After arriving in Britain, this reticent man, like thousands of other Jewish immigrants, found work as a cabinet maker at the enormous Lebus furniture factory in Tottenham.
Steve had no idea whether he’d kept in touch with family back in Poland. Had any of them remained in the small Silesian town? And if so, the obvious question loomed – what happened to them during the war?
It felt like an expression of love reaching across time to something which was disconnected and lost
Before our arrival, with the help of Alon Goldberg at the World Society of Czestochowa Jews, we had already started researching the history of the Braun family, or Brown as it later became.
Now our guides Marek and Malgorzata Malecki were able to lead us directly to the grave of an older brother of grandfather Samuel.
Mendel had died in 1925 aged 60. It was an emotional moment for Steve, discovering the great uncle he never knew he had, and praying besides his broken tombstone – probably the first person to do so in more than 80 years.
Nearby was the ruined but clearly identifiable grave of a sister, Steve’s great-aunt Kajja Cimberknopf, who died in 1935. For my husband, the emotions were powerful. “It felt like a strong connection with my family that I had never really known or understood, and it felt like an expression of love and reaching across time to something which was disconnected and lost,” he said.
Though neither Marek nor Malgorzata is Jewish, they are knowledgeable, charming and enthusiastic, with Malgorzata speaking in Polish and Marek translating.
Fifteen years ago, then a young historian, Malgorzata was asked by her professor at the town’s university if she wanted to help with some restoration work. She’s never stopped.
“Before the war,” she tells us, “the Jewish community of Czestochowa was the fourth largest in Poland, after Warsaw, Krakow and Lodz.” Its nearly 30,000 Jews made up a quarter of the town’s population.
Though nowadays there is little left to see, the couple showed us the location of the wartime ghetto, and the spot where residents gathered every morning for the eight-kilometre march to the factory where they toiled as slave labourers. We saw the Umschlagplatz where Jews assembled for transportation to the death camp of Treblinka, now the site of a memorial.
The Umschlagplatz memorial where Jews were assembled for transportation[Missing Credit]
The local museum has a decent exhibition about the 300-year history of Czestochowa’s Jews. It includes a picture of Treblinka drawn from memory by a local man who was one of the few escapees.
Unlike Auschwitz, this place of mass murder was pretty much destroyed by the retreating Nazis, leaving little in the way of photographic evidence. But Samuel Willenberg could never forget what he had seen there – the gas chamber, crematorium and the enormous pile of bodies. Tellingly, his picture shows minimal accommodation blocks. Most of those arriving there would never need beds.
After the war, just 1,500 Jewish former residents returned to Czestochowa. Scared by a 1946 pogrom in nearby Kielce, most of the survivors fled and today just a handful of Jews remain.
In the 1950s, with the approval of the remaining Jewish community, a philharmonic hall was built on the foundations of one of two synagogues razed by the Nazis, so that beautiful music could infuse a site of devastation.
The cemetery was a ruin. Those condemned to die had been forced to desecrate gravestones before being shot and, devoid of care, nature had done the rest. After the overthrow of communism, the project of mapping graves was started but left incomplete.
Then in 2004 Reut High School in Jerusalem started the “Gidonim” project of restoring Polish cemeteries and in 2007 they came to Czestochowa. During the long hot summer they began work, joined by local volunteers.
Over the next nine years they mapped the cemetery’s nearly 5,000 remaining graves, cleaning up what they could, eventually joined by Malgorzata.
“A group of about 30 would come to Czestochowa and check into a hotel,” she says, “and then spend the whole day in the cemetery, hard physical work in the heat.
“They’d just have lunch next to their bus and then carry on.” In parallel, work is being done on civic documentation, translating it into English, which helps descendants such as Steve trace family members.
Some of the restoration has been funded by Sigmund Rolat, who survived forced labour in Czestochowa as a child and later made a fortune in finance in New York.
By delving into the database, we discovered that – to our surprise – Steve’s grandfather Samuel (legal name Aleksandr) had a twin brother Leyser. There were nine siblings in total, including one other set of twins. We knew what had happened to Mendel and Kaija, we’d seen their graves. So, what of the others?
Some of Kaija’s children had moved west to Paris and post war the Browns of Tottenham were in touch with a Charlie Simberov (or Cimberknopf). But France proved to be no guarantee of safety. By cross-referencing the Czestochowa database with Yad Vashem, I have established that another of Kaija’s sons, Chaim Cimberknopf, was deported from Drancy camp to Auschwitz and murdered in 1941. I have now traced six other family members who were killed at Treblinka including three children. There is far more work to do, and we hope more than anything to find some who have survived.
[Missing Credit]
Steve at Mendel Braun's grave[Missing Credit]
The cemetery today is a site of picturesque decay, its ruins powerfully evoking the history it has witnessed. Though identifying graves is important work, Steve isn’t convinced that more renovation is required.
“Some things get emboldened and made into something flashy and showy to commemorate history and others are just quietly left as a testimonial to what horror took place there,” he said.
But our visit, which also took in Krakow, Warsaw and Gdansk, triggered something surprising – a deeper connection to his origins.
“Poland is an incredible country, and it was a profound experience for me to witness a place that is at the centre of European life and conflict. And unexpectedly, I felt a part of it. It brought out my inner Pole, that sort of surface cheerfulness and go-get-them with a deeper underlying melancholy and sadness.”
The overgrown cemetery[Missing Credit]