Original subtitles

I was born in Paris in 1947.

And when I was about six months old, my parents

moved to Australia.

The reason we ended up in Australia,

at the time, for many years,

I thought was, the answer I gave

when I was asked, why did we end up in Australia?

My answer was: because the papers from Australia came first,

because my parents had applied to go to the States, the US,

they applied to go to the Argentine and Australia.

the papers came first and,

that's how we ended up there.

In recent years,

I think the reason was that we ended up in Australia because,

yes, the papers came first, but my parents were sponsored to Australia

and the background for the sponsorship was through my father.

His grandmother, who died before he was born,

had a sister who was born in Płock

and went to England

and went through one generation of gentrification in England

and came to Australia,

and the Australian government

was being negotiating with the Joint,

what to do with Jewish refugees

after the war.

And my parents fit it into this category

that, and the family reunion.

And that's how we ended up in Australia.

My father had applied to go to the States,

but he was told by the Keller family

that he would have to wait because

it required patience.

He also spoke to family that

had migrated to Buenos Aires

and they said he could come to Argentine,

to Buenos Aires, but he would be smuggled through Uruguay.

And he wanted to be a legal immigrant, not an illegal immigrant.

And then he spoke to another family member,

Cynamon, who came to Israel through Anders army,

and he said, don't come to Israel,

the economic situation is not good,

there's going to be a war here.

So Australia essentially became the option, the best option,

because he wanted to get out of Europe as quickly as possible.

My parents came to the United States

in 1949 and had relatives in Boston.

So the first place they landed was in Boston, which is where I was born.

my parents came without English.

They came without trades.

We were fortunate that the family was able,

the Boston family was able to support them. After my father

went to baking school because his father was a baker,

we ended up moving to Chicago, where my mother had relatives.

We had our own bakery, first with another survivor,

and then shortly thereafter sold that bakery and had a second bakery,

on our own.

We did end up leaving Chicago in 1964 and going to California,

where we finished out, or my parents finished out their time.

I have one sister, a younger sister.

I am the oldest, but not the first born my mother had...

My mother also was from Płock, my mother and father had a child born before me

but he was premature, and the times were not right for that.

But I am the oldest surviving.

We grew up knowing that we were children of survivors.

I think I was 12 years old before I realized that there were other people

who were not.

My parents did not have tattoos, and some did.

Most of the family that we had was not family.

My father lost his entire family.

Immediate family. My mother still had a sister.

I knew some things about the life here because of a movie

that my father had from 1937 that had survived the war,

because it was here in the United States with that family in Boston.

And I grew up seeing that movie and periodically would get stories.

And the stories we had were more about the war and surviving the war

more so than than growing up in Płock other than,

my father's family was fairly well-to-do.

so he had things that a lot of kids did not have.

He had a bicycle.

He had a kayak, that was his own.

He and my mother got into a fight about the kayak at one point.

He would tell me that he was the spoiled rich kid.

I was really surprised to find out that my father would skip school periodically,

because I certainly wasn't allowed to do that. But he did.

That their life was very good.

He had a grandmother around,

and they lived in a very nice place.

In California, we went

from staying with other survivors

when we first came to California and then found our own place.

And my father worked as a baker for a short while.

And then we started with the liquor store business,

and we had, two different markets, one right after the other.

My father was a victim of a violent crime when we had the liquor store,

and because of that, he became blind in one eye.

I figured that he really didn't deserve this

because after the war, who deserves any more hard times.

But he learned, I had to teach him how to drive again.

I had to teach him some new things again.

And they had a pretty good life in the US.

They found their way and they had

eventually they bought a home.

They did not buy a home till after my sister and I had left for school

or for college, etc., and lived into a fairly long life.

My father was 95, one month, and one day. He said he was going to make it to 95.

His birthday was July 4th and his name was Samuel

so he was always excited because my cousins

had an Uncle Sam born on the 4th of July, which is a big thing in the US,

and my mom lived until 93 in change.

And then it was done.

Growing up as a child of survivors had its moments.

My mother...

nobody comes out of this without some damage.

My mother could not take noise of any sort, of any kind,

and noise would make her crazy.

So we were not allowed to have TVs loud

We were not allowed to have stereos.

I mean, in fact, we were in high school, I think, before we even had music in the house and such.

And if she felt threatened in some way,

it was: “Why did I survive Hitler's bombs

to have miserable children like you?”

We were the best behaved children you could have ever found

because of that. My father had different kinds of traits,

I guess you would call them,

after the war, as he had starved, and we had steak for dinner

every night for years because of that. He would have two steaks in a day.

He would have one at night

when he was working in the bakery, and then we would have it for dinner as well.

That was a direct outgrowth of starving during the war.

Other than that, they found community with other survivors.

And as I said, I was probably 12

when we moved to California and lived in a more diverse neighborhood,

that I understood that not everybody was a survivor.

That’s sort of the Brygarts and the Gutmans

in a nutshell.

I think when I look back at my childhood

in terms of my father's background,

I described myself as Robinson Crusoe

who lived in an island in the South Pacific

whose parents could have been Adam and Eve,

because they really didn't speak about

anything about their background

and any information

about the pre-war, about their lives

was like a dripping tap, you know, with a drip here and a drip there.

Also, my mother was born in Warsaw,

but when she was two years old, the family moved to Strasbourg.

And my mother grew up in Strasbourg.

My father met my mother in Paris.

The circumstances, how they met in Paris

came to light probably in the last 5 to 10 years.

From my mother's point of view, my mother had,

and I’ll speak mainly about my mother,

my mother had,

a full sister who was older than her

and she had a half sister,

and she had a stepsister.

So I knew much more about my mother's family, and they lived all in France,

I knew much more about my mother's family than my father's family,

but my mother didn't speak very much about her pre-war life.

She didn't want to.

And when I asked, about her pre-war life,

she would always more or less respond:

My life began when we landed in Australia in 1947.

She was very quick to close the door and draw the curtains,

so any information that I got,

was, like, I had to drag it out of her.

And even when I said that I was coming to Poland,

her response was: I don't want to hear anything about your trip to Poland.

Don't talk to me about it.

Coming back to my father, my father didn't speak.

Again, there was some incidences,

that I remember as a child,

you know, becaus we lived in Sydney,

on the fringes of the the so-called

Jewish neighborhoods of Sydney, which were the eastern suburbs.

And my playmates were non-Jewish.

My primary school was... I went to public school.

There was just a few Jews at the school.

It was in the 50s, the postwar period in Australia.

And, my playmates were Australian, non-Jewish children.

And they would often talk about the experiences of family members

who'd served in the Australian Army

and they would boast about some cousin

or uncle who was an officer or in the ranks

in the Australian Army, because the Australian Army was

in the South Pacific as well as North Africa during World War two.

And they would ask me, what did your father do in the war?

And my father ultimately said to me,

if they ask you, just tell them that I was a sergeant in the Polish Army,

which I believed, and there was no reason not to believe him,

which I generally found out wasn't the case.

The second incident, which I have strong memories of

is that my father received an envelope with photographs.

I didn't know where the photographs came from.

I found out

that they probably came from Sam Brygart,

but I remember him getting the photographs,

and he burst into tears and I couldn't speak to him for three days, four days.

But he never said... but I realized they were photographs of the family,

but he never mentioned really who they were.

It was a house of silence in terms of the pre-war history of my family.

Also the language of the house was Yiddish, not English or Polish.

My mother was two years old

and moved to France, and they spoke Yiddish in France.

My father spoke probably Yiddish in his house in Poland.

And that was the language of the house.

They spoke to me in Yiddish, and I refused to learn Yiddish

because I lived in Australia and they spoke English,

and my parents had to learn English because of my obstinance

and not wanting to speak Yiddish.

And to this day, in Sydney we only spoke English.

