Laja’s Registration Card

Laja Florkiewicz, daughter of my grandfather’s sister Chawa (see earlier posts in the series The Frankenstein Trail), was the only member of her family to survive the War. Chawa and her three other children were all killed in the Holocaust.

Chawa’s daughter, my cousin Ewa, tells me that her mother used to speak to her of escaping from the Warsaw Ghetto through the sewers, and of fighting with the partisans. Ewa says that Laja spent most of the War in the Soviet Union, married Josef Mandeltort there, and had her first child - Ewa’s brother Henrik - in Kazan, east of Moscow, in 1944. After the War the family returned to Poland, and Ewa was born a few years later. In 1962, shortly after the death of Josef, they moved to Israel.

Three cards

When I went to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, on the first morning of my visit to Poland earlier this year, I mentioned this story to Anna Przybyszweska, one of the genealogy experts there. Ewa particularly wanted to find out about Josef, her father - he had died when she was 10 years old, in Poland; she had spent the rest of her life in Israel, and all she knew of him was his name.

Anna explains

While I was explaining all this, Anna was fiddling with her computer, as experts tend to do, and before I had finished she was printing off three sheets of paper and handing them to me. There they were - Laja, her son, and her husband. These were print-outs of data from a Register of returning Jews, compiled from 1946 onwards by the Central Committee of Polish Jews. The registration cards are now held in the Archive of the Institute.

Here’s a scan of Laja’s card - you can click on it for an enlargement:

Laja's Registration Card

The card is dated 14 October 1946, and contains basic identity details, plus information about occupation and residence before, during and after the War. There’s some new family information, and a number of intriguing discrepancies with information we have from elsewhere - but we’re getting used to that, aren’t we? In this post, and probably a couple of further ones, I’ll be discussing what we think we can glean from it.

Two birth dates for Laja

Laja gives her name as Lea Mandeltort, née Florkiewicz, born in Gombin (Gabin) on 28 December 1921 - and here’s the first discrepancy. On the Certificate of Residence obtained by her mother Chawa in 1935, which lists the dates of birth of all her children, Laja’s is given as 7 February 1917.

from Chawa's Certificate of Residence

In 1946 Laja was nearly 30, but claimed to be not yet 25. She appears to have used the younger date through the rest of her life. We’re pretty sure the earlier date is correct, and Ewa is puzzled as to why her mother should have wanted to change it.

Two maiden names for Chawa

Laja’s parents are given in this document as Elia Florkiewicz, and Ewa Finkielsztein. Ewa is not a problem, it’s a Polish version of her mother’s Yiddish name Chawa. However Chawa's maiden name was not Finkielsztein, but Frenkensztejn:

from Chawa's Certificate of Residence

This was another puzzle, until I started thinking about Laja’s family situation, and realised that, by the time she was 14, there were hardly any Frankenszteins left for her to have contact with. Her grandfather was, we think, the only male of his generation to stay in the area, and she never knew him - he had died before Laja was born. Her grandmother used the surname Frankensztejn, but Laja would probably only know her as ‘Booba’ (‘Granny’). Her mother Chawa of course had become ‘Florkiewicz’, and Chawa’s sister Chaia had also married. Chawa’s brother Lajb - my grandfather - had left for London in 1913, and never returned; we don’t know if they were ever in contact. The other brother, Lajzer (also known as Itsek), was the only one who appeared to be using the family surname, and he used Finkelsztein - we still don’t know why (see the earlier post Siblings). Lajzer had left Poland in the 1920s, and by the mid-1930s was living in Palestine, from where he corresponded with Chawa, and sent her money.

from Chawa's letter to her brother

So perhaps it is understandable that, some seven years after Laja had last seen her mother, she ascribed to her the only family name she was familiar with.

And four names for Josef

Ewa had told me her father was Josef Mandeltort, but that he had adopted her mother’s maiden name, Florkiewicz, as it “sounded less Jewish”. 

Poland had become an uncomfortable place to live for many Jews well before World War II - Chawa’s letter to her brother, written in 1936, gives a graphic picture of the hostility they faced from Polish authorities and some sectors of Polish society. The majority of Poland’s Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and only a few amongst the survivors tried to return after the War. Those that did return found themselves in a country still riddled with anti-semitism, which reached its peak with the infamous pogrom in Kielce in July 1946.

In these circumstances it is understandable that some of those that did return might try to make themselves appear less conspicuous.

Laja’s father was Eliasz Florkiewicz. There is a long-standing Polish Catholic family in Gombin called Florkiewicz, but there do not appear to have been any other Jewish families in the area using the name, and very few elsewhere. It does not appear to be a ‘Jewish’ name. So how come Eliasz’s family used it?

We are in touch with the local Polish Florkiewicz family, and we are both intrigued by the possibility that there could be a direct connection between us. However, if there is, we have not been able to trace it. We think it is possible that one of Eliasz’s ancestors, some time in the 19th Century, may have chosen to use the name for motives similar to those discussed here for Josef - to blend more in with the Polish population.

