A Bashert Genealogical Discovery

by RIVKA SCHILLER

In the spring of this year, I began to research in earnest one of my ancestral towns in Poland. For those who may be familiar with it, the town’s name is Chmielnik, and it is situated approximately 30 kilometers (or 19 miles) southeast of the largest neighboring city of Kielce. Due to its high degree of poverty and lack of economic opportunities, this was a region of pre-World War II Poland referred to unfavorably in some memoirs as "meylekh-evyens giter."[1. According to the journal, Yidishe shprakh, this is a literary phrase used to signify a poor neighborhood or region. See: “Yidish in Sants,” Yidishe shprakh 4, no. 1 (1944): 77.] Loosely translated from the Yiddish, according to former Chmielnik resident Ezjel Lederman, this expression connotes: “The Estates of the King of the Paupers.”[2. Esther Gutman Lederman and Ezjel Lederman, Hiding for Our Lives (Charleston, North Carolina:Booksurge Pulishing, 2007), 134.]

Perhaps Chmielnik’s greatest claim to fame in pre-war days was as an agricultural and mercantile center of some 12,500 residents with an important goose trade. Both the geese and goose sausage originating in Chmielnik “were sold throughout Poland and exported to Germany. The feathers and down were sent to the United States to make pillows and bedding. The quills were sent to France for use as toothpicks. Even the goose droppings were converted into fertilizer.”[3. Suzan E. Hagstrom, Sara’s Children: The Destruction of Chmielnik (Spotsylvania, VA: Sergeant Kirkland’s Press, 2001), 30.] Indeed, much of the town’s economic infrastructure was predicated on this business, which was, incidentally, a predominantly Jewish trade.[4. Yosef Kleinert, “Between Two World Wars,” in Pinkes Khmielnik: yisker-bukh nokh der khorev-gevorener Yidisher kehile.]

Unlike its larger neighbor, Kielce, which was noted for its overt physical anti-Jewish excesses dating back to at least c.1918,[5. On 11 November 1918, the Jews of Kielce held a rally in which they demanded that Jews be granted political and cultural autonomy. “In response, Polish activities of the right-wing party destroyed many Jewish-owned shops and houses.” In addition, several Jews were maimed or lost their lives during the course of this pogrom. Aside from the pogrom of 1918, Kielce would subsequently come to be remembered for the violence enacted there in the single largest post-World War II pogrom. During that cataclysmic event, 42 Jews were murdered while over 40 Jews incurred injuries. For further information, visit http://www.sztgetl.org.pl/en/article/Kielce/5,history/; and http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Kielce (accessed 11-15-12).] Chmielnik did not have much of a history of anti-Semitism.[6. According to the testimonies Chmielnik: Yisker Book in Memory of the Annihilated Jewish Community, ed. Efraim Shedletski (Tel-Aviv: Irgun Yotsei Chmielnik be-Yisrael, 1960), 513.] According to the testimonies of former Jewish residents, this absence may have been due largely to the fact that Jews comprised a majority in the town. In contrast, say, to the moderately-sized city of Kielce, whose prewar Jewish population was at least 30%, Chmielnik was close to 85% Jewish. In this regard, it was very much a paradigm of the so-called Jewish shtetl. To quote Jakob Sylman, “On market days, when some Poles would rebuke their fellow townsmen with the admonishment, `Don’t buy from Jews!’ `we weren’t afraid because we were the majority.”[7. Hagstrom, Sara’s Children, 25.] Usher Tarek bolstered this statement with his own recollection of Chmielnik’s pre-World War II Polish-Jewish relations: “Let me put it to you this way: if Poles were anti-Semitic, they didn’t show it.”[8. Ibid, 23.] Finally, Morris Kwasniewki defined this absence of anti-Semitism in the following definitive terms: “We didn’t love each other, but nobody did anything actively against the other. We tolerated one another, as one might say.”[9. Morris Kwasniewski, interview by Richard Bassett, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, Toronto, Canada, April 5, 1995.]

When I set out to study the various facets of the Jewish community of Chmielnik, I had little more to go on than the fact that my maternal grandfather’s mother – my namesake – had been born and raised there. My grandfather, Szlama Pinkusiewicz (later, Shloime or Sam Pinkus, b. 1905 in the district of Kielce,[10. According to the birth certificate my uncle recently uncovered for my grandfather while visiting the regional archives in Kielce, my grandfather was actually born a year earlier than we had previously been told, in either June or July 1904, in a small town near Kielce called Dyminy.]) had been the source of this scarce information. According to him, his mother’s name before marriage had been Rywka Gorlicka, and she had died tragically young, when he was eleven years old, thereby making the year of death around 1916. Otherwise, my grandfather knew little of his mother’s family, which resided in a nearby town that he apparently never recalled having visited.