As a child, I would best describe it,

I was grown up as a crown prince.

I was the only child when I asked my parents why I had no siblings

the answer was we couldn't afford them.

Somebody said to me, wow, that was a pretty shocking answer.

You know, that you can't afford to have children.

And I think it was the case

my parents arrived in Australia,

no language, no profession.

My father worked on two shifts in a sweet factory.

He would come home at 7:00 in the morning, from the shift,

he had breakfast with me, and then I would go off to school.

It started at 9:00, or 9:30.

And when I came home, he wasn't there.

My mother worked as a seamstress and she had an arrangement

where she would be able to work from home on a sewing machine.

So I spent a lot of time with my mother but I had to learn to live on my own.

It was a house of silence, in terms of acquiring any information.

In Illinois, in Chicago, in the eighth grade,

one of the assignments that students had

was to write an autobiography or a biography of family,

and that is probably when I started hearing stories more,

because you would sit and you would interview your parents

to find out what their life was growing up.

We didn't really... that's not something you discuss necessarily with younger children.

So I was 11, 12 years old

and starting to hear more of the stories of how they survived.

Although I did not know my mother's story until much later.

My father spoke more than my mother did.

A little bit about camps, a little bit about work camps.

I would hear about forms they were filling out for the German reparation pay and such,

and my father did not qualify until probably 30 years later.

My mother did early on, but my father had pockmarks,

you know, on his legs and not knowing what those were from

I eventually found out it was from the acids - my dad was,

he was in a work camp, and primarily what they were doing was making ammunition.

And so there would be chemicals spattered.

And so he had pockmarks up and down his legs.

Those were things that, you know, in those days...

Daddy, daddy, how did how did that happen?

Why do you have these kinds of things?

But the stories I really didn't start hearing until I was 11, 12 years old,

but when he would start, he couldn't stop, you know, the room would get dark

and the night would fall, and he was still telling stories about what was going on.

My mother, not so much.

Life in Płock was pretty good,

you know, he said before the war, things were pretty good.

He came from a family that had money.

He had a bicycle, which, you know, was, I guess, at least it seemed to be,

it depended where you were in the strata, whether you had a bicycle.

He had a kayak.

They could go to the private swimming pool in the Vistula River,

because that was something that cost money.

He could go in and out of the bakery.

He would skip school. Who knew you could do that?

And he had two older sisters and a younger sister.

So a lot of family life, a lot of things going on for that.

But he he referred to himself and he explained himself,

he said he was a spoiled rich kid.

He had more than most you could see in pictures,

he did have pictures from before the war because most of them

were already in the United States with the family in Boston.

And, I could see pictures of him

from when he was an infant all the way till the war started.

I had pictures of him.

So I think I had more than a lot of people for that

but you could see he was well dressed.

And the home was, an upper middle class sort of home.

And he was spoiled!

For his words, for his words.

I guess when I left Australia in June 1969 and I came to the States,

the first port of call was Los Angeles to Sam, to the Brigarts.

I met Sandra and Sam, and Rita and Leslie

Sandra was appointed to be my guide and driver,

and I drove her crazy for a week or so.

We went to all sorts of places, you know,

Sam and Rita were both working, so really,

I only got to see them in the evening and to speak to them, but,

one evening, Sam asked me, what did I know about the family?

And I said I know very little

Then he unpacked this movie camera

and showed me an eight millimeter movie.

It was taken in 1937, and I saw this movie

and he identified some of the people on the movie,

and he drew a family tree for me to show

how he was connected to my father and how were other members.

And all of a sudden, I realized my father had a family.

There were people in this family.

And it's a memory that I've carried all my life.

Because whenever I, you know, in subsequent years

I got married and, or I met people

I guess it was common,

well, I assumed it was common that when you met somebody,

they would ask you, who are you and where did you come from?

I said: my father came from Poland and they lived in Płock

but it was pretty rudimentary.

There was nothing, you know, if I was sitting

and I was being questioned about my background,

you know, it was a pretty sparse story.

The analogy I use

the genealogical suitcase was pretty empty.

There was nothing in it.

But it was that basis

and fortunately, through work, after I moved to Israel,

I had the opportunity to travel

and, you know, traveled quite a bit on my trip.

And whenever I traveled, it, I took the opportunity

when it was possible to go and try and fill this suitcase.

You know, I was quite often in Bonn in Germany, and my mother's family lived in Strasbourg.

So if I was going to Bonn for work, I would route myself through Strasbourg

or on my way back to go and find out information.

My mother's sister, who lived in Antwerp,

she was not very communicative either, to just gather information

when I had to get to Buenos Aires for work reasons,

when I arrived in Buenos Aires I went collecting information.

So to try and gather information,

to try and fill the suitcase,

because I always felt that I really didn't have a story.

Everybody else had a story, but I had no story of where you came from.

When I was growing up

and other survivor families that we knew would go back to Poland

or go back to Płock to see whatever it was that they wanted to see.

My father was a “Never Poland”!

I was raised with “Never Poland”.

We are never going to go to Poland.

Apparently when he came back

right after the war, he had an experience that was very good with somebody,

but he had an experience that was very bad.

From 1945 to 49 - and it wasn't until 1949 that he came to the States.

So I was raised with “Never Poland”.

It was close to the time when my father died, which was in 2015,

that the idea started to kind of percolate periodically when we think about it.

But there was my dad. He was “Never Poland, never Poland, never Poland”.

It’s a bad place. Why would you go there?

The people are bad. Things are bad.

In his mind, it was still 1939 to 1945.

But as my dad and my mother both started to fade

when their health started to go, I realized that we knew very little about...

about the whole family, we only had all these pictures,

but he would never write down who the pictures were about, the combinations.

And it started being in the back of my head that it would be important to know this.

I had a son at this time, you know, and he's growing up as well.

And and I had no stories to give him from the early part

of his grandfather's life and certainly not before the grandfather.

I started thinking about going to Poland,

which was quite a change for me.

I was reluctant

I didn’t want to come to Poland because my father didn't want to come to Poland.

You know, I met my father on various occasions, I think,

and certainly the last time we spoke about it,

was in 1980, before I moved to Israel,

I was still in South Africa, and I flew to Israel to arrange work.

And my parents were here.

And I said to my father: Come, let's go to Poland.

And he said beforehand he said, okay, I'll think about it.

And when I got here, I said: Come on, let's take a few days, take me to Płock.

And he said no.

Then my mother said to me: Stop pestering your father.

He has a heart condition, just leave him alone.

So I had to put the whole process to bed.

The idea of coming to Poland

and my father closing the door on that straight away.

And then you have a movie like “Fiddler on the roof”.

And he lives in a shtetl.

every morning he wakes up and he starts singing “If I was a rich man”

and he's having trouble marrying off his daughter.

You say, is this what Poland is all about?

I mean, why should I go there?

You know, I mean, I don't know what Płock is like.

Maybe it's a shtetl and there's nothing there.

The message you get is that there's nothing here for Jews anymore.

But at the end, anyway, to come back specifically to your question.

After my father died, my mother moved to Haifa, where I lived,

and then we had to move my mother to where we were living now.

I was going through the material, and I found two coupons from the Buchenwald camp,

and I didn't know what to do with them.

I kept them, I knew I had them, but I didn't know what to do with them.

After a long process, I decided to give them to Yad Vashem.

I said they probably had better use of them than me because they are just lying.

And I was going to Jerusalem and I rang up Yad Vashem,

that I want to come and give them these two coupons.

They said: No, it doesn't work like that.

We have to come and collect it from you.

I said okay, so they came to the house about 6 to 12 months later

and asked for the coupons, and they said: How did you get the coupons?

I said: Well, my father was in Buchenwald

and I had just, coincidentally,

with the few family photographs that we had,

had digitized them and was trying to write the story

of my parents’ lives, from how we ended up in Australia.

