Back to Russia!

The second talk I did at the IAJGS Conference in Warsaw last month was Back to Russia!, about the experiences of my grandfather Louis Frankenstein and his cousin Jack Schwartz during the First World War. They had both emigrated from Gombin in Poland to London in 1913, Louis was around 20 years old, Jack a couple of years younger.

During the War they were both caught up in an episode about which little appears to be known, even by historians of the period. This was an agreement between the British and Russian governments for a reciprocal exchange of conscripts, so that Russian subjects living in Britain, and British subjects living in Russia, would be liable for military service in the country they were living in. This agreement was known as the Anglo-Russian Military Service Convention, 1917.

I have only been able to find one book which deals with this episode, War or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917, written by Harold Shukman, a historian whose father went "back to Russia" under the Convention. Apart from Shukman's book - which is excellent - and a couple of unpublished PhDs, which were also very helpful, I found just a chapter here, a few quotations there, and nothing else. I have even drawn a blank with a number of historians whose main focus is the contribution of British Jews to the First World War, and the effects of the War on the Jewish community - even the specialists were not able to provide any useful leads.

So the story told in this talk is based on what I have been able to glean from these sources (listed at the end of the Handout, which you can read or download), and on documents found as part of my own research into the lives of my grandfather Louis and his cousin Jack. This involved, amonsgt other things, pursuing Freedom of Information requests with the National Archives, and with West Yorkshire Police.

I must say at this point that neither my family nor the Schwartz family had the faintest idea what our respective grandfathers "did during the War". We have a photo of my grandfather in some sort of military uniform, but I couldn't find any record of his military service; he doesn't appear in the British Jewry Book of Honour, which is a thoroughly researched roll-call of thousands of Jews who served in the British Forces in WW1. There is a Jack Schwartz listed in the Book of Honour, indeed there are several, and his family thought he fought in France. He didn't.

Here's the Presentation I used for the talk. Click on the image below, and you will be taken to the Presentation page. You'll be asked to give yourself a name - it doesn't matter what name you use. Then you just click on the 'Slideshow' icon - it's the blue triangle, just left of centre above the slide.  This gives you the Slideshow in all its full-screen majesty. 

You can play through it using the Spacebar, the Return/Enter key, or the right-arrow key. Most of the slides have two or three components that appear in sequence, one at a time. You'll just have to imagine the commentary that goes with them. Jan did an audio recording, but we haven't got round to processing it yet, let alone matching it up to the slides. 

When you get to the end, or feel you can't take any more, just press the Esc key.

I think he was a tailor

My cousin Sandra posted this a few days ago in our family Facebook Group:

“As a child I met relatives who came from Panama to visit us in the USA. I don't remember the names but the male was our cousin and I think he was a tailor. This was in late 40s or early 50s. I think they stayed with my Aunt Fannie.”

Well, there were 6 of them, and they were all tailors. They are the Schwartz brothers from Gombin, and their parents were Towie Aron Szwarc and Bajla Frankensztajn. They had all left Poland to try their luck elsewhere. Jack came to London in 1913, and Abraham followed him in the 1920s. Morris also came to London, then went to Panama in the 1930s, and ended up in the USA, in New Jersey. Nathan, Paul and Ralph went to Panama in the late 1930s.

They all came together in 1946, in New Jersey, for a special occasion:

Morris, Nathan, Paul, Abraham, Ralph, Jack

Cousin Belinda tells the story behind the photo:

“The picture of the 6 brothers is in my parents’ wedding.  My parents, Pinhas (Paul) and Sarah were married in New Jersey in 1946. My eldest brother Allan and I were born there, but they returned to Panama when I was a baby, so my first language is Spanish, then English, and now, Hebrew. In Panama my brothers Arthur and Eddy were born there. 

The story about the picture is the following. You'd better sit down: 

My father had emigrated to Panama with his brother Nathan. He got a visa for his mother Bajla and his brother Herzl Ber to leave Poland; his father Towie Aron had died a couple of years before. 

My father said that later on they will send for the rest of family that was staying in Poland. But Herzl Ber got sick, and they exchanged the visa and gave it to the youngest brother, Ralph. Another brother, Isaac, did not want to leave Herzl Ber alone and stayed taking care of him. 

Bajla did not want to leave because she wanted to stay with her two daughters Sarah and Rivkah.  Sarah was married with two children and her husband Izrael Zolna was in the army. Rivkah was engaged, and she was waiting for her fiancé to return - he was also in the army.  They were planning to leave Gombin in the near future.  Rivkah’s fiancé didn’t return.

Well, the Nazis got into Gombin in 1939. They killed Sarah’s two children in the snow, in front of them, and as far as we know Bajla and the sisters were sent to Auschwitz. Herszl Ber and Isaac were also killed.

My father had left in the last ship to leave Poland, bringing his young brother Ralph. They arrived in Panama, where Nathan was waiting for them. 

Several years later, after the War, my father went to the USA, where his brother Morris had emigrated earlier. He met my mother, and this beautiful picture occurred. 