Here’s an extract from Josef’s Registration Card:

from Josef's Registration Card

He was not Josef - he was Izrael.

So Izrael Mandeltort came back to Poland after the War, and became Josef Florkiewicz.

And we haven't finished with Laja's card yet - for further discussion see (coming soon): 

Laja’s War - Laja’s other Grandmother

Chawa and her family

This is a Certificate of Residence obtained in Poland in 1935 by Chawa, a sister of my grandfather Lajb Frankenstein. She needed the documentation in order to apply for a passport; she was hoping to follow another brother, Lajzer, in emigrating to Palestine. A year later she wrote to Lajzer to say they weren't able to come at that time - for a discussion of that letter, see my earlier post 'Dear Brother'. Chawa never left Poland, but somehow the Certificate ended up amongst a batch of Lajzer's papers that his daughter Bracha came across a year or so ago. Chawa's grand-daughter Ewa - named for her - brought me a copy when she visited us from Israel earlier this year.

Ewa was keen - to put it mildly - to find out anything we could about her grandmother, and about her own mother Laja, and this document is a mine of information. As is often the case, it raises as many questions as it answers. Here's a brief outline of what we found out from the form.

In the document, issued in the town of Gombin (Gabin), Chawa is named as Chawa Florkiewicz, née Frenkensztejn. She is a widow. This in itself was new information for Ewa, as it implies that her grandfather Elias had died by 1935; she had known nothing of him apart from his name.

My great-grandparents
Chawa's parents are shown as Jankiel Josek and Gitla née Kon. This was the first documentary confirmation we had found of the names of our great-grandparents, and an indication of a family name - Kon - we had not been aware of.

Chawa's birth-date
Chawa is shown as born on 1 January 1891. I am always somewhat suspicious of birth dates from this period that appear as '1 January' or '31 December' - or other first and last dates - as births were sometimes not registered until weeks or months - sometimes years - afterwards. The parents may not have noted the exact day of the birth at the time, and just declared a convenient date for the registration. We don't have any other documentation for her at the moment, so we'll have to accept it until we do.

Juliszew - our ancestral home?
Chawa was born in Juliszew, a place Ewa and I had not heard of. We eventually located it on the map - a small village about 12km to the East of the town of Gombin, which is where we thought they all came from. We were so excited to have discovered what we took to be the family's ancestral home! However, when I mentioned this later to Bracha, and our American cousins, they all said, "Ah yes, Yoolashov, my Dad/Grandad/whoever mentioned that place". Nevertheless, this is our first documentary evidence.

Tylna 4
Other entries on the form show Chawa as a 'worker', Jewish, and of Polish nationality. She lives at 4 Tylna Street, which is the return address she put on the envelope containing the letter to her brother. She has lived in Gombin since 1915; before that, she lived in Juliszew.

Tylna Street now. The street is quite short, but there doesn't seem to be a number 4, and we couldn't work out where it would have stood.

The household
The lower part of the document lists the members of the household. Chawa is living with 4 children, which corresponds with what Ewa had heard from her mother. Her mother Gitla does not appear to be living with her, although she was with her a year later (see the letter to Lajzer). The children were all born in Gombin: Marjem born 1915, Laja (Ewa's mother) 1917, Szejva 1919, and the only boy, Jakub Josek, 1921. We noted that Jakub Josek appeared to be named after Chawa's father, Jankiel Josek - Jankiel is a diminutive form of Jakub. The tradition among Ashkenazi Jews was to name children after recently deceased close relatives, and not after those still living, so this suggests that Jankiel Josek had died by 1921.

What we have learned
We can conclude from the form that Chawa was almost certainly living with her parents in Juliszew until she married in 1915, at the age of 24. She and her husband then moved to Gombin, and raised their family there. Her husband died at some point between 1921 and 1935. Her father had also died, before 1921, leaving her mother Gitla on her own, though we think that Chawa's sister Chaia was probably living with her for some of that time. We can surmise from the letter to Lajzer, written a year later, that Gitla fell ill around 1935, when she would have been in her mid-70s, and came to live with Chawa.

Laja's birth-date
The big surprise to us was Laja's date of birth. Ewa had always understood from her mother that she had been born in 1921. This document puts her 4 years earlier. Another date puzzle!

Laja Florkiewicz, in the centre of the group of members of Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist-zionist youth group, 1934

Then I came across this photo, in the Gombin section of Ada Holcman's web site Zchor (Remember!). The young woman in the middle is named as Lea Florkewicz, and Ewa confirms that it is indeed her mother. The young man to her left is Meir Holcman, Ada Holcman's father. The year is 1934. What do you think? Is Lea 13 in this photo, or 17? Was she born in 1921, or in 1917?

The question is, why did she later - after the War - claim a birth date of 1921? On my trip to Poland in June I came across a couple of documents that take Laja's story a little further; I'll discuss them in a later post.

Laja was one of the few young people in this photo who did not perish in the Holocaust. She was the only member of her family to survive.