My families from the East
Family genealogy
Title 2
My research began with the death of my parents.
My mother passed away on September 7, 2007, suffering from Lewy body disease.
She had just turned 81.
My father did not survive his passing; a week later, he died in his sleep on September 14, 2007, at the age of 92.
My sister and I were surprised by my father's death. He couldn't get used to our mother's absence. Yet he had rarely shown her any affection throughout their lives.
At his mother's funeral, he authoritatively decided, in front of the astonished rabbi, that he would recite the Kaddish himself.
In the week that followed, he couldn't stop talking about her!
So I wondered about the nature of their relationship, their history(ies) and more broadly about their respective family backgrounds.
My work was demanding, my union activities remained important... I had little availability.
Later, retirement and meeting genealogists gave me the opportunity to get into it.
I was familiar with my mother's family world , even if I didn't understand the family ties with distant cousins who had populated my childhood. I questioned many of the older relatives still alive and drew on their memories.
Then, I went in search of their traces in the archives, naturalization files, civil status records in Paris as well as in Warsaw, since my maternal grandparents were originally from there.
My father, a Holocaust survivor, arrived in France in November 1946. He was born in Poland in 1915, in Lopuszno, and spent his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in Wloszczowa. The war caught him there when he had just turned 24.
He left Poland at the age of 31. I interviewed him about his life there in 1991 and 1994. Four tapes of testimonies that were crucial in helping me understand his life before, his family, his way of life.
1- Mother, Suzanne Leizerson, was 20 years old at the end of the War.
His family has been in Paris for 34 years.
Uncles, aunts and cousins disappeared during the Holocaust.
His father died shortly after the Liberation, in 1945.
2- In 1946, Papa, Szmul Czalczynski, was in Munich, as a stateless person.
He almost lost his entire family, who were murdered during the Holocaust.
He has just been reunited with his little brother Itzack, who miraculously survived.
He will come to Paris for a fresh start.
3- My investigation led me to multiple archive locations to identify the paths taken by my families and to get to know them:
- the cemeteries... the one in Warsaw has housed 150,000 graves since 1810 and the one in Bgneux for my French families.
- civil registry archives, both French and Polish.
- Museums, such as the "Polin" in Warsaw or the archives of the Rigenblum Museum, the Shoah Memorial in Paris.
- at the Bad Arolsen Archives: formidable resources concerning the Holocaust...
- and of course online sites, notably Jewish Gen and JRI-Poland...
