Footprints on Cobblestone: The engine that could

Now that I can speak from experience, finding out things here ends up being a lot like the little engine's journey in the classic story: at first, things are slow, and all possible leads fall quickly. Then, the train gets moving, as you find one record, or one reference to a record. Then, someone gets interested in helping, and the train goes further up the hill. Then, sometimes unexpectedly, the train hits the top and goes rushing to the bottom of the hill, fresh will all the information (and more) that you could have imagined to find. Today was a perfect example.

We started off by looking for my grandpa, Zayde's, birth certificate. The reason we had to look for this information in the first place was because we had always thought that Zayde was born in May of 1913, but recently, we acquired many documents from the International Tracing Service that listed his birth year as anywhere from 1907 to 1912 to 1913. The reason that we were able to acquire so many documents regarding Zayde's experiences during the Holocaust was that he was in 5 different camps during the war, and from the dates that he was in the camps, it seems that he arrived in each of the camps before the bulk of the other people--we think to sew the prisoners' uniforms, since he was a tailor. From these documents, we also found out that Zayde had had a wife (other than Grandma Esther) before the war, named Milka Licht, but that they didn't have any children.

Anyway, we started off in the town hall archives in Zamosc looking for Zayde's birth records. We told the woman working at the desk that we were looking for someone born in Zamosc, and we gave them Zayde's information: Name, Tobias/Tewel Zylberman, and Year of Birth: 1907, 1912, or 1913. She began looking through books for births with the name Zylberman beginning in 1910, since any earlier documents are housed in another archive. She looked through books and books and books and didn't see any births with the name Zylberman, that matched Zayde's parents' names. I then remembered the name Szczebrzesyn, the name of a town that someone had listed as Zayde's mother's hometown on an online Yad Vashem (Israeli Holocaust Museum) database. I looked at a map of the local area on the wall, and saw that Szczebrzesyn was right next to Zamosc. Since the woman working in the archives couldn't find any Zylbermans up till the 1930's (this would include Zayde's younger siblings as well), we concluded that either Zayde was born in Zamosc before 1910, or in another town, possibly in Szczebrzesyn. But he never mentioned Szczebrzesyn, only Zamosc, so this left us confused.

We then went to the other Zamosc archive, the one that had records pre-1910 for both Zamosc and Szczebrzesyn. The archives were empty, so the woman who worked in the reading room was very eager to help us with finding out any information we could find. We began by looking through Zamosc birth records for 1907, but there was no listing for Tewel Zylberman. We then looked through the Szczebrzesyn birth records for 1907, but again there was no record for Tewel Zylberman. But then, the train started moving. The woman who worked in the reading room suggested we look at a census from Zamosc from 1934, and she brought us an index of last and first names, as well as birth dates. We slowly turned the pages until--there, right in the middle of the page, was listed, Zylberman, Tewel! But there was a roadblock: his birth-date was listed as June 7th, 1904, and the only other Zylberman listed was a Chaim, born in 1929. I was skeptical that this was the same Tewel, but luckily the index pointed us to the train's next stop, a coffee-table size book (literally the size of a coffee table) that had more detailed records on the index listings. We opened up this book, and there was confirmation that this was Zayde's listing: his parents names, which we had previously known, were listed right next to his name (including his middle name, Manys--a name which we hadn't before known). Again, his birth-date was listed in 1904, and his occupation was listed as tailor, and on the top of the page was his address in Zamosc, 1 Kamienna Street, apartment 3. And, he was listed to have been born in Szczebrzesyn! So the mystery of where he was from was solved: even though he was born in Szczebrzesyn, he had moved to Zamosc at some point, so he had always said that he was from Zamosc, since that's where he lived for several years before the war. Under Zayde's name was his wife, Milka's information: her full name, Kajla Milka Licht, and her parents names. And under her name, was Chaim's information--Chaim, their son's information. We had never known that Zayde had had a son before the war, let alone a wife--we had only found that out through documents after Zayde passed away. Not only was this news to us, it was news to my dad that he had (or has) a half-brother, born before the war.

And then it hit us--we had checked the birth records for Szczebrzesyn for 1907, but Zayde was born in 1904. The woman at the archive by now was excited that we were excited, and almost without us asking, it seemed, she brought out the birth records from 1904. We opened up the book, and inside was Zayde's birth announcement, that went something like this: "An announcement, that Abram Shlomo, 22 years old, at 11 in the evening, presents a male child by Mindla Rotman, 22 years old, by the witnesses Nuchim Tuchminder, 62 years old, and Mayer Dicker, 47 years old. The child was circumcised in the synagogue in Szczebrzesyn and was named Tewel Manys Zylberman, on the 7th of June in this year, 1904." By now we knew that we had to visit Szczebrzesyn...but not before stopping at Kamienna Street in Zamosc.

We got to Kamienna Street, not far from the center of town, and although the original apartment building was not there, a new apartment building stood in its spot with the same address. And, just like the front steps were a kind of sign at Mama Manya's house, right across the street from Zayde's apartment building was a tailor shop. We took some pictures there and then made our way to Szczebrzesyn, a 20 minute drive from Zamosc, not knowing what to expect.

When we got there, we asked the first woman we saw on the street if she knew of a synagogue or Jewish cemetery still in existence. She didn't really know, and since we couldn't find too many other people on the street to ask, we were about ready to turn back to Zamosc...until we saw a large, square pink building in the center of town, that looked strangely like a synagogue. We turned the corner to see the front, and right there, next to the door, was a plaque in Hebrew--this was the original synagogue of Szczebrzesyn, restored in recent years! Although the building is now used as an art gallery, the main hall of the synagogue was still there, complete with the original stone steps leading into the hall and the carved stone Aron HaKodesh, where the Torahs would have been kept. And, as we learned, this was the only synagogue in town in Szczebrzesyn, so this had to have been the place where Zayde had his bris, and likely his Bar-Mitzvah.

And if that wasn't enough, the train kept chugging forward. We asked at the synagogue if there was still a Jewish cemetery, and she pointed straight up the hill from the synagogue. We walked up there and entered the gates to the cemetery--now, two hills overgrown with waist-to-shoulder-high plants. But there, right at the cemetery entrance, was a fenced-off section with a 300 year old grave to a famous Rabbi from the area. And, through the plants and up the hill, were hundreds of intact, upright headstones! It hadn't looked like anyone had tried to destroy the cemetery, and the only damage done seemed like it was due to natural causes. We spent probably close to an hour looking at the headstones for the family name, and although we didn't find anything, it was amazing to see such an intact cemetery, with proof that Jews had been living in the area for hundreds of years.

At the end of the day, we came away with so much new information, as well as a new word to add to our vocabulary--Szczebrzesyn. It's amazing how one small step after another, we made it to standing in the very spot that my grandfather grew up. Tomorrow we'll go to another significant place in Zayde's life, the synagogue in Zamosc, which was restored just last year. For now, trying to say Szczebrzesyn isn't losing its charm--just don't ask me to spell it.