I have written before about my grandfather Meyer’s relatives murdered in the Holocaust The View From Brule Lake: Lvov and Other Places. Since then, I found an additional relative who most likely died in the Rohatyn ghetto and a moving commentary by Solomon Mandel, one of the few descendants of Rose Winz and Mehshulum Zalman Mandel who survived the Holocaust while living in eastern Europe.
Rose Winz was one of my great-grandfather Abraham
Bloomfeld’s sisters. For some reason, Abraham had a different surname than his
Winz sisters. Rose and Mehshulum had 7 children, with birth years ranging from 1884
to 1898, three of whom died before 1900. Joel Mandel, the only survivor of the
war, was born in 1898, one year after Grandpa Meyer. He married Berta Eisensher;
they had 4 children, Solomon being the oldest, born in 1926. Berta perished in
the Rohaytn ghetto in 1942; son David there the following year and sons Adolf
and Morris – probably in Rohaytn – also in 1943.
Here's Solomon’s account:
I am Solomon Mandel. I was born on July 28, 1926, to
Berta and Joel Mandel in the town of Bukaczowce, in southeastern Poland [NOTE:
The region of Galicia, now part of Ukraine]. It was a small town. We
had two synagogues and a Talmud Torah. We had two rabbis whose names were
Rabbi Shwarz and Rabbi Singer, and we had two shoctin for slaughtering kosher
meats and poultry. Their names were Joel Nagelberg and his son, Shimon
Nagelberg. They all perished. The only survivor is a grandson of Joel
Nagelberg.
I was going to a cheder for my Jewish education and to a
Polish school for my Polish education until 1939, when the Second World
War started. The Germans occupied the northern part of Poland, and the
Russians occupied the other half. For the Jewish people it was not bad –
the only thing the communists stopped was Jewish education. It was not
until June and July of 1941 that the Germans occupied us. The trouble
started for the Jewish people in 1941. That summer the Germans, with the
help of the Ukrainians, created the ghetto. On Yom Kippur, the first
action was made, and the Jewish people were sent to the
crematoriums. Three weeks later, the second action was made, and the town
was declared "Judenfrei." Whoever remained alive from the Jewish
population had to move to a different ghetto in Rohatyn, 23 kilometers from my
town. I went back secretly to my town and hid so no one would know. In February
1943, I was captured by the Ukrainian police and sent to Rohatyn, and from
there to a concentration camp. I was not there too long when I planned to
escape. It worked for me. I went back to my town, and I got connected
to the Partisans. My father somehow came to town illegally and I joined
him. We were together until the Liberation in 1944. In July, I went to the
Allied Army for one reason, to take revenge. In the end of 1945 I was
discharged, and I needed to go into the Polish Army, but I did not want to
go. So in the summer of 1946 I escaped from Poland to Germany, where I was
in a DP camp until 1949.
I came to the U.S.A. on June 16, 1949, by boat. The
name of the boat was the General Heincelman . . .
Solomon’s quilt, which included photos of his Bukaczowce family, as well as photos of his wife Cirl's Feigenbaum family from Szydlowce, Poland.
Within one year after arriving in the United States, Solomon married Cirl Feignebaum, a native of Poland born in 1927. They lived in the Bronx, where Solomon became a naturalized citizen in November 1954, and Queens, where he died on January 25, 2015.
Solomon’s father Joel also emigrated in 1949, probably on
the same ship. He settled and worked in the Bronx, according to a report, and passed
away in 1975. He married Helen Reisman, a native of Poland, on an unknown date;
she died in 1967.
