A Beautiful Memory

We began in one place, then scattered.  

Strangers from around the world. Returning.  

Sharing stories. Surveying history.   

Fragments from the same puzzle. Pieced together.  

We were welcomed.  

From Lublin to Antwerp

Thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe fled to Antwerp, Belgium in the late 1800s and early 1900s to escape harsh economic conditions and rampant anti-semitism. While the majority sailed from the Port of Antwerp to the North and South America, many stayed.  

My grandfather, Sol, was the first of my family to arrive in Antwerp from Lublin in 1920 and soon sailed to the United States. A year later, my grandmother, Pola arrived with her two young children and my great grandparents, Abram and Sura Matele. Pola and the children left to join my grandfather, sailing on the SS Minnedosa, arriving in Quebec, Canada in July 1922. Abram and Sura remained in Antwerp and were joined by Pola's brother, my great uncle Chaim, in 1927. My great grandparents returned to Lublin in 1930. 

On, Sunday, May 14, 1939, just months before the declaration of war in Europe, our relatives, Fanny and Benny Sembler from America, visited Chaim, his family and friends in Antwerp.  

From my grandmother's photo collection: 
In Antwerp's Stadspark (photo on left, l to r):  Benny Sembler, Rachel Blat Krymholc, Fanny Sembler, Chaim Krymholc
Photo on right: (front l to r)  Mrs. Mendell , Mrs. Stuger, Fanny, Chaim, Mr. Mendell (back l to r), Mr. Rubenstein, Rachel, Benny, Mrs. Rubenstein  

The Red Star Line office in Lublin

I knew little about my relatives in Antwerp until Jackie Schwarz, a researcher there, contacted me in 2016. At the time, Grodzka Gate Theater researchers, Gosia Milkowska and Tadeusz Przystojecki were looking for descendants of Lublin's Jewish residents who would have taken the long journey to Antwerp to immigrate to North America. Their work led them to the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp, named for the shipping line, where more than two million passengers made the crossing from 1873 to 1934. Museum staff connected Gosia and Tadeusz with Jackie, a researcher with background in Jewish immigration history.  

The team worked together to identify dozens of Lubliners who immigrated to Antwerp including my grandparents and their family.  Jackie sent images of registration photos of my grandmother, great grandmother, Chaim and his wife Rachel  found in city's Felix Archives. 

Family records were also found in the archives of Memorial de la Shoah in Paris and Kazerne Dossin, the former transit Camp in Mechelen, Belgium, now a memorial and documentation center. They revealed the fate of Chaim Krymholc's family who fled to Frankfurt, Germany, then to St. Affrique, France after the fall of Belgium in 1940. The family was captured and sent to Rivesaltes and Drancy transit camps in France, then deported to Auschwitz in 1942.  

As a result of the Lublin-Antwerp research, the Grodzka Gate Theater team developed an interactive map of street addresses for both cities, cross referenced with the names of those who lived there. Lublin street addresses are shown on a current city map with a 1928 map overlay so viewers can see the same location in both time periods.  

My great grandparents lived at Rynek 14 in Old Town Lublin, apartment no. 11. The pinpoint near the top of the map identifies the street address and the pinpoint at the bottom of the map shows apartment no. 11, in the back portion of the building. The current map identifies the Trinitarian Tower and Diocesan Museum closeby.

In Antwerp, one of the addresses where the Krymholc family lived was at Plantin en Moretuslei 32, in the Jewish Quarter area. Most of the immigrants lived in the same area, near the Central Station and close to the main synagogues. They changed addresses often, so this mapping feature may list multiple addresses for one person. 

The list below shows names of residents at Rynek 14 during the pre-war years – my family and their neighbors. Each listing may also include visa, birth and death records. Many have photographs. 

Researchers continue to identify former Jewish residents of Lublin and Antwerp to remember who lived there and deny the Nazis their goal to exterminate all Jews, destroy all records and erase them from memory. They have given them a face and a name, and now their home. 

Saying Good-Bye to Poland

On the final evening of the Lubiner Reunion, participants, our hosts and members of the Lublin and Warsaw communities filled the historic Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva Synagogue for a beautiful Shabbat service and concert performed by KAIROS - Men's Vocal Ensemble.  

Reunion closing ceremony and Shabbat dinner 

The Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva Synagogue, once an important center of Jewish Life in Lublin, reopened in 2007 after the Polish government returned the building to the Jewish community. Confiscated by the Germans during the occupation, the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva later became a medical school. Along with the synagogue, it now houses the Hotel Ilan with a Kosher restaurant, conference center, Jewish Community offices, Jewish museum and mikveh. 

Following services, we dined al fresco in front of the Ilan Hotel and toasted to this magical week of learning and friendship. Shabbat blessings were led by the rabbi and members of Jewish Community of Warsaw, who maintain the synagogue along with two others in Warsaw. 