The Lives of Polish Jews between the Wars

In order to get a sense of the lives of the Jews of Chmielnik in the interwar period – and by extension, gain some deeper insight into my own family – I surveyed autobiographical accounts at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, which had been written by Jewish young adults in Chmielnik in the 1930s. These autobiographies are part of what is known as “Record Group 4, Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland, 1932-1939.” The collection was assembled from a series of writing contests that the YIVO (Yidishe visnshaftlekhe institut) of Vilna (Wilno) sponsored in 1932, 1934 and in 1939 through its Youth Research Division (Yugntforshung). In fact, the winners of the third contest were supposed to be announced on September 1, 1939, the very day that Germany invaded Poland, plunging Europe into World War II.

Whether it was mere serendipity – otherwise known as bashert, in Yiddish – or something more at work here, I cannot say. But, among those 300+ autobiographies that had been recovered after World War II from what had originally amounted to over 600 such autobiographies, I was amazed to discover one that had been written (in Yiddish) during the spring of 1939 by an Icek Dawid Gorlicki (born c. 1916). At the time that this autobiography had been written, the author resided at Pańska 108 in Warsaw, although he had been born and raised in the town of Chmielnik, in “Kieltser gubernye” (the province of Kielce).[11. Icek Dawid Gorlicki, Autobiographical Submission for YIVO’s Writing Contest, c. 1939, YIVO Archives, Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland, 1932-1939, RG 4, File 3691, 1.]  As previously mentioned, Gorlicki (Gorlicka) was the surname of my own Chmielnik ancestors.

The Autobiography of Icek Dawid Gorlicki

What I uncovered next in that heartbreaking text was informative both on a familial, as well as a more general level. For example, I learned that like my grandfather, Icek Dawid Gorlicki had also lost his mother at a tender age. This life-changing event is reflected in the following words of the author:

Upon returning home [from the hospital], she lived for two more days. I didn’t know in which world I existed. It was a harsh blow for me. I felt that in living, there is also death. Until then, I knew nothing of that; I had only heard [about that]. But I had never [before] felt what that is. My heart began to beat more rapidly, and would occasionally release a sigh/groan. My life grew more solemn. My younger sister had to fill my mother’s place; and from time to time, our home grew sadder.[12. Ibid, 20-21.]

In my own grandfather’s case, when his mother died, leaving him and five brothers to fend for themselves, my grandfather told me that “I cried for an entire year.” In addition, he had to go to work to earn the money necessary to pay a melamed[13. In this instance, a melamed meant a private tutor of religious Jewish subject-matter.] to teach him for his Bar-Mitzvah. Before long, he, like Icek Dawid, had joined his father in the family trade – which in this case, consisted of the slaughter and sale of kosher meat.

Like my grandfather, Icek Dawid was forced to abandon his studies due to the family’s economic hardships – something that was certainly not unheard of in pre-World War II Poland – and go to work with his father as a carpenter and woodworker. In the words of the author, “Perhaps half a year before my Bar-Mitzvah, my father pulled me out of Cheder. He said that he [the author] can already pray; and [knows] Chumash and a bit of Gemara – it is already enough for him. In either case, he [the author] was not going to become a rabbi.”[14. Icek Dawid Gorlicki, Autobiographical Submission for YIVO’s Writing Contest, c. 1939, YIVO Archives, Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland, 1932-1939, RG 4, File 3691, 6.] Needless to say, this was not part of Icek Dawid’s personal vision for the future.

As a cathartic measure against his father’s decision to pull him out of school, Icek Dawid wrote a short story entitled “Shloymele Longs for His School” in which he describes an obviously autobiographical protagonist named Shloymele, who is the son of a poor shoemaker. The shoemaker’s father decides to pull his son out of school because, according to the father, Shloymele will never become a doctor or a lawyer anyway, and his skills are more badly needed elsewhere. All of this is contrasted with the fact that Shloymele wants very badly to learn and to continue attending school, and is envious of the other children who remain in school. Clearly, this vignette must have resonated strongly with enough other Jews who, like Icek Dawid, were coming of age in the 1930s, such that a children’s newspaper immediately decided to print it. What’s more, according to the author, some of his peers then attempted to model themselves after him by submitting their own articles to this same (unnamed) newspaper.

