8 | AUGUST 25 • 2022

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued on page 10

essay

The Day My Great-Grandparents Died
T

he reality is that my great-grand-
parents didn’t just die, they were
murdered. They were two of six
million Jews murdered by the Nazis and
their willing accomplices throughout
Europe. And it wasn’t just
the two of them, but their
children and grandchil-
dren, and scores of cousins,
nieces and nephews, and
neighbors. They were lined
up and shot in a communal
grave on the outskirts of
Kanczuga, the Polish town
in which they lived and raised their fam-
ilies for generations. Their murder took
place 80 years ago this week.
We know what happened from the
testimonies and writings of some who
had escaped, or those who were deport-
ed earlier and survived. Survivors com-
municated with their neighbors years
later. My great aunt told me she would
write to the mayor of Kanczuga after
the war, sending along care packages as
a bribe for him to provide information,
any information, about her parents, sib-
lings, and nieces and nephews. Even if
what he said was made up as the histor-
ical record seems to demonstrate, it gave
her some sense of closure.
When the war ended, some survivors
came back to Kanczuga to look for other
survivors and try to start their lives over in
the only place they knew as home. Several
Jews who had returned were murdered by
their Polish neighbors in a pogrom that
took place in April 1945, after the war
officially ended. I knew the three young
men who buried the victims and extricat-
ed the survivors to safety from their Polish
neighbors threatening to finish the job. As
old men they shared vivid details with me.
Willie Kramberg, with whom I became
close, was always “happy” to do so, but
prefaced that he won’t sleep for three days
as a result of reliving the horrors.

THE JEWS OF KANCZUGA
I have written and spoken about my
family’s life and death in Kanczuga many
times. I heard stories from my grand-

mother and great aunt, about their par-
ents, siblings, and nieces and nephews.
Though I have never been there, Kanczuga
is part of my family’s history, but in the
distant rear-view mirror. I have a sense of
nostalgia for this place which I have never
visited, in which my family lived for gen-
erations, yet no urgent desire to do so.
I am grateful that my great-grandpar-
ents had the sense to begin to get their
children out of Poland in the 1930s. But
now, as a grandfather, close in age to that
of my great-grandparents were when they

were murdered, I look back and weep at
how painful it must have been not to be
able to save everyone much less them-
selves. They knew they needed to get
their families out of Poland, that time was
running out even before the Nazis arrived
but didn’t know when that time would be.
Until that last Shabbat, when the Jews of
Kanczuga were rounded up and massa-
cred, I suspect they did everything they
could to save their family.
Shabbat is a joyous day to celebrate
surrounded by family. The sense of help-
lessness that must have overcome them in
those last hours, on their last Shabbat, is
incomprehensible as I think about what
happened that Saturday 80 years ago.
The Jewish community had been
rounded up and crammed into one of the
synagogues. A hot August day with many
times more people packed in than the
building was built for. I don’t know if they

were told they were being “deported” and
given any hope or not. I just know how
they perished.
While the bullets were German, the
jeers from the those lined up to celebrate,
or just watch, were Polish. If they were
close enough to the Poles, no doubt my
relatives saw neighbors they had known
all their lives. The Nazis needed wagons
and the like to move the Jews from the
synagogue in the center of town to the
communal grave that the men had been
forced to dig outside the town. The Nazis
didn’t just bring in their trucks and
buses to deport Jews when they invaded.
In many places they were forced to walk
kilometers to their death or carted out
of town as it might be too “unpleasant”
to massacre hundreds or more people
too much in public. Where vehicles
were needed, they were borrowed or
requisitioned from the local Poles, often
with the Polish “driver” leading his own
horse to carry away his neighbors to
their death.
I met Benny Schanzer decades ago.
He was a teenager when he was being
deported 80 years ago. He shared with
me that my great-grandmother, Dreizel,
saved his life by telling him simply,
“You’re too young.” I don’t know if my
great-grandmother had any hope for her-
self or any of her family being saved even
at those last horrible moments. She knew
the end was near. Benny understood,
escaped and survived to tell me the story
decades later.
Before the war and the Holocaust,
Kanczuga had about 1,000 Jews, repre-
senting between a third to half of the
population. There were instances of Jews
and the mostly Catholic Poles getting
along including attending school, doing
business, even serving in civic capacities
together. Antisemitism existed as it did
throughout Europe, largely but not exclu-
sively due to Catholic teaching about the
Jews. That sowed the fertile ground in
which antisemitism thrived. My grand-
mother used to tell me that the ground
was soaked in our blood. She did not
mean it metaphorically. Antisemitism

Jonathan
Feldstein

The author’s great-grandparents,
Dreizel Birnbach and Shalom Yaakov