|
July 20, 2001/Tamuz 29, 5761, Vol. 53, No.41
Uprooted historyAuthor unearths husband's family tree
LENI REISS
|
 Barry Reiss stands in knee-high grass at Jewish cemetery in Miedzyrzec, Poland. Photo courtesy of Leni Reiss |
Given the history of the Jews who lived and perished there, it was low on my list of places to visit. But since my husband, Barry, often had spoken of his desire to trace his father's roots in the city of Miedzyrzec Podlaski, some 70 miles from Warsaw, I agreed, reluctantly, to accompany him on his quest.
Born in that then-predominantly Jewish city in 1900, my father-in-law, Irving Reiss (Itzchok Reiswasser), came to America with his mother and an older sister on the SS Noordam in 1908 from Rotterdam, South Holland, The Netherlands.
Researching family history
Prior to our late-May departure for Eastern Europe on a tour that encompassed stops in Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic in addition to Poland, we actively researched the family history. We connected with aunts, uncles and cousins back East with whom we hadn't been in touch for years and found that we would be the first family members ever to make the trip; we utilized sources on the Internet (including ellisislandrecords.org), and we made long-distance arrangements for an English-speaking guide/driver, Wieslaw Makowski, to pick us up at our Warsaw hotel. "Call me Wes," he said. "All the Americans do."
We arrived in Warsaw the day before our planned excursion and walked through streets crowded with tourists to the Old Town with its artists, street performers and plentiful kitsch for sale. Old Town, in fact, is new, having been totally rebuilt to reflect its pre-WWII state, and is a tribute to its restorers.
The Allies had reduced much of Warsaw to rubble, and some post-war construction reflects the Communist-inspired concrete and glass school of architecture: boxy, dreary and functional. Flower stands on many street corners provide a touch of color.
The morning of our genealogical journey we went first to the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto, once a sealed-off district surrounded by a barbed-wire topped brick wall, and now in part a grassy park where children play and young mothers push strollers.
In May of 1943, when the ghetto uprising was quelled, the Germans leveled most of the buildings and none remain today. An impressive monument to ghetto heroes by Natan Rappaport dominates the eastern segment, but as much as we tried imagining the horrors while standing in this now-pleasant park, it was impossible to get a feel for what it was like in that place at that time.
Two nearby kiosks sell postcards and such "touristy" items as key chains with stars of David, while a huge billboard tells of a planned Jewish museum to document the history of Polish Jewry.
A companion observed that the sign was the only one we had seen that was in both Polish and English, indicating that many English-speaking tourists visit the site. There was no date set for a groundbreaking. There is, however, in another part of town, a magnificent monument to the Warsaw uprising, which was completed and unveiled in 1989. It depicts figures of soldiers, a priest, a mother and a child emerging from the wartime rubble.
Dim expectations
Our expectations of what we would find in Miedzyrzec (Polaski is the region) relating to its Jewish past were dim. We knew the basics, thanks to the extraordinary research done by American genealogist Miriam Weiner, whose book, "Jewish Roots in Poland" provides an inventory of surviving Jewish records.
Weiner had ferreted out records of Jews living in Miedzyrzec as early as the 16th century when town owners encouraged Jewish settlement. By the end of the 19th century, Jewish workers employed in sawmills, tanneries, clothing manufacture and transport actually organized into unions, and a range of educational institutions included Orthodox, Hebrew and Yiddish schools. There even was a local Yiddish weekly.
On the eve of the Holocaust, the 12,000 Jews of Miedzyrzec comprised approximately 75 percent of the town's population.
During the second half of 1942, however, more than 11,000 of them were deported to various camps, primarily Treblinka. Those remaining were moved to a ghetto, which was liquidated in mid-1943 with the deportation of the inmates.
After the war, about 100 survivors were ultimately unsuccessful in their efforts to reestablish a Jewish community.
So we were braced for disappointment, yet hopeful that some traces of the past would be there for us to find.
We traveled to our destination along a two-lane road, passing villages with such unpronounceable names as Zbucyn, Borky Kosi, Modrzew and Pogonow. The personable Wes, who spoke excellent, though heavily accented English, told us this very route, Road #2, extends from Warsaw to Moscow.
When we asked about the preponderance of beat-up Mercedes and BMWs we saw along the way, he explained that Russians regularly make the 20-hour round trip to Poland to buy "very old, very used" autos to take home, repair and sell. So as limp as the Polish economy is, it appears that things are even more bleak in the former Soviet Union.
Wes also told us that the bulk of his clientele in recent years has been people like us, mostly Jewish, who were anxious to visit the places where parents and grandparents had lived.
Road #2 provided a sense of how the countryside might have looked in the early years of the last century: The scenes were predominantly pastoral. Farms dotted the lush landscape; farmhouses were in various stages of disrepair.
Sleepy small town
The sign indicating the city limits of Miedzyrzec was tarnished, but the town itself proved pleasant enough. It was a sunny mid-week afternoon and we found a pleasant, sleepy small town of some 55,000 residents with a park at its core.
We headed immediately for the Town Hall only to learn that the archival information we sought, "birth records and places of residence," had been transferred to the regional center, Lublin, within the last few months. An elderly civil employee told Wes that until last year there had been one local Jewish resident, a man who was hidden by a local family during the war and later married the daughter. He was the person, she explained, who would meet with visitors like us.
Although he was not an observant Jew, she said, he had requested to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw upon his demise, and his wish had been granted.
So our search came to a dead end in one sense. We couldn't identify the address where Barry's family had lived. But we learned that the town square historically had been the former Jewish region, and that a nearby apartment complex once was the site of a synagogue destroyed during the Holocaust. As we walked through the little park, my husband's eyes welled with tears as he envisioned his father playing there as a carefree youngster.
Seeking out the cemetery
After a quick lunch at a bar/restaurant where the three of us ate homemade borsht and pirogi (the bill, including bread and beverages, totaled $6), we sought out the Jewish cemetery. This proved to be challenging since there are no markers to indicate its existence. If we hadn't had an address, thanks to Weiner's book, we never could have found it, surrounded as it is by a brick wall. The address led us to a small house and we knocked on the door. It turned out to be the residence of a caretaker who was not at home, but a relative who was house-sitting indicated that we could gain entry to the cemetery through their yard.
What we found was disheartening: a large untended area of knee-high grass, abundant weeds and headstones, the oldest dating from 1708. They were either knocked over or haphazardly stacked along a section of the wall, a portion of which was made from tombstone fragments.
We stopped for a moment at a small monument funded by a New York-based "Mezritch Relief Committee."
It read: "With bowed heads we dedicate our eternal home to the Jewish population of Mezritch. Here also were put to rest Jewish men, women and children murdered in a savage way by the Germans in the time of Hitler's occupation."
And then it was time to head back to Warsaw. We had come a world away from Phoenix to try to connect with a world long lost. We agreed, through tears, that on one level our Jewish roots in this part of the world been long extracted. But on a deeper level our search reminded us of how far we had come as a family.
We took comfort, at least, in being able to pay deep and loving respect to all those whose remains rested in this sacred ground, while being profoundly grateful that young Itzchok Reiswasser had found his way to America.