WHO AM I?

           

When I was young, I vaguely understood that my mother’s parents came from Romania, but it meant nothing to me. In those days nobody asked questions and I never even knew my grandmother, as she died at a comparatively young age. My grandfather remarried, and we had very little to do with them. It was only when there was nobody of my generation left  to ask that I  began to feel  the urge to find out something about my ancestry

I therefore decided to spend the Passover holidays in Romania, with the faint possibility that I could discover some family background.  I enjoyed the holiday, as Romania is a beautiful country, but I still can’t go back more than two generations into my family history. Which is

more than countless other Jews

Today is Holocaust Day. As a result of the Holocaust,  the question of identity became a very painful issue for hundreds of Jews.  Leah Balint is a lady living in my Senior Residence complex, who has made it her life’s mission to help Polish Jews discover whom they are. She began her research in 1993, when the people in question were approximately in their 50’s. These are people who were completely “rootless”. Many of them had no idea of  their proper names and had no notion of where they came from in Poland

Leah discovered that the archives in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw is a goldmine of information. It contains millions of documents – testimonies of both Holocaust survivors and non-survivors, with full details of names and addresses, etc. One large section in the archives is devoted to orphans who were either given up by their parents to non-Jews, placed in monasteries/convents, or ran away to the partisans

  

Leah herself, at the age of two spent two years in a Polish ghetto with her mother and, left an orphan at the age of four, was placed in a convent for three years where she became a devout Catholic. At the end of the war, Jewish leaders sent people to find children hidden by Gentiles. Leah was taken almost by force from the convent and  placed into an orphanage in Poland run by the JOINT, a Jewish international organization. From there to Israel, where she built a new life for herself

Ariella Goldschmidt is one example of the approximately 170 Jews who Leah succeeded to discover their  identity. Ariella had no idea how she suddenly appeared in the world. She had spent a good portion of her life, and financial resources, to try and find her roots but found nothing. She only knew her name and the fact that she was born in Poland. Leah succeeded in finding her pertinent details in the list of children documented in the Warsaw archives, including the family who had saved her

A TV crew from Israel flew with Ariella and Leah to the small holiday resort in Poland to meet with her adopted family whom she hadn’t seen, or heard of, for fifty years.  The parents were obviously not alive any more but the rest of the family, in particular the eldest daughter who had helped look after Ariella, remembered her very well. It was an overwhelming emotional experience, both for Ariella and the family – who have since been given a place  in Yad Veshem (Israeli Holocaust museum) dedicated to the  “Righteous amongst the Nations