Ruby Family History Project Blog

There are two recognizable Wohlgemuth headstone fragments in the old Jewish cemetery in Starogard Gdanski. I will talk about the other one in a separate post. Here is one where I couldn't exactly make out the first name and married name engraved on the stone, but I could clearly see her maiden name was Wohlgemuth. Her married name looked like Blau. It was great to find her but it didn't mean that much because I didn't know who she was or even what to call her. 

Since coming home I have been able to mine a new set of records that gives the answer. First, I knew pretty quickly I was right about the surname Blau. It is one of 64 Jewish family names that were registered in Stargardt in 1812. Then I began digging into the trove of digitized LDS microfilms that I just recently discovered. 

The whole family and all the relations are in there, including the answer to the identity of the Wohlgemuth-Blau gravestone. The third attachment is her marriage record from July 1862. I read her first name as Teile, which I find listed in at least one Yiddish name directory. She was the daughter of Salomon Wohlgemuth. As you recall, all of the Wohlgemuths in Stargard descended from either Salomon or, like us, his brother Herz. Teile's husband was Hirsch Blau. 

Salomon was already in his 60s when Teile was born in 1832. Apparently he was then residing in the nearby town of Berent, today Koscierzyna. I have not yet mined the death records so as of now I don't have death dates for Salomon or any of the others. I assume Salomon had several wives, so I can't say yet who Teile's mother was. 

Still I was able to identify and give a background story for the person in the grave at the Starogard Jewish cemetery. And that feels better than just having found the grave of an unidentified relative. 

I found another cache of specifically Jewish records from Stargardt that were filmed by the Mormons and are accessible at FamilySearch.org. With these, I have now been able to reconstruct our Wohlgemuth line from Isaak's father Leopold back to the first Wohlgemuths to take the name in Stargardt. (Yay! That was one of my goals in making the trip.)

Leopold was born on March 5, 1833, the son of Abraham Wohgemuth and Rebecca (nee Altmann). He was formally give the name Lewin but the more Western name Leopold is also recorded on his birth record. Leopold's father Abraham Wohlgemuth was born in 1805, the third child of Herz Moses Wohlgemuth and Rosa. At the time of Abraham's birth, surnames were not yet in use, but a few years later in 1812 Herz Moses, his brother Salomon Moses, and their father Moses Salomon all adopted the Wohlgemuth surname. 

From a directory published in 1812 that correlates the surname with the old patronyms, we find birth dates for Hertz (March 16, 1769) and old man Moses (May 21, 1729). Herz's mother Yette was born March 13, 1739 and Moses married Yette on May 18, 1760. All of the men in the family are identified by profession as "handelsmann," or dealer. 

So that is our family history in Starogard Gdanski. I will capture images and properly document these new finds later, but I wanted to share the news immediately. 

A couple of days ago I wrote that echoes of the Holocaust pervade the present, and then I regretted posting that. I didn’t mean to imply that it Is front of consciousness for most everyday Poles, because I don’t think that is true. Then I attended a session on Thursday, the last full day of the conference, that put my half-formed idea into eloquent, even poetic expression.

Jakub Nowakowsky, director of the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, is not Jewish, but he has made it his life’s work to study the forgotten sites of Jewish life in the region of the former Galicia, which constitutes the southern tier of Poland and the western portion of Ukraine. His talk was based on the core exhibition of the museum, which recalls the diversity Jewish life that once flourished in hundreds of Galician villages and cities and which was snuffed out in the Holocaust. 

His theme was the absence of memory and the physical spaces that represent what is painfully missing from the modern Polish world. Synagogues repurposed as shopping malls. Cemeteries desecrated and unrestored. Mezuzahs stripped from doorways leaving traces in the peeling paint. Unmemorialized killing fields where people now walk their dogs. These, he said, are scars on the Polish landscape and in its collective psyche. 

“Sometimes it is nothing that tells you something,” he said. “Here there was a polyphony of Jewish life—a diversity of flavors, tastes and noises. It was not one common experience, until the end when rich Jews and poor, observant and not, educated and unschooled all met the same fate.

“These are the traces of the past shouting the silence of the Jewish presence. Some are places on the map for visitors but most are just embedded. Unlike in other countries where they erect a Holocaust memorial, all of Poland is a memorial.”

But history does not end in 1945 at Auschwitz, he continued. Today, there is a revival of Jewish life in Krakow, Warsaw and other big cities, but it is a shadow of the vibrancy that was. Krakow in particular has become a tourist destination for Jewish heritage, a type of commercialized Disneyland. 

