“My Visit to Kielce, Poland – Finding a Lost Memory”

“My Visit to Kielce, Poland – Finding a Lost Memory”, Kenneth P. Fehl, Esq.

Background:

I had the opportunity to visit Poland this past summer. It was not only an educational experience but a personal rendezvous with my family’s past. It was both a painful and a liberating experience. My maternal grandparents were deported to Kielce, Poland, from Austria and probably died in the Treblinka concentration camp. I found something of their presence and their memory in Kielce and that gave me a new insight about my family history to share with my progeny.

From where did they originate?

My mother was born in Lackenbach, Austria, in the Burgenland district near the Hungarian border. Her maternal line could be traced to the founding of the town in the 12th century as immigrants from Italy, passing through the easternmost Alpine pass named “Loebl” from whence they received their family name.

My mother’s father, Philip, who is my namesake, came from a shtetl in the Russian Pale. At the Polin Jewish Museum in Warsaw, I was finally able to discern the proper spelling of that town: Nesuckhoyezhe, which is now in Ukraine. Drafted into the Tsar’s army in World War I, he fought against the Austrian army and was taken prisoner. [My paternal grandfather was in the Austrian Army. My Uncle Sigmund was taken prisoner of war by the Russians and sent to Siberia as a POW.] The Lackenbach Jewish community arranged work furloughs for the 3 Jewish prisoners of war interned nearby. My grandfather became apprenticed to a tailor. When the war was over, he stayed in Lackenbach becoming a tailor in his own right.

My mother emigrated to America at age 15 along with her brother, and serendipitously, another boy she had met standing in line for 3 days in front of the Gestapo when applying for their visa who would become my father: Arnold, who had been arrested during Kristallnacht, was in line with his mother, next to my mother, Ella, who was in line with her father. Despite applying early on for visas since Philip had two siblings already in America, he was classified the U.S. State Department as Polish, and never received his Visa. My grandparents were left behind and perished in the Holocaust.

Poland

Although I never knew them, my grandparents had been a vague but eternal presence in my life, relegated only to some photographs, a clothes hanger, and correspondence which ceased in December 1941 after America entered World War II.

When my mother was diagnosed 17 years ago with pancreatic cancer given only six months to live, I asked that she translate those letters handwritten in German so that their meaning would not be lost. It was an emotionally painful task for her to do so forcing her to relive the anguish she had while waiting, expecting and futilely hoping for their eventual re-settlement in the U.S.

When I was presented with the opportunity to visit Poland last August with my friend and rabbi, Brad Bloom, I brought copies of the translations to read for the first time. My mother had told me how to read between the lines for the conveyance of messages which would escape Nazi censorship. While copying the letters, I noticed the return address was in Kielce, Poland, which lies directly between Warsaw and Krakow, our ultimate destination for visiting Auschwitz where my grandparents were purportedly killed. We rented a car to drive between those two destinations. I had no expectations other than a drive-through in a former ghetto town.

While driving to Kielce, I noticed a return address on some of the envelopes from the General Government with Swastikas and censorship tape. We plugged the address into our GPS since we had otherwise no idea where to focus our drive-through in the former ghetto. As we were following the GPS instructions, we got out of the car and walked over to a park which was once the center of the Jewish ghetto the Nazis created. There we came upon a large steel Menorah sunken into the ground which turned out to be a small memorial to the 27,000 Jews who were trapped there. There was also a commemorative plaque stating among other things that 1,004 Jews from Vienna were transported there on April 12, 1941. Of the 27,000 prisoners, 2,000 were killed, and the remaining were shipped to Treblinka for extermination in between August 19 and August 24, 1943. Treblinka was destroyed by the Germans in the advance of the oncoming Russian army, and all records were torched.

Brad and I strolled along the river in the park which has since replaced the ghetto. Walking literally in their footsteps, after reading their last letters, my grandparents became real people to me, fully fleshed out human beings, and not merely photographs or Holocaust statistics. Walking on the ground where my grandparents endured their frustrations, fears and anguish, I could sense their suffering, their enforced starvation, their foreknowledge of their deaths. For me this encounter, albeit excruciatingly painful, was a life changing experience. I finally made the connection in my heart, to see with new eyes, that their grandchildren lived on, prospered and had families of their own. I was forced to realize that I would never know their final days with specificity, but I was able to say Kaddish where they figuratively, if not actually, died. I was able to locate what may have been their final apartment where they suffered through the balance of their lives, taking some small satisfaction knowing that I could share this experience with my own grandchildren.

My visit to Kielce is likened to finding a lost memory. I found something of myself in Kielce as I recovered a precious legacy of my maternal grandparents. The fact that I can share these experiences and my own memory of visiting Kielce will only enrich me and the history I can transmit to my children and grandchildren. That is a blessing which I cherish.