And I said, I've got this album, if you'd like to look at.

They said: Okay, yeah, show us the album.

And they looked at the album, they said: We'd like to borrow the album.

And I said okay, and the photographs.

And then over the years, you know, the movie that I had first seen in 1969,

had been transformed from VHS

and I had this, and gone through various transformations.

and I said: I've got a DVD copy of the movie

I have from 1937 They said: Yeah, can we look at that too?

They looked at a few minutes and said: Could we borrow the movie?

And I said okay. We'll return it.

So they took everything, they returned it,

and then I contacted Sandra and I said to her: Where’s the movie?

You know, what are you doing with the movie?

And Sandra said, well, it's in the cupboard.

You know, the projector is unusable.

The movie is just sitting in a box in a cupboard.

And I said to her: You ever thought of donating it to Yad Vashem?

And she said: I’ll ask Leslie.

They agreed and that put Yad Vashem in touch with Sandra.

And the movie, the original movie ended up in Yad Vashem.

And a few months after that all happened,

I got a phone call from the film department at Yad Vashem

asking me who's on the movie and what's the connection

between the Brygarts, the Bomzons the Kellers and the Rotmans?

And I said: Well, I can explain the connection between the Brygarts and the Bomzons

but I cannot tell you the connection between the Brygarts, Bomzons, Kellers and Rotmans.

I have no idea, ask Sandra.

And they contacted Sandra,

and I guess we had no answers for that.

I sort of thought to myself

and Sandra and I then started talking and said: Well, my father's dead,

Sam was dead, and we had this movie

they were just people on the movie, and some of them we could identify.

I guess we decided we would see who's on the movie.

And we then started, mining the websites.

Geni, JRI Poland,

and then I contacted my friend Alex, who I grew up with in Sydney,

and he spoke Polish and I said: Alex, I need your help.

Can you write to the State Archives in Płock with specific questions?

I told him what I wanted, and he would write in Polish to the archives,

and a week later, a month later, we would get an answer

and you know, the cost of the search was cheap,

but the cost of the bank transfer was more expensive.

And in the end, I said to Sandra:

If we're going to do this, I think we're going to have to go to Poland.

And then one day, surprise to me.

Lionel said he would go.

And then it was a process of how do we go and who do we see

and such, and figuring out the logistics of this.

I don't speak Polish.

It was considered wrong when I was born. I was born in 1951.

It was considered wrong to teach the child the family language

because it would hold them back in school.

And so I don't speak Polish.

Arieh doesn't speak Polish.

How are we going to make this work, and how are we going to create this?

The only connection we had at that point that I had

was Rafał and Piotr because of the book.

And so there was somebody to contact and somebody to talk to.

Arieh had friends who speak Polish

who would be in Poland

in September of 2019, and that's how we came up with the date.

That is the the reason for the timing.

And it was pretty much

we didn't expect to find anything more than what we already knew.

So it was a surprise that we have found out so much.

I met Sam and Rita in 2014, when together with Rafał Kowalski

we flew to the United States to carry out a project

of recording the memories of the descendants of the Płock Jewish community.

From my perspective, this meeting was certainly fruitful.

It provided a lot of information

about what life was like for our interlocutors here in Płock before the war.

We talked with Sam, but unfortunately with Rita a little less

due to her health condition, which meant that she was already a bit absent.

I think Rafał Kowalski, who was the originator of the entire project,

will best describe how this meeting took place.

It really started with a non-Jewish topic, with a conversation

with Mrs. Anna Bąkowska, known as "Anula" from Płock,

a soldier of the Home Army, a participant in the Warsaw Uprising,

who at one point in the conversation said that somewhere in the States

lives a friend of hers with whom she corresponds, her name is Frymeta, and with this Frymeta,

they went to Regina Żółkiewska Middle School on Kolegialna Street in Płock.

She showed me some letters from Frymeta.

The topic was intriguing

and it was already at the stage when the museum started operating

and actually from the very beginning there was a question of talking

to people from Płock who were born before World War II in this city,

to find them and try to talk to them and Frymeta was such a person,

it was known that she was still alive, she was elderly that it was practically the end of her life

in this world to put it bluntly,

so it would be worth finding this Frymeta. And it actually happened.

Even though there was internet, she and her husband Samuel,

Sam Brygart in the United States,

didn't have internet access, so we corresponded traditionally, by handwritten letters.

And finally it happened that we managed to go and see them,

you, Piotr Dąbrowski and I, flew and we talked

on a very hot day in Redondo Beach, at the house of Sam and Frymeta née Menche.

That's where we met them, we had a few laughs,

we got to know Sam's sarcastic humor, we had a bit worse contact with Frymeta

because she had advanced dementia, but it was a great conversation because,

if I remember correctly, Sam told us that he met Frymeta

in a pool on the other side of the Vistula in the Radziwie district of Płock.

In the pool, as he remembered it, which was 25 to 30 meters,

as a reporter I love such details, like this '25 by 30 meters',

and in this pool he kicked her because he liked her so much

and that's how they met. He also told us

how he paid the amount of 2 grosz to cross the wooden bridge in Płock to the other side,

he told us how he bought ice cream and pretzels on Tum Hill for 40 grosz

in a wooden booth.

So it was a treat for a reporter to listen to such details that we actually won't find in any history textbook,

because these are such life-related, everyday matters and textbooks do not deal with them.

In 2014,

my father was contacted by Rafał and Piotr

about interviews for a book about life in Płock.

My father had a point of view and his point of view

for this interview was to... He wanted to talk about the war

and the experiences of the war and how bad the things were.

And I didn't know what this was all about.

If I had known, I would have been there.

And Rafał and Piotr interviewed

the Plotzkers, of which there was a fairly large group in Los Angeles,

and they wanted to find out about life before.

And this really irritated my father, who had a whole thing

in his head of how he was going to talk about

the war and how terrible it was and how everything.

And instead they asked him questions like, when did you meet your wife?

My mother was sitting next to him.

She had dementia. She was not aware of what was going on.

But: When did you first kiss Frymka?

Well, did I get an earful later that day.

Papa, how was this interview?

“Oh my God!”

And I got chapter and verse of how horrible and how terrible.

And they didn't hear and they didn't want to ask the questions and,

and you know, we basically never spoke about it again.

I saw the book after he died. It came out after he passed away.

And it was in Polish, which, of course is not a help to me,

but I do have it from the daughter of another Plotzker,

Anat Alperin, and she lives in Israel, and we did a Skype phone call.

Skype was before Zoom.

We did a Skype phone call and she translated it for me.

And the amazing thing is, as obnoxious my father

probably was about all this, and he could really do that.

I found out how my parents met, which is not something I knew before.

That was the piece of information that I took away from the story.

I have the book, and I now have it in English as well, I think.

I'm glad he did the interview, and I'm so sorry.

he was pissed off.

He was so angry.

September was set as the time to come, and I said to Sandra, I'm going to Poland.

We're going to Poland to solve that.

And that's how we ended up here.

I came essentially to deal with the archives.

I mean, the museum and doing other things were not part of the trip.

I said, while I'm here, I might as well see where my father grew up.

I didn't expect to find anything.

Coming to Płock was to try and fill the suitcase

there was no other purpose for me, you know,

so I think that's the way that I would view the first trip.

Collecting information, just as you know, when I was an academic

and I went to a particular laboratory

to learn a new technique or to learn something,

and I would take it home and work on it at home.

But the purpose of the first trip was just to collect information,

if information was available. If I came back empty handed,

I came back empty handed.

If I came back with the information, I came back with information.

That's what I'd have to deal with.

We planned the trip, the logistics of it.

But coming into town,

with the expectations that my father always had, that it was a negative place.

We were expecting negativity.

We were expecting people to not want to help.