The major issue confronting Jews and Poles alike is what is to be done with these forgotten sites of history. In most cases they are in places where tourists will never visit. They should not be built over, but should they be restored or preserved as ruins? How should they be memorialized? How can surviving Jews who want to restore a cemetery, for example, do so with participation from the local population, and not just “parachute” in and out?  

Nowakowski says that Poland does not have a national policy, and that every locality makes its own hard decisions. He believes this is as it should be, because it puts the responsibility for memorialization on the local people and their children to recognize what happened and to account for it. The good news, he concluded, is that in many places Poles are beginning to recognize that the history of the Jews is their history, too. Instead of turning their heads, they now have the opportunity to embrace the commonality of the Jewish and Polish experience before, during and after the Holocaust. 

For me, this moving session wrapped up many of the ideas and issues raised during the course of my week at the IAJGS conference. I decided to skip the extra-cost closing session in favor of some final interactions with other attendees, including an American-born Berliner and an Israeli couple—both with amazing genealogical stories. My week at the IAJGS in Warsaw had come to an end. Next August, the conference returns to the U.S. when it convenes in Cleveland, Ohio.

We’re going to have to talk about it. The Holocaust. It happened here 75 years ago and it still pervades the place. Nobody seriously contests the facts: 3.5 million Polish Jews perished, including the 450,000 who were killed when the walled Warsaw ghetto, smack dab in the city center, was liquidated in 1943. It happened because of the evil policies of the Nazi party in Germany, but many Polish citizens participated and most others looked the other way. A few took action at great risk to themselves and their families to rescue Jews. 

Equally true, the Polish people also suffered terrible losses, both by the Germans during the war and under the brutal repressions of the Communist regime that ruled the country for the 40 years following. Many Poles of Jewish extraction supported communism. and some of these played leading roles implementing Stalinist policies. 

What is a matter of never-ending debate and recrimination is the reckoning of responsibility. Counter narratives from every sector of society —by Jews and Poles, by disparate layers of officialdom, by opposing factions within the Catholic Church, and by intellectuals and the man in the street—reverberate to this day. Six months ago, the current nationalist government under Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki promulgated a controversial new law criminalizing words or actions ascribing any degree of collective responsibility to the Polish people. A worldwide outcry ensued, including a move, later rejected, to relocate this conference out of the country. Just a few weeks ago, a new agreement between the governments of Poland and Israel resulted in modest changes to the law that has defused the controversy, at least for now. 

Professor Anatoly Polonsky, the conference scholar in residence, gave his penetrating analysis of the history of the responsibility debate in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine during his major address to the conference on Tuesday evening. He expressed discouragement that after earlier periods of liberalization and self-examination, the current moment sees populist and nationalist tendencies on the rise, especially and surprisingly among the young generation of Poles. However, Polonsky finds hope in the work of scholars and reformers that the long arc of history will bend toward toleration and pluralism. 

“As difficult as it is, the past is easier to deal with than the future,” he remarked. “I believe in the reverse of Gresham’s Law: Good history will drive out the bad.”

As an outside distant observer, I have little to contribute to the debate. However, I can do my part to commemorate the original sin. There are many wonderful resources for Holocaust research in Warsaw especially the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute named for the author and social worker who chronicled the unfolding tragedy in Warsaw between 1941 and 1944. Documentation and material objects that he and others in the Oneg Shabbos group collected were buried before the final destruction of the ghetto and were partially recovered in the aftermath of the war. These form the basis of the JHI’s collection, that also includes vast resources of records and documentation about the history of Polish Jews before, during and after the Holocaust.

There are also those organizations from around the world who memorialize Holocaust victims that are represented here. The Israeli memorial authority, Yad Vashem, which maintains the definitive list of Holocaust victims, is at the conference to solicit new testimonies from the high percentage of conference attendees whose families were impacted. 

The stories of several of my relatives are already well documented in the Names Database, but just last week I learned of a previously unknown relation, Amalie Katz, the cousin of my great grandmother, who was deported from Berlin in 1942 and perished at Treblinka, the death camp located 60 miles northeast of Warsaw. Amalie is listed in the database, but only because her name was given on a Nazi deportation list. Based on my research, I can add significant new details about her and her family history that will help to bring life and memory to this otherwise forgotten individual. Before I leave this week, I will assemble my information about Amalie (so far I have no photograph) and make an official submission to Yad Vashem.