My families from the East
​Family genealogy
Title 2
5- In Uncle Fajwush's family: One son, Aron-Majer Landschaft, will remain alive.
In the summer of 1994, my father and I visited Aron Maier in Gedera. I recorded him for over two hours. My father asked my questions in Yiddish, and Aron Maier answered in Yiddish. My father provided a rough translation, but I planned to translate everything back home with his help. I loved their Yiddish. Unfortunately, the tape didn't record anything; I hadn't realized. What I do remember of my father's translation is that he knew my grandfather, Kasriel Czalczynski, well and remembered their house in Wloszczowa, and Fajgla, who was an excellent cook.
But also that the recording ended with Aron Maier in inconsolable tears. My father told me that he had lost his first wife and his four children.
I would later learn that he was on the Schindler list and I was able to read his name on the column of the Schindler Museum near Krakow;
In the Schindler Museum near Krakow, a column displays the names of those saved by Schindler.
His story
Aron Majer was a baker in Krakow (southern Poland) until 1940.
When the war broke out, he was 30 years old, married to one of his cousins, Myriam Fajgenblatt, and had four children.
Apparently, he and his family ended up in the Krakow ghetto, in Podgorze, a suburb of the city, in March 1941.
From the end of 1941, mass deportations began to concentration camps, one of which would become the first extermination camp: Belzec.
Was it at this time, or later, that he saw his wife and children disappear?
The Ghetto was enclosed by a stone wall with only three openings and was extremely regulated and monitored.
The evacuation of the ghetto began in June 1942 (7,000 Jews sent to the Plaszow camp and then directed to the death camps) and continued until October 1942 (more than six thousand more Jews would follow the same path).
In March 1943, the ghetto was completely liquidated, after the massacre of two thousand children and old people in the streets of the ghetto.
Aron-Mayer was employed at Schindler's "Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik" factory, located just east of the Ghetto's boundaries. It was relocated a few months later near the Plaszow concentration camp (Schindler went to great lengths to ensure that "his" workers were close to their place of production). The enameling and tinning factory employed several hundred Jews, whom Oscar Schindler decided to "protect" from deportation and various atrocities.
On the left is a map of the Krakow Ghetto: the Nazis expelled two-thirds of the city's 55,000 Jewish inhabitants, leaving only between 15,000 and 20,000 in the Ghetto built in May 1941 in the south of the city (and not in the former Jewish quarter of Kazimierz). Stone walls and barbed wire surrounded it. On the right is the entrance gate to the Ghetto. A tram passed through it without stopping.
By the summer of 1944, the Soviet advance was so significant that the Nazis decided to relocate all businesses westward.
Schindler also receives the order to evacuate.
He obtained the right to relocate his company 300 km away to his native Sudetenland, to Brunnlitz.
During the course of all these efforts, his male employees were transferred to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and 300 women were about to be sent to Auschwitz. Schindler managed to have them all reassigned to his factory in Brunnlitz.
This is the episode of the Schindler List. In fact, it was a list of 1200 names compiled by a Jewish Kapo—Marcel Goldberg, in charge of Plaszow's transport. He added other Jewish prisoners to the list of Schindler's workers.
The Bad Arolsen archives sent me a copy of the microfilm in which Aron Landschaft appears on the list of those transferred to Brunnlitz, which would be called "the Schindler list".
From October 21, 1944, Aron Maier appears on the Brunnlitz Commando list under number 381, where he is categorized as "Metallverarneiter".
The factory will operate until May 8, 1945, the day of the Nazi surrender and their liberation.
From July to December 1945, Aron-Mayer was reported to be a refugee in Vienna, Austria.
From there, he had to return to Poland to his city of Krakow. Sabina reports him, at the beginning of 1946, in Jedreszjow (where many Landschaft lived before the war).
He is then found in Munich from March 1946. There he married Rosa Rosenbaum, also a deportee and survivor. They lived at 77, apartment 2, Rosenbergstrasse, according to the census dated August 17, 1946.
His son Fajbus was born on November 15, 1947 at the Glym Hughes Hospital in Lohheide, Hohne Camp, Kreis-Celle, near Bergen-Belsen, under British control. Why?
Like so many others, they remained in Munich for four years as stateless persons.
They emigrated to Israel in 1949
From left to right, Aron-Majer, Pila Zalman and Perele from Canada, my father and Henri.
Contact me
I am still looking for additional information, photos and archives. Contact me.