Читать книгу LOST AND FOUND, A Family Memoir - SARA APPLEBAUM - Страница 5

My mother’s family came from Lodz, Poland. I’ve now traced the Szaja/Bendkowski line back to the 1790s. It seems that Bendowski means a person from the town of Bendkow/Bedkow and there is such a place, Latitude 51 35’, Longitude 19 45’; what’smore, it is in the same vicinity as a half a dozen towns where the family lived for 4 or 5 generations…Sulejow, Belchatow, Przyglow,Lodz, and Piotrkow ,where my earliest known ancestor is buried.

A few years ago, I managed to get to Lodz in Poland and found the house where my great grandfather, Abram Icek Szaja, lived at 81 Pomorska Street until he died on November 6, 1892. That was the year of a devastating Cholera outbreak. So many also died of Typhus, that a lot of victims were buried in mass graves.

Last house my great granfather lived in on 81 Pmorska Street in Lodz,Poland in 1892. I took this picture in 2005

My great grandfather, Abraham Icek is listed on the Constant Citizens Register of Lodz. It lists his birth on March 8, 1842 in Zgierz, just North of Lodz.

My father’s side of the family came from Warsaw. The city was so badly bombed that parts of it were literally rubble. The city center has now been rebuilt to look like it did before the War.

Many years ago, when I first became interested in researching my family, I sent to Poland for my parents’ birth certificates. My mother warned me that I was unlikely to find anything on my dad’s side. When I asked why, she told me that Lodz, with it’s large ethnic German population didn’t resist like Warsaw did. In her words…”they practically turned over the keys to the city.” I received my mother’s birth certificate within a couple of weeks. I never got my father’s.

As it looked in 1945

Old Warsaw rebuilt