9 children and lived at 16 Woloska Street in Warsaw before the Holocaust. Their children were Moshe Mordechai, Zipora "Feige", Tamar "Tana", Hava, Michael Haim "Misha" (my grandfather), Leah, Arieh "Leib", Haya & Rivka.
Bella, her husband and 8 of 9 children perished in the holocaust (the 9th child was my grandfather who escaped east to Russia). I don't know their exact fate, but from bits and pieces of what I remember hearing, they died of Typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto. I am sure that if I dig in the Polish Archives I will be able to find more information, but that will have to wait for now. It is assumed that Bella died in 1943.
The translated page of testimony about Bella from Yad Vashem reads as follows:
Detail text:
Bela Dombek was born in Warsaw in 1884. Prior to WWII she lived in Warsaw, Poland. During the war she was in Warsaw, Poland. Bela perished in 1943 in Warsaw, Poland. This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on 26-Jun-1955 by Rivka Geiger.
Full Record Details for Dombek Bela
Source Pages of Testimony
Last Name DOMBEK
First Name* BELA
Sex Female
Date of Birth 1884
Place of Birth WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Name of 1st Child LEIB
Date of Birth of 1st Child 1928
Name of 2nd Child* LEA
Date of Birth of 2nd Child 1926
Name of 3rd Child KHAIA
Date of Birth of 3rd Child 1930
Permanent residence WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Place during the war WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Place of Death WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Date of Death 1943
Type of material Page of Testimony
Submitter's Last Name* GEIGER
Submitter's First Name RIVKA
Registration date 26/06/1955
* Indicates an automatic Translation From Hebrew
Detail comments:
http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_FL/.cmd/acd/.ar/sa.portlet.VictimDetailsSubmitAction/.c/6_0_9D/.ce/7_0_V9/.p/5_0_P1/.d/2?victim_details_id=1604044&victim_details_name=++Bela&q1=53EyGfyZ998%3D&q2=nCb0IKBT2lJyrAw9hs3KZKtWDxcmsb7P&q3=VlWlwPDAqiE%3D&q4=VlWlwPDAqiE%3D&q5=5%2BnqSfv9YJY%3D&q6=rFcgqeCcjDU%3D&q7=bxVfqQaN%2Ft%2BRpyXBct1qE2j6IQqmeLWD&frm1_npage=4#7_0_V9
Update: My mother read this post and pointed out that the dates above are incorrect. She is completely right about that, because these birth years do not make much sense. But you have to remember a few things about Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony - Most of them were filled out a decade or two after people left Europe and not always by very close relatives. These sources should be treated carefully because they may contain mistakes. For Example, the same submitter filled out a page (actually two) about my own grandfather, who was alive at the time. Still, for anyone researching Jewish Genealogy, the Yad Vashem database is a must. Thanks for the comment Mom!
Had it not been for my genealogy research and newly found obsession with family history we would probably never have come up with the name Bella. I am honored and proud to be able to name my youngest daughter after my great grandmother. Two Bellas - 5 generations apart.
My maternal grandfather was Michael (Misha) Dombek (Domb is an oak tree in Polish). As far as I know, he is the only surviving Jewish Dombek from his family to have made it through the holocaust (There are other Dombek families, but so far I have not been able to find any that are Jewish). When WW2 started he left Warsaw and his disapproving family behind and fled to Russia, where he later met my grandmother. When he returned after the war, there was nobody left alive.
I will have many more posts about my grandfather, as he was one of my role models growing up and one of my favorite people in this world. But for the sake of this post I will focus on one single story. It's a sad story about the complete annihilation of his family in the holocaust and how a misunderstanding and a case of mistaken identity changed the future for many people.
Misha lived with his family in Warsaw in a big apartment at 16 Woloska Street. He was one of 9 children in the family and was about 19 years old when the war started. he felt that things were not going to end well and decided to leave. He tried to convince his father and the rest of the family to leave with him, but they wouldn't listen to his warnings. And so he set out on his own to the Russian border.
He moved around a lot in Russia during the war, joined and left the Red Army (twice) and eventually met my grandmother in Central Asia (near Tashkent, Uzbekistan). After they married in 1945, he made an unsuccessful attempt to find his family in Warsaw. A couple of years later they moved back to Poland, in 1947. At this point, he tried to go back to his family's apartment. Surprisingly, the building was still standing and the old Polish woman who worked there recognized him. She told him that one of his sisters, Tema, had come back after the war and sold the family apartment. Apparently Tema and another sister had survived, according to the old woman, and had moved to Israel.
Misha was encouraged by this new development and had tried to contact his sisters in Israel for several years without success. Eventually Misha and his new family (wife and two children) immigrated to Israel around 1957. One of the reasons was the chance that his sisters could be contacted somehow. At that time there was a radio show on Friday afternoons that tried to reconnect lost family members. Misha was reluctant, but his wife Riva decided to put his name on the show and they were soon contacted by Mrs. Rivka Geiger (Kramarz).
Rivka and her sister, Tema Fruchter (Kramarz), were the only two known survivors. When they finally met, Rivka took Misha to see her sister and that's when things got a little strange. Apparently Tema and her husband were acting in a weird way, avoiding eye-contact and being very distant. After the visit with his two cousins, Misha figured out what must have happened. It seemed that Tema came back to the family apartment in Warsaw, pretended to be Misha's sister (also called Tema) and sold it. Misha later confronted her with this conclusion and she admitted to it and apologized. Her reasoning was that since it seemed like everyone had perished in the holocaust, there was no reason to just let the apartment go to waste. It took some time but eventually all was forgiven.
So the case of the cousin who "stole" the apartment had led to several life changing events. Had she not sold the apartment, Misha would have had no idea that they were alive and living in Israel. Without the (false) hope of seeing his sisters he would not have moved his family to Israel. My parents would have never met and I would not be here to tell the story. I am constantly amazed at how little incidents in our past make a huge impact on our future (or present).
Rivka Geiger has been one of my biggest sources of information about my grandfather's family. She filled out dozens of 'Pages of Testimony' for Yad Vashem about her relatives who had perished in the holocaust. From reading these handwritten documents I have been able to piece together a family tree dating back to the mid 1850's in Poland. Below is a tree of descendants of my 2nd great grandparents:
I marked the only survivors in red, all who perished in black and myself in blue (bottom left). It is astounding how entire families were massacred and wiped from existence. This is just an example of only one branch in the tree. I have similar diagrams for the Kreplak family (my great-grandmother's side, of which a couple of second cousins were later located in Paris) and the Smorgonski family (my paternal grandmother, who were murdered in Dolhinov, Poland). And these were only the adults. Many of these families had children that aren't listed in the 'Pages of Testimony'. All gone.
I will slowly continue to add details and proper citations from this resource. I am currently at around 100 people combining both sides of my Polish ancestry. My next big leap would be to try to find out if there were any family members higher up in the tree that left Europe before the war or survived the holocaust in some other way. The problem there is that both my great grandfather and his father were only sons in families with many sisters. Another problem is getting through to the correct information for 19th century Polish Jews. This is one of the top goals of my research.
