8 | AUGUST 25 • 2022 

PURELY COMMENTARY

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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