The B'nai Brit magazine sent the picture all around the world. In Australia, Rivkah’s fiancé saw the picture and recognized the brothers and called via telephone to my father. (I can’t remember his name... I was a little girl). 

I know he came with his wife to Panama to explain why he never returned to Gombin.
He was sick in a hospital in Russia and couldn’t leave.  When he finally came to Gombin, it was too late.  He came to Panama to explain himself to the family.”

So who was the tailor from Panama who stayed with Sandra’s Aunt Fannie for this momentous occasion? I think it must have been either Nathan or Ralph. And what was their relationship to her?

Morris, Nathan, Paul, Abraham, Ralph, Jack - with hats

I’m pretty sure that Sandra's ‘Aunt Fannie’ was Frajda Rajn, daughter of Boruch Rajn and Sura Rywka Zegelman. This makes her not just a cousin, but a Triple Cousin to Bajla Frankensztajn, the mother of the Schwartz boys:

1. Boruch’s brother Gersz Ber Rajn married Tauba Frankensztajn, and then after Tauba died, he married her sister Rywka Laja; Bajla is their younger sister.
2. In the generation before, Sura Rywka’s father Hemie Zegelman, and Bajla’s mother Rachla, were brother and sister.
3. At the same time, Sura Rywka’s mother, Hana Frankensztajn, and Bajla’s father Wolek, were sister and brother. In other words, a sister and brother had married a brother and sister. So the children of these two couples would be cousins twice over.

(Nathan and Ralph Schwartz later kept up this family tradition, when they married two sisters, Ruchla and Siza Aizenman, in Panama in 1944.)

So Aunt Fannie's mother, Sura Rywka, and the Schwartz brothers' mother, Bajla, were Double Cousins, through both the Zegelmans and the Frankensztajns. Then in the next generation the Rajn brothers joined the party, and married a Frankensztajn and a Zegelman respectively. So in fact all of Boruch Rajn’s descendants are Triple Cousins to all of Gersz Ber’s. The rest of our Frankenstein clan can only look on in admiration. Have a look at I have a feeling that we are related for how we worked all this out.

This is now the third time in a couple of months that we have confirmed family connections through things that happen at weddings. In Is this the Missing Link?, it was where the groom was staying, in Another Link in the Chain it was the identity of a witness. This time it's where the groom's brother was staying. The first two were in documents, this one is from childhood memories.

And in this case we also have an iconic photograph, which as Belinda's childhood memories tell us, had played a part, 70 years ago, in bringing together people who had been separated in tragic circumstances.

I wonder what's next?

I think we need to talk

I met Cousin Joan yesterday. Well, Third Cousin Joan. She came across me online a few months ago, but this was the first time we had met - she lives in Israel, and was coming over to London for a couple of days, so I hopped on the train and went up to see her.

She had just started delving into her family history, and did a Google search for her great-grandmother, Bajla Frankenstein. Go on, try it. Second up is a post of mine from two years ago, recounting how I had made contact with Frankenstein cousins in the USA that we had previously had no idea even existed. In the post I mentioned a Bajla Frankenstajn I had found, as a possible connection between my family and the 'new' cousins.

Joan saw what I had written, and posted a comment:

"I've just started a serious genealogy project and stumbled upon this post. I am a great-grandaughter of Bajla Frankenstejn. I think we need to talk."

So here we are, talking. We compared notes, and after some scratching of heads we realised that, although I'm older than her father, she and I are in fact of the same generation - we share great-great-grandparents, which makes us third cousins, I think. Her great-grandmother, Bajla, was sister to my great-grandfather Jankel Josek. She was 13 years younger than him, and his lot seem to have been quicker off the mark than hers in each succeeding generation.

Joan brought with her an absolute jewel of a photo album, which had been her grandparents'; it had scores of photos from before the Second World War. I had never seen any of them before, and Joan herself was pushed to put names to more than a few of the people in them. As she showed them to me, I snapped away with my iPhone, on the café table (spot the shadows); Joan will scan them properly for me when she gets back home.

Bajla and her husband, Towje Aron Szwarc, lived in Gombin, in Poland, and had a dozen children. A couple of them died in childhood, but most of the rest went on to have families of their own. Towje Aron died in the early 1930s.  Some of the children emigrated - to Panama, the US, and the UK - and thereby survived the War. Bajla and the others stayed in Poland, and all perished in the Holocaust.

Bajla and Towje Aron

The oldest of their children was Jankel, born in 1896 and a few years younger than his cousin, my grandfather Lajb. The two cousins both came to London in 1913, where Jankel became Jack Schwartz, and Lajb became Louis Frankenstein. They remained in contact at least until the late 1930s.

Bajla came to London to see Jack in 1930, and stayed for three months, during which time she must have seen her nephew, Louis, and his family, including my mother, who would have been 10 years old. However we have very few photos from this period, and none that seem to be of this visit. So this is the first photo of Bajla that I have seen.

More than that, it is the first time I have seen a photo of anyone in the generation before my grandfather.

PS:
By the way, this is at least the third time that I have been 'found' by a previously unknown cousin googling for one of their own ancestors, and coming up with a page I had written that named the person they were looking for. See Cousin Report #27, for example.