Yisroel Goldfarb, known as “Srulka,” was our grandmother’s younger brother.  He was one of seven siblings, including five sisters and two brothers.  He lived with his parents—our great-grandparents Sara and Alexander Ziskind Goldfarb—in Szczuczyn, Poland. Szczuczyn was a shtetl of about 2,500 Jews, who made up more than half of the town’s population.

After Srulka’s older brother Abraham (Avremel) arrived and settled in New York, he used to send money every month to a Polish family to hide Srulka from the Nazis.  In time, Avremel heard that the family had turned his brother in to the authorities, though they continued to collect the money. 

According to a family legend, Srulka was a boy of around twelve years old who was fatally attacked by wolves while escaping into the woods.  However, as per testimony given to Yad Vashem by a surviving cousin who emigrated to Palestine before the Holocaust, Yisroel Goldfarb was a merchant and single and was “eliminated” in Szczuczyn in 1941 at the age of thirty-three.  Still, in a survivor’s eye-witness memoir recounting the Nazi atrocities in Szczuczyn late in the year of 1941, Yisrolke Goldfarb is mentioned as a councilman and member of the Judenrat, the local Jewish police.  Yet another family source contends that Srulka was a fervent Zionist and Jabotinsky resistance fighter who used to carve wooden toy swords for the children. Ultimately—according to this source—he hid in the woods and fled to Warsaw where he was one of the last heroic resistors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. 

These conflicting narratives will likely never be resolved, as no one is left to bear witness.