SISTERS RASHKE GOLDFARB & ROCHEL GOLDFARB

Of our grandmother’s numerous siblings, including Rashke, the youngest sister Rochel and a younger brother Yisroel (Srulka), only four were able to escape from Europe before the Nazi invasions.  Her remaining siblings and parents were murdered in the Holocaust.

Their father, Alexander Ziskind Goldfarb, was a fish merchant in the shtetl of Szczuczyn, Poland.  Between the two world wars, a new industry of fish farming had developed.  Fish were bred in pools in neighboring districts, purchased by wholesalers, and delivered to the larger towns.

Rashke and Rochel were tasked with smoking the herring in a small house in the yard.  Ziskind sold the fish from barrels at his grocery store on Ulica Krsywa 12 (12 “Crooked” Street, also called Krumma Gus). 

Each week before the sanctified holiday of Shabbes arrived, the daughters laundered clothes in the Wissa River past the fields behind their house.  White Shabbes dresses were shared by the sisters for special occasions.  Not only did they share their dresses; on Chanukah, they divided an orange into segments so all could have a taste.  In the winter when the stream froze, they amused themselves by whittling pieces of wood, which they attached to their boots to form makeshift ice skates. 

On August 8, 1941, a fence was built around Crooked Street where the Goldfarb family lived.  All the remaining Jews were forced into the block-long ghetto.  They endured terrible conditions.  Fifteen to twenty-five people were crowded into a single room, with very little food and no wood to heat the houses.

On November 2, 1942, the ghetto was liquidated.  Two hundred Jews who had outlived the pogrom massacres in the town, including our great-grandmother Sara Goldfarb, were sent by wagons to the nearby Bogusze transit camp and ultimately to the gas chambers at the Treblinka extermination camp.  From Szczuczyn, only ten Jews survived the Nazi Holocaust.