With the passage of time, Icek Dawid felt the educational, professional and cultural limitations of small-town Chmielnik life closing in upon him. The desire to set out on his own and become his own person became even more pronounced after the death of his mother. As captured in the author’s own words:

First of all, I wanted to see if I was strong enough to exist on my own, without the help of my home [family]. Also, the youth in town had begun to sit around doing nothing. I saw that my life here was without content. Mostly, people would walk back and forth on the “treading grounds.”  Or, they would gather together a few groszy from a whole week, and on Saturday [night?], sit in the bar, drinking beer and wasting their time on nonsense. And I couldn’t get used to this. I decided to set out for the great big world. After thinking it over, I came to the conclusion that the best [place for me] would be Warsaw, [because] it is the capital, and also the cultural center.[15. Ibid., 22.]

Yet, even upon finding himself in the more metropolitan surroundings of Warsaw, life did not become any easier for Icek Dawid. For as an unsophisticated “boy from the provinces,” he frequently found himself being exploited by various supervisors. Such was the unfortunate fate of somebody as desperate for work and a professional foothold in the big city, as he.

One of the great ironies in my discovery of Icek Dawid’s autobiography is that I had previously worked on this very collection in my tenure as an archivist at YIVO. Indeed, it was one of the earliest collections that I worked on, having joined YIVO in January 2005. However, at the time, I did not spend too much time fixating on Icek Dawid or his autobiography. There were simply too many other autobiographies to plow through. And although I was well-aware of the significance of this find, I had little way of figuring out how we might possibly be related. Again, I knew so little to begin with concerning my own Gorlicki (Gorlicka) ancestor from Chmielnik. As the old adage goes, “out of sight, out of mind.” This is precisely what happened following my first discovery of Icek Dawid Gorlicki’s autobiography.

The Gorlicki Family Tree Includes Icek Dawid Gorlicki

Fast forward a few years later to 2008. It was then that pieces of my own, more immediate family tree began to come together, thanks to the ongoing help of several (mostly) distant relatives who managed to painstakingly reconstruct the Gorlickis of Chmielnik family tree, dating back to around 1770. For roughly a decade, this had been in the works, as several of us had been in touch by way of JewishGen, a Jewish genealogy website.[16. The award-winning website’s URL is www.jewishgen.org (accessed 11-15-12).]

Fast forward again to spring 2012. At this point, when I happened across the name Icek Dawid Gorlicki within the context of Chmielnik, Poland, I was essentially “armed and ready.” I was now able to consult the Gorlicki family tree that Howie Zakai – one of my long-time JewishGen Gorlicki acquaintances and cousins – had mapped out.  Sure enough, I found an “Icek Dawid Gorlicki,” who was listed as having been born in c. 1913 – close enough in time to be one and the same as the autobiographer, Icek Dawid Gorlicki, born in c. 1916. Although he is on my family tree, he is a very, very distant relation.

Now that I had actually located him on the family tree, I was hoping that I might also learn of the autobiographer’s ultimate fate – whether he had perished during the war or somehow managed to survive.  I realized that this, too, was no small feat, since the fate of so many Jews during World War II remains cloaked in mystery to this very day.

What Happened to Icek Dawid?

Thus, the next resource that I consulted was the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.  There, I was yet again amazed to find a page of testimony submitted for a “Yitzkhak Gorlitzki,” which is simply a variation on the Polish-Yiddishized name, “Icek [Dawid] Gorlicki.” Upon opening the webpage, I noted additional commonalities, such as the parents’ given names and the listed profession: “Nagar” – the Hebrew equivalent of carpenter. I became increasingly convinced that this was our autobiographer, and even ran this past my cousin Howie, for his own input. We were both in agreement that this was an almost certain match.

The good news was that we had found Icek Dawid Gorlicki. The bad news was that by virtue of the fact that his entry existed, he had perished in the Shoah. Still, I wanted to know the rest of the story. What yet remained was actually contacting the person who had submitted the page of testimony indicating that she is the niece of this man. Fortunately, this was one of the more recent pages of testimony, with a submission date of 1999. I was hopeful, but not entirely convinced that the listed Israeli phone number would still be viable more than a decade later. But as it turned out, Esther Arman, the woman who had submitted the page of testimony, picked up almost immediately, and confirmed that I had, in fact, reached the person in question.