XIV. Michael from Lajb’s family

written by Magdalena Krysińska-Kałużna, May 2023

translated by Ada Kałużna

 In my first blog post in March 2022, I wrote about the sign of Lajb Zajdlic’s store. I wrote how it survived the war and is still visible under the balcony of a townhouse on Dąbrowskiego Street, the building in which Lajb was running his grocery store. The short description brought about unexpected results as Robert Olejnik published an article on LM, a local news website, about the project and the people and events I told about through the subsequent blog posts. Someone in the United States read the article, shared it with her friend, who in turn recognized Lajb as his late relative (deceased for about 80 years) about whom not much had been known until then.

Since that time, so June 2022, we exchanged dozens of emails with Michael. We were separated by the distance of several thousand of kilometers, yet I somehow witnessed how – acting on impulse – Michael has been finding information about more and more relatives, alive and deceased. It must have been in his very first message that he announced that he would be coming to Konin. Seeing his involvement in the search for traces of his family history, I did not doubt for a second this would come to be.

Michael Schoencholtz, a resident of Oregon, came to Konin on May 10^th. I went to pick him up from the train station together with Damian Kruczkowski, the library director who discovered the barely visible store sign several years ago. He told me about this when I started gathering information about the prewar Jewish community of Konin. It was thanks to this that Lajb Zajdlic was ever mentioned on the blog.

For the next day and a half, Michael could have been seen photographing the town with his professional camera and making acquaintances with the passers-by chatting him up. Thanks to him I met several extraordinary people, interested in the history of our town. This includes Mr. Konstanty and a man living on Dąbrowskiego Street, right in front where Zajdlic’s store used to be. Finally, we all met up in the synagogue where we listened Mr. Piotr Rybczyński talk about the history of Konin’s Jews. Then, we heard Michael share a story about a certain Jewish family:

„My cousin and I had tried to recreate the stories of everyone in the photograph, with the limited information we had. We consulted holocaust testimony, personal recollections, memoirs, transit documents, books of the dead, news articles, and more.

Private Family Collection. In the center of the photograph and of the family are Leib (Lajb) and his wife Rosa (Rojza). 

 Leib was listed in a 1968 memorial book for the town [Memorial (Yizkor) Book for Konin – MKK] as having been murdered in the war. Like many others, we do know precisely how, when or where he died, but we know he was alive when the war began, because there is a photograph of him wearing the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear during the early days of the war. 

Jews were murdered in a variety of ways, among them gassing, shooting, burning, drowning or burial alive, exhaustion through forced labor, starvation, epidemic diseases, deprivation of medical care and minimal hygienic conditions. Some took their own lives in order to escape arrest and further persecution, or to end their hopeless suffering. So we don’t know how he met his end, but he would have been approximately 80 years old. 

His wife Rosa is listed as well, but to add to the indignity, the record is missing her first name. She is only referred to as „Zeidlitz, married to Leib, of Konin.” She would have been approximately 77.

Standing on the far left, we see son Cudek, a former football star who was widely known in the region. A merchant when the war broke out, he was sent to Ostrowiec in 1941, and lived until 1943. He was 43 years old.

A woman we believe to be his wife Esther, is sitting next to him, near Rosa. She was sent to the Lublin ghetto in the spring of 1941, and later to Ostrowiec, where she died.  She would have been 37.

According to the book of the dead for Konin [Memorial (Yizkor) Book for Konin – MKK], Cudek and Esther had a child, but we don’t have any additional information. 

Sitting on the far right is son Saul. Standing behind him is his daughter Tola, and sitting next to him is his wife Helena. Saul died at Auschwitz in 1943, age 51. Saul’s wife and daughter managed to survive by sneaking into a kitchen brigade, and stirring a pot of soup with the only utensil they had with them – a spoon. 

 Helena and Tola were two of the 46 people to return to Konin after the war. They went to the train station every evening for some period of time, to see if anyone else would return. No one did. Eventually they left Poland.

Standing behind Leib, and to our right, is his daughter Ita and her husband Jacob. Ita was sent to Ostrowiec Kielecki, and then to Treblinka in 1942, where she presumably died. She was 35.  Her husband Jacob, the tall man standing next to her, was liberated in April 1945. He remarried and emigrated to the US, via Costa Rica.

 Standing behind the young child are son Abraham and we believe his then-fiancee Rose. After they married, they moved to Paris. In July 1939, they made a trip to New York, for what appears to have been a personal visit. In September, when the war broke out, they were on their way back to France. Eventually, he or they were sent to a transit camp near Paris, and even though the camp was later closed and its prisoners sent to Auschwitz, Abraham somehow made his way to Pau in southern France, and eventually to Philadelphia via Portugal. He ended up in Canada, while his wife returned to Paris, where she died. We presume they divorced somewhere along the way. 

 The second and third people standing in the back are daughter Bluma and her husband Marek. Bluma was the first woman in her family to graduate from the university in Warsaw. Her husband Marek and Ita’s husband Jacob were brothers. The two young boys in the photo are their sons Avrom and Dovid.

In the early days of the war, the family was able to hide in a cellar for several months, by paying a reluctant farmer for shelter and a minimal amount of food. This arrangement lasted until the money ran out, and then the farmer turned them in. The family was taken to a concentration camp, and as punishment, the Germans forced them to watch as their youngest, son Avrom, age 12, was thrown into an oven alive. 

 The older son, died on the day his concentration camp was liberated, in the arms of a childhood friend from Konin. 

Bluma and Marek survived and ended up in Canada. Several family accounts say that Bluma didn’t utter a word to anyone for a number of years before her death. 

 One son of Leib was not in the photo. He left for Berlin in the early 1920s. He had a furniture shop, and after a mysterious fire, he decided to move to New York rather than to rebuild in Germany.  

 I had asked my cousin’s mother where the photograph was during the war. If everyone in the photo was incarcerated in one way or another, how could something like this survive? 

 As we know, the mother and her daughter on the right side of the photo returned to Konin after the war. They went to the house that they had to leave in a hurry 4 or 5 years earlier, and found another family living it. All of the old houses had new residents. When this particular family moved in, they found a stack of family photos, two silver sabbath candlesticks, and a set of crystal goblets. 

They kept them – just in case anyone ever came back. And they did. 

The family let the two women stay with them, and when they sold the house, they shared some of the proceeds. 

It would have been so easy for the new residents to throw away the photos. If they had, we would never have had a roadmap for telling this family’s story.”

Once Michael had finished, all 80 of us went for a walk. Eventually, we stopped in front of Lajb’s store, taking photos of the faded sign.

*Michael Schoencholtz’s story was presented and written in English. It is, therefore, cited here in its original form, unedited by the translator.