That's why knowing Rafał and by extension, Piotr was a positive thing.

Because at least we knew we had somebody who had some interest

which we didn't understand.

We didn't understand the interest

of this younger generation for wanting to know

what was going on before, because we had been raised

or I had been raised with a very negative view of Poland

and Polish people, you know, “Polish people”.

So we came, at least for me, with some apprehension.

We were, you know, we came in from the airport, we met up in the airport,

and came on a shuttle.

And in my mind, my father always said that Warsaw was across the Vistula.

So I really thought that I would look across the Vistula and see Warsaw.

I apparently I was wrong, or he was.

And that was a pretty country, you know,

we all have in our minds, at least in this, in the United States,

I think from all we know of Poland is the war.

All we know is the war movies.

All we know is bombing and dark and unhappy place.

And so it was a it was a real surprise, even just driving in

seeing how green and beautiful the country is.

And we came in September, the first time, September of 2019,

that it was a vibrant and lively and bright and sunny kind of country.

That was a surprise.

I needed to see for myself what it looked like.

I needed to see where they lived.

If the building still even existed.

I wasn't sure. In my father's mind,

everything was gone.

They had the bakery. They had the apartment building.

They had orchards, that none of this existed anymore.

And so it was: What really is there? What survived besides my parents?

It was only in 2019, after Samek's death, after Rita's death, her parents' death,

that she came here to Płock and in the place where we are actually talking today,

a conversation took place with her, and also with her son Evan,

so it was about subsequent generations speaking on the matter and it was,

you could say, a supplement to this story of Sam and Frymeta - Rita,

because both Sandra and Evan were talking, she told about her parents, he told about his grandparents,

from their experience, how they see it, as the next, second and third generation.

I knew about the museum and I contacted Rafał, said we were coming,

and he seemed to get all excited about us coming, and he said: Oh, you're coming!

I want to interview you for my book, and we've got this photo exhibition.

I said: Okay, we're coming, we’re coming, no big deal.

I met Arieh when I met Sandra Brygart.

He had written to me earlier, introduced himself, "I am Arieh".

And from him I learned that his father Izrael Abram, if I remember correctly, who survived the war,

maybe even the only one from the entire large Bomzon family in Płock,

related to the Brygart family,

was very close friends with Samuel, there were, I think, I even remember this topic - there were four or five friends,

men who were very close friends before the war and among them was the brother of Izrael Abram,

and this brother did not survive the Death March, so you could say that he was very close, almost within arm's reach

of surviving this hell, he did not succeed. So I am not surprised,

it is not something so exceptional for the generation that survived, but Izrael Abram was one of those people

who survived this war hell and did not want to talk about it.

Arieh, however, did not give up, as he decided to fly to Płock

to walk the streets of this city, in the footsteps of his late father,

he came with his son Zeev, which is also a continuation of generations,

and he did not drag him here by force, Zeev really wanted to come and also follow in the footsteps of his grandfather,

as he nicely put it, if I remember correctly, to connect the dots, I remember it from this story, this nice comparison,

that he came here to connect the dots.

And I remember Arieh, who came here, a guy as big as a grizzly bear,

when he cried at the memory of his father, that he tried to talk to him and it did not work out

and he was very sorry that he was not here with him.

We were invited to visit Rafał

at the little synagogue, which now is a museum.

The synagogue was going to be closed that day

because they were getting ready to do an exhibit

that evening, or an exhibition, and that we were there.

I have one child, and my son was with me

and we were in the museum.

I met Rafael because I had not met him before, and we were looking around.

I was traveling with my cousin

and a representative from Yad Vashem who was interested in our family's story,

we had Debbie with us,

and the people who spoke Polish, who were friends of my cousin,

who were doing our translating

because Rafał does not speak English particularly either.

And we're in this museum looking around,

and suddenly I hear my birth last name.

I hear Brygart.

There are no other Brygarts in the world besides my sister and myself

and my parents, and they're gone.

So hearing the name, you know, it's like, what am I hearing?

And a man had come in

into the building, and Rafał said to him

and pointed to me - Brygart, and this man

said: Samek Brygart?

My father.

And by now my ears are up and the antennas are up.

Everything is up because this is totally an unexpected thing.

How could I have come to this little town

where nobody from my family has been since 1946 maybe?

And somebody know who Brygart is.

And this is how I met Grzegorz Chabowski.

And in the strangest of things,

Grzegorz was born in the apartment building that my father's family owned.

You can't write a script like this. You couldn't plan something like this.

And I think my heart stopped for a moment. I know my brain's short circuited.

There was just... I didn't know what to do.

It was a good thing my son was with me because I was beyond crazy on this.

And from that moment,

Płock became a place that belonged to me

In 2019, my own exhibition "Not everything has an end. Photographs of the Jews of Płock" was organized.

In the synagogue, that is in the Museum of Mazovian Jews,

in addition to the staff, there was a group of people

I did not know them, the group was about 7 people.

I asked the staff who they were. I got a short answer - Jews.

They were shown around my not-yet-opened exhibition by the deputy manager, Mr. Rafał Kowalski.

Passing me, he said to these people:

This is the author of the exhibition. Then they stopped next to me.

Two of them, Mr. Aleks and Mrs. Stella, spoke Polish, the rest of the people did not speak Polish.

Our conversation began:

Who am I, where am I from? So I said that I am from Płock,

I was born at 20 Kwiatka Street in the Brygart house.

And it was like a magic word, it turned out that in the group of people

present there was Mrs. Sandra Rodriguez, née Brygart,

in the family house of whom I was born.

An exchange of words began, of course through an interpreter,

because I don't speak English, Sandra doesn't speak Polish.

And I remembered that I have documents with the name of Brygart

among my old documents at home.

Sandra was very moved and told me that she would like to see these documents.

I went home, found the documents

and brought them. The documents are from the 19th and early 20th century,

they are in Russian, because that was the official language at that time.

I translated standing at the desk,

I translated from Russian to Polish, and Mr. Aleks from Polish to English.

When Sandra heard this, I saw her face change.

The document mentions Iska Brygart. Sandra knew that she had Iska Brygart among her ancestors,

but she didn't know who she was. It turned out to be her great-grandmother.

She was very moved, she cried then, we hugged,

this is how that conversation looked like.

We realized that there was information to be found.

My cousin met Gabriela.

She’s an amazing, amazing woman who speaks numbers of languages,

who does genealogy research, I'm sure, among other research.

And she was again, a random find.

I will let him explain how all that came to be.

Sandra ended up with the book, was given the book, and I didn't know it existed.

We came back to the hotel and I looked at this book and there was,

paging through the book, there were photographs of my father

and my grandfather and a few other family members,

like Cynamon, for instance, Lejzor Cynamon.

and I knew the family in Israel and I said: Well, we'll have to get more copies of the book.

And we split up.

You know, the ladies went off to the museum the next morning to try

and get copies of the book, and Alex and I said: Well, we'll go to the archives.

I didn't go to the archives to get the book.

I went to go ahead with my objective of trying to talk to somebody about,

you know, my own search.

And that's when I met Gabi at the library because Alex said:

There's somebody here who can help you, because she's interacted with Alex before.

Because we were in the waiting room,

there's a reading room there.

And then we spoke, and I exchanged, contact information with Gabi.

And I said, when I get back to Israel, I'll send it to you.

And I said: Okay, I now have a contact,

and came back and I never said anything to the rest of the group because

I didn't want Gabi besieged, you know, with 3 or 4 people, you got to talk with one voice.

I knew what Sandra wanted. I would be the contact person.

I would then distribute the information, and they came back empty handed.

and I said, okay, you know, from my point of view,

I had achieved the purpose of my trip.

I found somebody who could help me. And I came back to Israel happy.

And then when the information came through,

you know, information has to be processed and it takes time to process.

