16 | AUGUST 25 • 2022

From my longtime family research, I know
the Allweisses I’m more closely related to
came from the shtetl (village) of Jaslany (pro-
nounced “yawsh-LAH-nee”) in southeastern
Poland. The area was part of Galicia in the
former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jaslany,
in Mielec County, is located near the Wistula
River, between Krakow and Rzesow. Before
my first visit to Jaslany in 1985, I counted
57 relatives on my family tree, most of them
deceased, who were born there. My dad and
I stopped by his village in 2006 and 2007.

MY DAD’S YOUTH
Oral histories that Zygie and Sol recorded
— in 1987 and 1993, respectively — are
part of a collection of survivor inter-
views housed at The Zekelman Holocaust
Center in Farmington Hills. Transcripts
are available online. The brothers spoke
of their Jaslany-born father, Jacob (Yakov
Leib) Allweiss, who was a horse and cattle
trader. Their mother, the former Esther
Heller, was a homemaker. They met in her
hometown of Nisko, Poland. Sol described
his parents as “pious Jews” and “highly
respected.”
The couple’s children attended public
schools in addition to being homeschooled
in Hebrew and Jewish subjects. Students
in the village took their lessons in the

Allweiss home, where a
traveling maggid stayed
periodically with the
large family.
In the village of
approximately 1,600
residents, including
400 Jews, antisemitism
was part of everyday
life; Zygie recalled there
were “some violent beat-
ings.” A vivid memory for
each about Fishel, the sibling just
older than Sol, was when a horse kicked
Fishel in the head. My Uncle Sol named
his youngest son Phil for Fishel.
After Germany attacked the Republic
of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Jacob and his
older sons, Tarnow-based dentist Loeser,
Mendel and Fishel, headed for presumed
safety in the east. Initially, Jaslany residents
thought their women and children were
safe to remain. A kindly neighbor took in
Esther and the children when the Allweiss
home, among many others, was burned to
the ground.
Jacob returned to the area to check on
his wife, daughters, and Sol and Zygie. On
D-Day, June 6, 1944, Volksdeutsch (eth-
nic Germans living in Poland) ambushed
the three Allweiss males in a field. They
were joyously but apparently too openly
celebrating the Allied forces’ landing in
Normandy. The two boys got away that
day, but Zygie learned decades later from
another Shoah survivor that Jacob was
captured, tortured and killed.
The three older Allweiss sons, includ-
ing Fishel, were never accounted for. My
sister Janice, named for her Aunt Genya,
said she always believed that “someday we
would discover someone from my dad’s
family survived … Now, it’s a miracle
come true, and I’m so happy.”
Some of us now feel there’s a chance that
one or both of the oldest brothers might
have survived, too. But where did you go,
Mendel and Loeser?

ZYGIE, SOL SURVIVE
My dad, Zygie, was 12 and Sol nearly 14
when the war started. I’m very familiar with
my dad’s wartime history and have written

articles about him. He told
me that after seeking refuge
in an uncle’s house in Mielec,
Zygie and other young Jews
were taken by truck each morning
to build latrines for Nazi officers. He and
Sol later passed themselves off as gentiles
to work as farmhands in nearby villages.
Running out of options, they asked to enter
the Biesiatka labor camp near Mielec and
reunited there with their mother and three
youngest sisters. The inmates broke up con-
crete to build a primitive road, which Dad
pointed out to me on our 2006 visit to the
camp.
Their mother died of “fleck fever,
” a form
of typhus, and was buried at the camp; their
three youngest sisters were shot. On March
7, 1943, Zygie lowered himself off the truck
taking about 80 people from the camp to a
mass execution site in the woods. He later
reunited unexpectedly with Sol who had
escaped earlier and hid in a barn’s hayloft.
Polish Christians Maciej and Zofia
Dudzik (honored by Yad Vashem in 2007
as “Righteous Among the Nations”) hid
Zygie and Sol on their farm for 14 months,
at great risk to their own family. Afterward,
the brothers found kitchen jobs in the city of
Lvov, Poland, now part of Ukraine.
Sol and Zygie enlisted in the Russian
Army, serving in different places. Zygie
later was transferred to a reorganized Polish
Army. He fell into a coma after a strong blast
at the Odre River in Germany. Zygie awak-
ened in a hospital in August 1945, months
after the war ended.
The brothers ended up joining a few
surviving first cousins in Foehrenwald
Displaced Persons camp in Germany.
In 1947, with U.S. assistance, Zygie and
Sol sailed to New York with first cousins
Zygmunt and Sara Muhlbauer. It was a
special “orphans transport” aboard the SS
Marine Flasher.

BELOW: From left are Michael, Arkady and Faina,
children of Fishel Alvais (Allweiss), who died in
their early 60s. Arkady left two sons, Gershon and
Alexander Alvais, and Faina had a daughter, Irina
“Ira” Kuravsky. Fishel’s grandchildren, born in
Belarus, live today in Israel.

Klara and Fishel Alvais

Zygie and
Irma Allweiss
on their
wedding day

Fishel Alvais
(Allweiss)
worked as a
watchmaker.

OUR COMMUNITY
ON THE COVER

continued from page 14