The Stories Our Parents Found Too Painful To Tell. Henry R Lew
students at Tel Aviv University, have endowed a Day Care Centre at the Melbourne Montefiore Homes for the Aged, and have been supporters of the Melbourne Sholem Aleichem Yiddish School.
Shifra Pollard of Boca Raton, Florida, U.S.A.
Shifra was raised in Brooklyn, New York, learned Yiddish at school, and graduated from Brooklyn College. She taught English and American Literature at High School for twenty-five years and in retirement also taught Yiddish at a local college.
Jacob Rosenberg of North Caulfield, Melbourne, Australia.
Jacob was a teenager living in Lodz on September 1st 1939. “The war finished my primary schooling,” he says, “the ghetto was my high school, Auschwitz was my university, and Mauthausen was my institute of post-graduate studies.” Jacob was liberated in May 1945, arrived with his wife Esther in Melbourne in 1948, and worked for many years in the clothing trade. On retirement Jacob returned to his childhood love of writing. He is a recognised Australian poet and writer, both in Yiddish and in English; and his most recent book, “East of Time,” won the prestigious 2006 Douglas Stewart Prize at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the 2007 National Biography Award. “East of Time” was also shortlisted for the Australian Literary Society’s 2006 Gold Medal.
Murray Sachs of West Newton, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Murray has a B.A. from the University of Toronto and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York. He has taught French language and literature at various universities, and from 1960-1996 was Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He is now Emeritus Professor. He is the author of four books and more than thirty articles in professional journals, and he has also served on the Editorial Advisory Board of six professional journals.
Berek Segan of Toorak, Melbourne, Australia.
Berek, a native Yiddish speaker from Lida in Poland, emigrated to Australia after obtaining his Matriculation Certificate in 1938. Berek has had a profound love of music since early childhood. He studied violin from the age of 6 and attended the Vilnius Conservatorium as a schoolboy. In Melbourne he became a successful businessman and an early supporter of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Opera Australia. In 1975 he established the biennial Castlemaine Festival of the Arts. For his contribution in promoting a relationship between business and the arts he was presented with a “Business and the Arts Award” from the University of Sydney in 1975, an O.B.E. in 1975, and an A.M. in 1980.
Michael Silver of East Brighton, Melbourne, Australia.
Michael survived the Holocaust first as a prisoner of the Soviet Government for one and a half years, and then, after his release, as a refugee in Central Soviet Asia. He was repatriated to Poland in 1946 and migrated to Australia in 1958. He worked for many years as an auditor with the Commonwealth Public Service. I first met Michael in 1976, when we climbed Mount Sinai together.
Simcha Simchovitch of North York, Canada.
Simcha survived the Holocaust in Poland by escaping to the Soviet Union. He emigrated to Canada in 1949. He has a B.A. in Humanities from the University of Toronto and a Masters in Hebrew Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. Until his retirement in 1998 he was Librarian and Curator of the Beth Tzedec Museum in Toronto. He is a poet, writer, and translator. He won the Dr. Hirsh and Debra Rosenfeld Award for Yiddish Literature from the I.J. Segal Cultural Foundation in Montreal in 1991 & 2004; the Zhitlowski Award for Writers of High Quality from the Yiddish Cultural Association of New York in 1998; the Izzy and Betty Kirshenbaum Award for Excellence in Yiddish Writing from the Book Committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater Toronto on six occasions, in 1992, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2002; the Harry and Florence Topper & Milton Shiel Award for Creative Yiddish Writing from the Book Committee of the Toronto Jewish Congress in 1990 & 1997; and the Nachman Sokol, Chaim Joel and Mollie Halberstadt Prize in Yiddish and Yiddish Translation, Canadian Jewish Book Awards, at the Koffler Centre of the Arts, Toronto in 2004.
Nathan Sobel of Long Beach, New York, U.S.A.
Nathan, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and the only member of his family to survive, is from Luboml, formerly in Poland, now in Ukraine. His family managed to hide for a long time in a dugout his father built under an apple tree in their yard. A crawl tunnel from the kitchen provided access to it. Nathan’s father and sister were murdered in 1943. In January 1944, he saw his mother, two brothers, and ten other Jews machine-gunned by Polish resistance fighters in a barn. Nathan miraculously managed to hide away in the hayloft, but then had to escape a blazing inferno, when the barn was set alight. He served in the Palmach during Israel’s War of Independence, emigrating to the United States in 1951. An urban planner, Nathan also edited the English translation of “Luboml: Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl (New York: KTAV, 1997).” In my first printing run I inadvertently omitted Nathan from the list of translators and had to add him as a postscript. When I rang Nathan to say sorry he replied, “What’s new, everyone forgets me!” You are definitely not forgotten Nathan and your efforts are most appreciated.
Edward Zerin of San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
Edward was ordained as a Rabbi at the Hebrew Union College in 1946 and received a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1953. After serving as a congregational rabbi for twenty-eight years, he and his wife Dr. Marjory Zerin founded the Westlake Centre for Marital and Family Counselling in 1974. He is the author of eight books and numerous professional articles, has served as a Jewish consultant in the preparation of numerous Catholic textbooks, and has been a faculty member at Boston University, U.C.L.A., Grinnell College and Drake University.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Leon Slonim, who read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions, and also to thank Danuta and Renata Schnall for their help with the epilogue. They have become valued friends.
Henry R. Lew.
North Caulfield,
Melbourne, Australia. (October 2007).
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER’S NOTE.
It might seem strange that the book of Rafael Rajzner’s memoirs, “The Annihilation of Bialystoker Jewry,” is published by the newly formed Bialystoker Centre in Melbourne, Australia.
We originally hoped that the Bialystoker Centre in New York, the largest of its kind in the world, would perform this task. New York greeted Rajzner’s manuscript enthusiastically, thought it worthy of publication, and promised to help pay for it. And then for financial reasons, they regrettably reneged on their offer. The money was needed to house three hundred elderly citizens in their old people’s home instead.
In Melbourne, former Bialystokers found it inconceivable that such a unique and valuable document should not be published.
Rafael Rajzner helped manage the co-operative printing plant, which produced “Undzer Leben,” (Our Life), the largest daily Yiddish newspaper in Bialystok, under the long-standing editorship of the renowned journalist, Pesach Kaplan.
Rajzner lost his wife and his two children to the Nazis. He was interned in the Bialystoker ghetto, imprisoned in the Bialystok Gaol, and transported to numerous concentration camps. During this time he used his intense powers of observation and his phenomenal memory, to store numerous facts relating to many tragic events in exquisite detail. He was driven by an iron will to survive so that he could, one day, inscribe these observations and memories onto paper, and this he began to do immediately after his liberation. He decided not to limit himself to personal experiences, but in the interests of a more total historical picture, also collected eyewitness reports from other surviving Bialystokers.
The