And with processing information,

I was able to more or less provide answers to Yad Vashem.

But it took a while to process,

you know, through the family tree, the connection and understanding.

And then I shared the information with Sandra.

So I came back very happy from my first trip,

but I also came back and realized that

it was a transformative event for me, because I said

in terms of my attitude towards, you know, my own behavior,

you know, over the last 60, 70 years towards my parents.

I met Arieh Bomzon

on Wednesday, September 4, 2019, in the research room

at the State Archives in Płock. The research room in the Archives

is an extremely important place for me, because here, for the last 15 years,

since I have been helping the descendants of Płock Jews in genealogical research,

I have had the pleasure of meeting many wonderful people who have their roots

here in Płock. The meeting with Arieh

was very short and specific. Arieh came to Płock, to the archives,

because he was looking for someone who would help him with genealogical research,

help him fill the suitcase of his family history.

The Brygart and Bomzon families were already known to me, because representatives of these families

appeared in my books - “Window on Kwiatka Street” and “Album of Jews of Płock”.

The book “Window on Kwiatka Street” was published in 2019 by our foundation,

it deals with Kwiatka Street and its residents,

while the “Album of Jews of Płock” was published in 2015

and presents several hundred photographs of Płock Jews from applications

for ID cards and passports, which were preserved in the Records of the town of Płock

and records of the District Office in Płock, which are kept in the archives.

Since the Album is permanently available in the research room of the archives,

which co-published this book, Arieh and I had the opportunity

to look through the album and look for photos of his family members.

Among others there is a photo of his grandfather Lejb Bomzon in the album.

Lejb Bomzon worked as a confectioner and baker in pre-war Płock

and was professionally associated with the Brygart company. The Brygart family, in turn,

was one of the more well-known families in the pre-war town,

a family that owned a wonderful, impressive tenement house located at 20 Kwiatka Street,

but also a very prosperous enterprise, a colonial store,

as well as a bakery, a confectionery, located at 28 Kwiatka Street,

where there were various types of sweets to buy,

but also gingerbread and Saturday cholent.

We suddenly realized there was information,

and our trip was booked, and it was very short, so we were gone.

In between the first trip and the second trip,

Gabriela was able to provide,

I remember the first one I believe it was 53 scans

from the registry with 1 or 2 lines up, because it was all

either in Polish or Russian or German, depending upon the time frame.

When my father was born, it was Bolshevik, in 1920.

Who married who?

Where a child was born? Who lived where?

Provided 53 scans with 1 or 2 lines each about what they were about, as well as having

put all this information on a program, on a family tree program.

A week later I received my first email from Arieh. It turned out

that he already had some information, which he managed to obtain in the State Archives in Płock,

but many issues still needed to be clarified and many questions needed to be answered.

Arieh Bomzon's great-grandmother - Jenta née Szrajber,

before she married Izrael Abram Bomzon, Arieh's great-grandfather,

was the wife of Abram Frydman. Arieh wanted to know, among other things:

what year Abram Frydman died, what year Izrael Abram Bomzon was born and died,

what year he got involved with Jenta, when Jenta died.

He was also interested in the children of Jenta and Izrael Abram,

including: Dwojra Ides, Lejb, Chawa, Estera, Bajla Sura.

The research I conducted for Arieh included, among others: determining the dates of marriage,

between Dwojra Ides and Lajzer Brygart or Lejb Bomzon and Tauba née Żeleźniak.

The research I conducted for Arieh was based on documents that can be found in the State Archives in Płock,

but above all also in documents available at the Civil Registry Office in Płock, which stores record documents

that are more contemporary for the Jewish community of the town of Płock until 1939.

In quite a short time, I managed to establish connections between individual members

of the Brygart, Bomzon, Ejzenman, Cynamon, Keller, Frydman and Rotman families.

In total, there were several dozen record documents, birth, marriage and death certificates.

Based on them, a family tree was built, which Arieh then successively supplemented with further data.

With each subsequent e-mail and information, more questions and requests appeared,

including those regarding the family of Sandra Brygart Rodriguez, the Menche family,

which was connected with Płock, but also with Gąbin.

On the other hand, Arieh and Sandra provided our foundation with very valuable materials

from their family archives, photographs that were published on our website JewishPlock.eu,

and then were included in two publications that we prepared,

the book "Out of oblivion. Jewish families of pre-war Płock"

and then the the English version of "Out of oblivion...",

which was prepared in cooperation with the descendants of Płock Jews.

Arieh and Sandra also shared with us an extremely interesting and valuable film

that was recorded by Herman and Norton Keller in 1937 in Płock,

which we premiered at the Art Gallery of Płock in early 2020

as part of events commemorating the liquidation of the Płock ghetto.

During the first trip there was a realization

that there was a life here, that Płock was not a shtetl.

You know, where Tuvia got up in the morning

singing “If I was a rich man” and he was milking cows every day,

and he didn't have to worry about marrying off his daughters.

That this was a community. This was an urban community.

It wasn't a rural settlement,

which was the image that was conveyed, you know, in many ways,

outside Poland about what Jewish life was in Poland.

They didn't live in a shtetl.

They lived in a town there was a large town.

For me, it was the start of the transformation

that my father had a life here.

And, you know, you may have wanted to come

and I asked myself,

you may have wanted to come to collect specific information

to answer the questions that Yad Vashem had asked,

but I realized that what I should be asking was,

about my father's life, you know.

Because I guess it would be important for me.

Because if I knew about my father's life, I would also complete my narrative.

My life story.

So the motive for coming back for the second visit was really to see Płock,

to see where my father grew up, where we lived.

We said, we have to go back. There's more.

In the meantime, you know, we stayed in touch and we planned the next trip.

We were here just prior to Covid, in February 2020.

What we discovered on the second trip,

through Gabriela and Piotr was, among other things, a walk around town.

Your father lived here, your cousin lived here.

All the different family marks.

My mother constantly felt that she was lesser

because the Bomzons were a big family. And it was a big story.

And my mother was from the Gutmans, and it was a small family and a small story.

So it was always about my father, which I heard about till she died, I think.

But we were able to go around the town, the old Jewish quarter

and see where everybody in our family and it made them so real

because they weren't real before they were images on a film.

Now they're real.

Every time descendants of Jewish families connected with the city come to Płock,

together with Gabriela we try to show them not only those places that are related to this community

in a broader sense, but we also want to show them places that were associated

with specific people, with their families,

and this was also the case with the Bomzons and Brygarts. We were on Kwiatka Street, we saw the building

at 20 Kwiatka Street, where members of both families lived,

we were at 28 Kwiatka Street, where the Brygart confectionery and bakery was located,

but we also went to 33 Bielska Street, which was associated

with the Bomzon family and for this reason very important, especially for Arieh,

as well as at 23 and 19 Bielska Street, in turn, members of family closer to Sandra lived at these locations.

This walk was certainly a sentimental journey, as it is often the case,

and from our perspective it is also something that we want to achieve,

to make this journey to the roots, the journey to Płock, as personal as possible,

and not just a traditional tour by a guide, of places related to the history of the city,

but by finding and showing such places we can make this journey much more personal.

We spent part of the time with Gabriela and Piotr

but we also spent part of the time with Grzegorz, and Grzegorz

does not speak English, and we do not speak Polish.

And I had asked him if he had somebody

who could be a translator for us the few days that we were there.

And the question he asked me is what I mind if it was a Catholic nun...

I don't mind. It was an intriguing idea.

And another really exciting part of the trip was Sister Veronica.

there's a convent here in town on the market square,

and Sister Veronica in full nun regalia, including a wimple,

which you don't see in the US anymore.

She's slightly taller than me, not much.

We were walking arm in arm with a Catholic nun

through the Jewish quarter, learning about the town

and you could knock me over.

That's just if I tried to write a story, I couldn't write a story like that.