Selfie with Jon and Jackie

We said good-bye to fellow Lubliners, including those who shared their family stories: Judith Maier and Neta Żytomirska-Avidar from Israel and Dan Oren and Leora Tec from the U.S. Others recorded their memories in oral histories for Grodzka Gate Theater. Some Lublin survivors and descendants have written books about their experiences. Nechama Tec's poignant memoir tells of her family's survival during the war, Dry Tears; The Story of a Lost Childhood. Anna Sidor wrote the delightful book, The Family with Two Front Doors, about her grandmother's large Jewish family in the 1920s.

I am forever grateful to reunion organizers, Leora Tec, Bridge to Poland, Agata Radkowska-Parka, Rootka Tours, Joseph Dakar and the Kol Lublin organization in Israel, Tomasz Pietrasiewicz and Monika Tarajko at Grodzka Gate Theater NN, especially the Lublin-Antwerp project team, Małgorzata Miłkowska, Tadeusz Przystojecki and Jackie Schwarz for finding me in the first place. With their passion and diligent research more names will be added to the Gates of Memory project and more Lubliners will hear our stories. שלום

“I would like to give my deepest thanks to all those who accepted the invitation of the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” Centre and took part in the Lubliner Reunion. For most of you, participating in the event meant embarking on a long and tiring journey from various locations of the world. 

I am certain that some of you had doubts whether to come to Lublin. After all, it is so very much linked with the memory of the tragic death of your relatives and the anti-Semitism of their Polish neighbours. I am grateful that you have decided to visit us in spite of your many fears. I hope that after the time you have spent in Lublin each and every one of you will be able to say – it was worth it!

I would like you all to know that Lublin remembers the Jewish inhabitants who, in a sense, stayed here forever. Our role in the Grodzka Gate is to be the wardens of their memory.

May the Gate become for you, who have been dispersed all over the world, the light always showing the way back to the place bound with your family history for so many decades. We will always be here, waiting for you.

I hope to see you back in Lublin soon.”

Tomasz Pietrasiewicz

After the War

Marker representing western boundary of Lublin's Ghetto, 1944

I was excited about the first day of the Lubliner Reunion and left the hotel in a hurry. On my way to the Royal Palace, I didn’t notice the tiles on the sidewalk along Lubartowska Street designating the boundary of the Jewish ghetto. When crossing the busy transit station, I didn’t know the area was once the heart of the Jewish quarter crowded with people, buildings, markets and synagogues. In short, I didn’t know how much Jewish history and culture in Lublin had been erased.

By 1944, when the Russian army liberated Lublin and Majdanek extermination camp, most of Lublin’s 42,000 Jewish residents had been murdered and the city’s vibrant Jewish quarter destroyed. Of those who fled to the Soviet Union during the war, some returned only to find they had no family and no home.

Transit station once the heart of Lublin's Jewish quarter

Holocaust survivors attempted to create a new community in Lublin. Chewra Nosim, the only pre-war synagogue remaining after the war, was reorganized. A Yiddish newspaper began, and an elementary school for Jewish children operated for a few years. Several organizations were also created to help resettle Jewish survivors. But violence against Jews continued, including the Kielce pogrom in 1946, where 42 Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered by their neighbors.

poet Jacob Glatstein was born and raised in Lublin

By 1950, the majority of Poland’s Jews emigrated to Israel, the United States, Western Europe, Mexico, South America and Australia. A few hundred continued to live in the Lublin District until 1968, when many left after a series of anti-semitic events. What started as a student protest against the communist government in Warsaw, escalated and led to the expulsion of thousands of Jewish citizens of Poland.

Under Russian occupation from 1944 to 1989, discussion of Jewish genocide was mostly taboo in Poland. Young people were taught that those who died in the camps were Poles or came from “many different countries,” and were not identified as Jews. Extermination camp memorials and museums, established after the war, at Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were to “commemorate Polish and international martyrdom.” Their displays showed atrocities committed by Nazi Germany in Poland, with little mention of the devastation to the Jewish population. Finally, in 2013, the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel prepared a permanent exhibition entitled Shoah, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, to clearly define the Holocaust and the murder of the Jewish people. 

In the meantime, signs of interest in Jewish life began in the 1980s as the communist government weakened. Some young Poles discovered their Jewish roots and gathered in a small network of synagogues, schools and summer camps. Academic Jewish studies programs were established at Warsaw University and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Also, the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow began in 1988, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. In addition, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Polin Museum, opened on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in 2013. 

From the wall at Grodzka Gate Theater NN, Lublin

In the 1990s Grodzka Gate Theater NN in Lublin established The Memory Gate program dedicated to recovering the memory of Polish-Jewish Lublin. As part of that program, researchers have gathered photos, articles, documents and testimonies about the individual lives of Jewish residents and created programs to share with students and visitors. Their outreach to Holocaust survivors and descendants of Jewish Lubliners led to the organization of the first reunion in 2017, which I attended.

I am grateful to the folks at Grodzka Gate for the opportunity to experience this journey into the past. While in Poland, I visited a forest where 30,000 people were shot and buried. I saw the mass graves of 500,000 Jewish victims and the death camps where they were murdered. I visited museums, memorials and cultural centers dedicated to the memory of those who perished. I climbed the stairs to the apartment where my family could not return. And, I observed the city of Lublin that grew without us. 

The Polish people are the keepers of this history. We can only hope to continue to learn from the truth.