So we had a lot of it. It became very personal, became very real.

It wasn't just a story that my parents told anymore.

It became reality for me.

The people we met here are amazing

under all different kinds of circumstances, and each has brought something special.

Grzegorz, I'm not quite sure how

walked us to where my father's building is,

which is 20 Kwiatka Street my father would say Szeroka,

the previous name, and we had walked

in front of the building when we were here the first time in September 2019.

And I said, yeah, that's the building.

And we walked in front of the building and Grzegorz rang a doorbell,

and I looked at my cousin and I went: Oh my God, we're going inside.

And he had arranged, there are two apartments,

he had arranged for us.

There's, a husband and wife who lived in the smaller of the two apartments,

which was my great grandmother's apartment.

She's kind of the beginning of the Bomzon line that we know.

And these people were so gracious to come inside their home.

And I have pictures of my great grandmother

sitting on the balcony outside that apartment.

And I now have a picture of me with my cousins

and one of my own sitting on that same balcony, just

Again, I don't know how many unexpected things that could happen.

We also went to the the larger apartment because my father had three sisters.

So there were the four kids and parents.

It is now a law office,

and Grzegorz had arranged with the law office manager,

I assume, to come in and walk around there.

Each of these things was beyond a wildest dream.

It was never in my imagination that anything like this could be possible.

I sat in my great grandmother's apartment and cried.

I stood on the balcony of my great grandmother's apartment

next to it and cried.

And I wished my father was with me.

He is in my heart, but I wished he was with me for that

because I can't imagine what he would think about “Never Poland”

on our second trip to Poland

and discovering all this stuff, it's just beyond what I can comprehend.

I thought it would be worth it to bring Sandra into the house of her grandparents and her father,

and Arieh and Sandra into the house of Jenta Bomzon, the great-grandmother to both Arieh and Sandra.

I managed to arrange this.

And after the first meeting, a visit to this house was planned for the next day, they did not know about it, it was a surprise.

When I brought them in, Sandra was also shocked,

I have a short recording of Sandra speaking English, she sat down tired from this joy,

from this surprise, she did not quite sit down in a chair and said a few words,

how amazing it was that I could bring them into the house of their ancestors.

I am so overwhelmed.

So over the moon.

In a place I never, ever thought I would be.

It's my father's home.

It's just so much. There are no words

I can try but there are no words, Grzegorz.

Let it out, Sandra.

Grzegorz did an amazing thing.

An amazing thing for all of us not just me, all of us.

It was interesting to go into this place,

but if I had to focus on how I felt,

I guess there was some envy.

You know, okay, we went into Jenta’s apartment,

because we shared a great grandmother

and going into where Sam grew up,

the Brygart apartment, there was an element of envy.

And as much that we were in this apartment,

I can't go into the apartment

at 33 Bielska Street because the building is uninhabitable.

It's in a bad condition.

So there is envy that I can't go into that house.

Bearing in mind what I've just said, that I don't have the key to the door.

You know, the key to the door was with my father,

so there was envy if anything.

I have three sons.

They asked about going to Poland.

and they knew my father.

It's not that my father was a stranger to them,

because when they were born in South Africa

and they were small, my parents came to until we lived there.

We left when my oldest son was seven.

You know, my parents knew their three grandchildren, grandsons

and my grandsons knew who their grandparents were.

And then we came to live in Israel.

My parents came to visit and stayed in Israel.

They retired and they, my parents were present at the bar mitzvahs.

It was a big event for them.

And also as part of the school curriculum, the kids,

in high school when they're about 12, when they're 12 years old,

around about the time of Bar Mitzvah, they children they have to do

a roots project, you know, talk about their ancestry, their heritage.

They relied upon me, to provide them.

And as I pointed out earlier, that my heritage, my suitcase was,

pretty bare, I used to fill that in whenever I could.

And so when that coincided with one of my parents’ visits,

they would push my parents to talk about where they came from in their life.

And it was also an opportunity to look at the 1937 movie,

not that that was a major stimulus for my parents

or for my father to talk about the movie.

and as they went to the army and got older,

particularly Keith,

he was working in Europe and every now and then he would say,

come, let's go to Poland to see where grandpa came from.

And I said, I'm not going in the middle of winter,

You know, because he was talking of winter.

And I said, no way I'm going to go to Poland in the middle of winter.

But they did ask,

so when I said that I'm going to Poland,

I think they were surprised.

And I would say, why do you want to come?

And each of them, jumped on the opportunity to come.

When my father asked me if I wanted to join the trip with him and Sandra,

I was really intrigued about the opportunity to learn more

about the family, who they were and where they came from.

So I gladly joined for the first three days.

Well, for many years I wanted to come to Płock.

I guess it was an opportunity and an excuse to join my father.

The reason I came to Płock, was my father

when we were growing up, he never spoke about the Holocaust.

He never, I don't know, somehow, I got a feeling

he was never interested in it because grandparents

did not speak about it, I mean, his parents did not speak about it too much

or didn't speak at all.

Even when I used to ask my grandparents

about the Holocaust, they would not speak about it.

And kind of, when I used to ask

my father, he used to say, well, what's done is done.

You can't redo the past.

And he never showed any interest.

I don't know, something changed.

And my father started,

digging deeper into his roots where he came from.

Anyway, his father came from Płock.

I think when my dad asked me if I want to come.

So I felt that it was actually maybe a good place to be in.

And maybe I know it's important for my dad

to know where he came from.

And by doing that, to show the importance for him,

I felt I wanted to come and see also from where my dad came,

where his grandparents came from, where he came from.

And basically, I came because he was enthusiastic of discovering it.

So I mainly got there for him.

What really struck me coming to Płock was,

that it became really real,

you know, of a story of a place

in Poland where, my grandfather and his family

had grown up and lived.

It suddenly became very real.

The people came to life

when we visited the various houses, and we saw various houses

where we walked down certain streets where perhaps my

great grandparents had walked around,

felt very alive.

I think it was the first time I really understood

what was lost in the Holocaust,

how immense the lost was, and

how much life and how rich life was in Poland pre-war

and I don't think that was something that was very real to me, up to then.

It was kind of just pages in a history book.

Now, the trip was beyond expectations.

Way, way beyond expectations.

I met, we met some friendly local Poles,

that were only there to help us, they have become family, in a way.

Płock is beautiful.

I could see and imagine

had a good perspective of the life my grandfather had.

I could see the strength of the family, how close they were

The childhood my grandfather had,

the happiness.

I could see I even feel that was a good, happy Jewish surrounding.

And it was a big community and a happy life.

So the feeling I think that became dominant was a feeling of connection,

connection to the past, the connection to my family.

Curiosity to learn more about the family

and a certain feeling of sadness about the loss.

The loss of a family, of a clan,

or maybe even of a nation and a culture that all disappeared

within the six years between 1939 to 1945.

It really was a journey to celebrate life, to celebrate life as it was in Płock

before the war.

And as it is today,

as we continue life as Jewish people, as the Bomzons and the Brygarts

as that clan in other places across the globe

Up until the trip. I felt somehow that I was up in the air,

not really knowing who I was.

There were certain values that I grew up on.

Not really sure where they came from.

I think during the trip, realizing

quite a bit of who my grandfather was

of the values that he was brought up upon.

The strength. He was a strong man, and I know that.

And in a way that changed the way

I perceive myself and how I look at myself.

As it turned out, we had another opportunity

to meet Arieh, Sandra, but also Arieh's granddaughter Tomer

to walk around Płock, see places associated with the family

and also to tell Tomer about the history of the Płock Jewish community.

It was another important meeting, a meeting with the next generation of the Bomzon family,

also very valuable for us, and it was a meeting at the stage at which

we knew that we wanted this film to be made,

a film of Arieh and Sandra's idea, which we, together with Gabriela, promised to produce

and I also hope that in many aspects this journey to the roots

was documented and presented in an interesting way.

So when I was in 11th grade

while in Israel, as my grandfather said,

In high school, you get the opportunity

to go and do a trip to Poland.

It's a week long trip.

You start in Warsaw or in Krakow. I started in Krakow.

And you go through the various locations of the death camps and of the ghettos

and you hear a bit about the uprising that happened in the Warsaw Ghetto, in Krakow Ghetto.

And I was very interested in it.

I think I started getting interested in the Holocaust since I was,

I don't know, in my teen years, 12 or so,

and I knew that my grandfather,

my grandfather's family was from Poland, and I knew

my great grandmother was from France, but I didn't know much.

I didn't know my great grandfather

but I used to meet my great grandmother a lot, and when I'd ask her,

how was the Holocaust for you?

She wouldn't answer.

And if she'd answer, she'd say: I wasn't a real part of the Holocaust.

And I saw the movie when I was 12 or something,

But we didn't know much.

And I was the first person, the first Bomzon to step in Poland

after the war.

and my father wrote a letter he gave me when I flew

And I didn't know a lot when I came here, and I wanted to find something.

So when I got in Treblinka and I saw the stone that said Płock on it,

I started crying and called my friend to take a picture really quick,

because I understood that I found something about my family.

And when he decided he wants to come to Poland,

it was shocking to me because I thought he'd never come.

I thought he didn't want to. It was too hard.

I don't know, and I think I was.

I wanted to join the first trip or something, but I couldn’t

because I just had surgery and I was always interested.

So when he came to me in February and asked me if I wanted to join

it was obvious to me that I will figure out a way to come here, because

I wanted to know more about my family

and see the places, because I didn't get to see it.

And as he advertised it

or as he said, this was a trip of life, not a trip of death.

I did the death part, but now it's time to see the life part.

And I came here expecting nothing.

I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know what I'm going to see.

I didn't really look up Płock or liked to see how Płock looked.

And then I came very open minded and with a blank page.

And yesterday when we walked the streets, I could imagine the family walking

and I got very excited and emotional

and I took everything in.

It's an amazing place and I can really imagine the family living here.

I didn't know my great grandfather,

but I don't know, I could see him

in the windows of the apartment and walking the streets.

And so that was really amazing.

And I think I didn't expect to feel as much feelings as I felt yesterday and coming here

even the feeling it felt kind of, in a weird way, familiar.

I've never been here, but the streets felt familiar.

I don't have words to explain what I felt

but it just felt like I was here before.

I know this place and I've never been here.

Well, we're the only Bomzons in the world.

There are Bomzons, but they're Indian or something.

And growing up, everyone asks: What does your surname mean?

And we never got an answer. We never really knew.

I mean, we never we never even checked.

When I asked my grandfather, he said there was this

big departure of Jews from Spain.

They told us: Go away sons of bitches, which in Israel is “ben zona”

“Ben zona” is very close to “Bomzon”

So that's that's the origin of the name and that's the story we've always walked with.

And then when he came back

the first time, I believe, or even before and he said,

We found documents saying Baumzon and “baum” is wood

And that I know because I know “baum”

and Baumzon is like a “wood man”.

And so, finally the name got like an origin and I could say something else

I still tell the stupid story sometimes, but I had a real meaning.

And I think coming here just made it feel real.

And I think that's part of the connection that I have to this place.

Growing up,

my grandfather, Sam Brygart and I would often

hang out in his den where his TV was and watch baseball games.

But sometimes, instead of the baseball games,

he would show me this film of his family and his community in Poland.

And this movie was filmed in Płock in 1937.

But I was young, and I had no conception of how extraordinary that was

and how rare it was for there to be a video of that time and of that place.

I just knew it was old. It was silent. It was black and white.

It was clearly of what what felt like a bygone era.

So I just I just knew I was watching an old film and

what was on the film, I guess, wasn't objectively exceptional.

It was

his community having dinner, people walking along the promenade.

there were shots of him goofing around,

with the sisters at the local swimming pool.

It was just their life.

And as the video would play, he would point out people

and he would name them and say, that's my father,

that's my sister, that's this person.

And after he would name them, there would be a pregnant silence.

It was the type of silence in which you could feel

the weight of what was not said.

And as I grew older, I realized what those silences meant.

That he was naming people who did not survive,

and that almost everybody on that video did not survive.

And there were dozens of people on this video, on this film,

and none of them made it

with a few exceptions, of my grandparents and maybe a couple of others.

So I as I grew older, I realized that,

yes, this was a video of his family and immensely

important and meaningful, but it was for that.

But it was also a document of genocide.

I had a very tiny family growing up.

We could have a family reunion in a single restaurant booth.

And I realized very early on that that was not normal, that other people

had, you know, lots of cousins and aunts and uncles and

you know, could fill an entire backyard when they had their family reunion.

And I did not.

And I realized that this video was the answer to

why I did not, this was the family that I did not have.

And so,

I guess I

understood this video as something that,

you know, happened to our family, not just to my grandparents.

It was something that that had ramifications

down the generations.

And when this project got started,

I started to, you know, think about

how much it wasn't just a family that was taken.

It was people who were erased. It was a community that was erased.

it was individuals who were erased.

This was not just a project of murder that the Nazis had embarked on.

It was one of eradication.

they were trying not just to kill the people,

but to remove them from

the world and the historical record.

And what drew me to this project outside of, you know, just simply supporting

my mom and Arieh was this was maybe an opportunity to

unerase them by

bringing them back out of

the kind of nothingness that they had been consigned to,

the forgottenness that they had been consigned to.

And that seemed, even at this late date, even decades after the Holocaust

that did seem like an act of defiance towards what had happened.

And I think I was attracted to,

participating in that and restoring them,

as a means of

maybe granting them a bit of the defiance that they were deprived of.

at the moment.

Seeing my grandfather's apartment

and going through the bakery

that my great grandfather owned, his father owned

and seeing my grandmother's apartment and where Arieh’s parents grew up

I think drove home,

a sense of the plunder that was a part of that

Nazi project of erasure.

that this was in addition to all the

the monstrosity of the death, that this was also kind of a looting.

They looted this world in addition to to the death

and I got a sense of what was taken.

You know, I heard my grandfather say these things were taken,

again, that was something I understood more intellectually.

Now, I really understood that in visceral terms.

They really they literally took this life that his,

his father had built and just yanked it away from them.

And I don't think I realized that

the gathering for the deportation

occurred right in front of his apartment and his bakery.

And so, my family would have been looking at their entire world

that they had built up as they were being gathered to be deported.

and I think that brought home what that took what had happened,

you know, out of history with a capital H and made it very personal

and very visceral.

To the same token,

my grandfather was a bit of what

we would call a smart aleck or a wise ass

and you could see the glint in his eye when he was about to say something smart alecky.

He got that face and that face is on the video.

You could see it when he's goofing around

with his sisters and stuff, and he's about to, you know,

pull a little prank on them.

You see the glint in his eye.

And it was...

I don't think I appreciated,

that life of him until I was walking around where he was

and could feel kind of what it must have been like for him

to have been a youth and for him to have been carefree

and full of life with his whole life ahead of him.

but I now appreciate the linkage of, you know, kind of the face

you see in the film, the little glint in his eye,

and he's about to pull a prank and the one that I grew up with,

that even as everything else was plundered from our family, he was able to maintain

that zest for life,

which I guess is a good reminder of, you know,

what can and can't be taken from you.

Hearing the stories

from Arieh, which, you know, I had known him previously,

but I hadn't heard his stories in detail, but also reflecting on,

the stories, from my grandparents, you know, understanding how much they had

to just absolutely start from scratch without family,

without the generational wealth that may have been built up back here,

without language, without,

without necessary skills that were useful in their new societies,

gave me a new appreciation of the life that they built

and the full life that they built, and one that is peopled,

one that has, you know,

new things that can be passed on to future generations.

And I think in the course of this project,

I had a son who's now three and a half, and I think that,

gives new weight

to what gets passed on to him.

And that could be anything from stories,

to skills, but mostly

to people, that, you know, it is part of

it is an obligation of mine

to bestow upon him a peopled world,

that was taken from my family, but that can be rebuilt.

And that is so essential that the people

are the most important part of that.

One difference in the third trip from the second trip.

Mind you that there has been a little over three years between one and the other.

And there was Covid, and there's Ukraine and there are refugees and government

here in Poland, government in

in the United States government, I think even in Israel has made a shift.

It's shifted rightward, which is that way.

Grzegorz thought it would be

a nice thing to be able to visit my father and grandfather's home again.

My grandmother's home again.

And the people this time, were not open to it.

There is a fear that I would want the property back.

I don't want the property back.

And I will do whatever I can to make or to help

them understand that I'm not going to do that.

And I understand the feeling, and I'm sad about the feeling

because the world is moving back towards some distrust.

And that makes me sad, because somewhere along the line

we've got to learn our lessons as human beings.

And this was the first negative.

It doesn't change the trip particularly, but it just put a little bit of a little spin

that's different, to show you how the world continues to change regardless.

And that was it.

Ari brought up a question while we were doing this process

about how we knew and how we became

and how we experienced our Jewishness postwar.

What did our parents teach us? How did we become or behave Jewish?

My father, the grandmother lived in the house,

so I know that while they were here, they were far more religious.

They kept a kosher home.

They would go to synagogue, but they were still not orthodox by any sense.

Probably more of what we would call conservative in that time.

We always knew we were Jewish but we didn't necessarily show it outwardly.

It was something that frightened my mother, having to wear

the yellow star, other kinds of things that were not pleasant there.

I mean, there's no way to put a good face on what happened here.

We were probably what you would call ritual Jews.

We celebrated Passover. We celebrated Rosh Hashanah.

My parents sent me to Sunday school for one year,

and I think I went to Hebrew school for one year, and I said, this is not for me.

This is not something that fulfills me.

We would do some of the things

at the Jewish community center, some of the activities, but more

because we were with other families.

We did it not necessarily because we went to do that.

I personally, I know I am Jewish, I know this is my heritage.

I know this is where it comes from, and I am proud of it.

But I do not believe in God.

And I take that from my father,

who always said he could not believe in God anymore

because God would not have allowed the Holocaust.

The concept of God that most of us grew up with is, not the hellfire,

Jews don't believe in hell,

this is not part of the structure of the religion of Judaism.

And my father said there can't possibly be a god because a god, by that definition

would not allow a holocaust, whether it's the Jewish Holocaust

or any of the other diasporas and holocausts and horrible things

that have happened and continue to happen in the world, that could not be.

And my mother differently.

I think my mother probably did still believe in God.

And wonder that it could happen. But my father, for my father it was not.

And that is pretty much the attitude that I have come with.

The values of Judaism - definitely!

You know, education, family, being good to people,

mitzvahs are definitely a part of life,

but from my perspective, that should be part of anybody's life.

That has nothing to do with religion.

So I do not consider myself religious.

Although my son had a Bar Mitzvah, I think from that perspective,

the education of Judaism, as in many other religions, is the value system

of how to live a good life, how to be a good person,

but a God that we are talking about, that people talk about in a synagogue

or in a church, although I will go occasionally,

it does feel good in some odd sort of way that is, that's antithetical to me.

I do not understand it.

That being said, I am Jewish. It is a cultural way of life for me.

I believe, you know, my son had a Bar Mitzvah.

I know he is imparting the values to his son.

I don't know whether there will be a Bar Mitzvah in that generation.

I was totally surprised when my son was born.

Back in the day before you had an ultrasound, before every kid,

you knew what you were going to have, and they said, it's a boy.

And I said, it's a Bar Mitzvah.

And I don't know who said that because that came from somewhere behind me.

Somehow it was not a conscious thought at all.

It's a good way to live.

It's a good way to behave, as are many other religions that point out

that we should be good to one another, and we should have mitzvahs. Coming to Płock

for me was creating a backstory.

Ari calls it a suitcase, which is a good analogy for that.

It is an understanding

and a feeling of completeness so that we know where we came from.

We had no grandparents. I had an aunt.

My mother's sister did survive, but out of all the family and such,

we did not have family.

And when my son

was in preschool in first grade, second grade, and my father,

the grandfather, could attend a school performance,

the first time that happened, I sat next to my father

and I just cried my eyes out because I never had that,

Ari was talking about being jealous of my being able

to go into my father's home, which was an amazing thing.

But I was jealous of children who had grandparents.

I had a lot of adopted grandparents.

There were a lot of people around who allowed us to call them

grandma grandpa because we did not have it, and it was a lack that we felt.

Being a grandmother now myself,

my grandson calls me “savta”, which is Hebrew for “grandmother”,

not typically what you hear in certain parts of the US.

It's a little bit different, but being able to pass it down

and that my son had a grandfather and my grandson has grandparents

is extremely important to me.

Coming to Płock

A long held thought that never would happen.

It came true, we came, it came to be. And I cherish it.

I would like to conclude by saying it comes back to what Evan said

about the visit, our visits to Płock of being “unerasing”.

My father was silent and he didn't speak.

I can understand why he didn't want to speak just because he lost everything.

He lived in paradise

and by the time the war finished, the Holocaust was over,

he knew that everything that he had in Płock was lost.

He lost his parents, his siblings, the immediate family.

The only person that he really had left was Sam.

And he chose not to talk.

And, when I think about it, he was in some way, he had become

unintentionally there was complicity with Nazi ideology.

His silence contributed to the erasure,

the process of erasing the family by not talking about the family.

Yes, there were photos and not identified saying who was on the photos

and where they were taken.

There was an element of complicity, unintentional complicity

with Nazi ideology of destruction of European Jewry.

And this journey that I embarked on, which may have had a very

again, simplistic the first reason for coming

just to make contact with the archives and answer

the question: Who's on the movie and what's the connection?

over the last five years, four years

I think what I have done and what Sandra and I have done, not only me,

is that we've gone through a process of “unerasing”.

One of the words that you used, which I really like,

you used the word “oblivion”.

I think one of the movies you made was called “Out of Oblivion”.

I think that my father sent his family to oblivion by not speaking.

And for Sandra and for me, the transformation is that I think

we've taken them, we've restored them. You know, there's been a restoration.

We've taken them out of this abyss of oblivion, and we've brought them back

we “unerased” them, and I'm particularly proud of that.

And that comes back to what I said earlier, that I've become my father's voice,

that I can walk with Tomer for instance, or I can bring my grandchildren here

And say: This is where my father lived. This is where the Bomzon family lived.

Because we now go back over nine generations.

And you know, Tomer is ninth generation, I'm seventh generation.

So that's something we didn't have.

So the Bomzon family as an entity, not me, everything

anyone who had this family name of Bomzon or a variation of the family name

we have brought them back out of oblivion.

The Bomzon family is on the map again because it wasn't on the map.

Not that we wanted the gap in headlights and we would be the celebs of Płock,

but we've brought them back because even in the big book of Płock

there is the only person that is mentioned as a survivor

is actually Sandra's grandmother.

But there's no mention of any other Bomzon in that book.

But what Sandra and I have done over this

journey is that we have restored them.

The family came from Płock.

It has a 200 year tradition in Płock and what Sandra and I did is bring them back.

We've taken them out of the abyss of oblivion

and put them on the map and that's something that I am particularly proud of.

And I think Sandra is as well.

[singing “We Are the Family”]

1937 revisited!