IN MEMORY OF OUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS

ALEXANDER ZISKIND GOLDFARB & SARA TETTENBAUM GOLDFARB

WHO PERISHED IN THE HOLOCAUST

By Sharon Citrin Goldstein

Our great-grandparents lived in Szczuczyn (pronounced Sh’chu-chin), Poland in the district of Lomza less than five miles east of the Polish-Russian border. 

Szczuczyn was a typical shtetl in the pre-war Russian Empire.  In 1921, the year our grandmother left her hometown for America, 2,506 Jews lived there making up more than half of the town’s population. Szczuczyn’s Jews worked mostly as tradesmen and craftsmen, while the Poles engaged mainly in agriculture.  Although the two populations relied on each other economically, any social or cultural contact between them was rare…and potentially risky.  (See   http://www.szczuczyn.com/.)

Our great-grandfather, Alexander Ziskind Goldfarb (born in 1875) was one of fourteen children, of whom eight survived to adulthood. 

Ziskind was a fish merchant selling fish from barrels at his grocery store.  Ziskind had inherited the status of Kohen and spent much of the day worshipping while his wife Sara minded the store.  His grandchildren called their zaide “Rev Ziskind” because he tirelessly taught them Torah. 

Sara was known to be somewhat vain.  Beneath the shietel or headscarf that she was obliged to wear as a married woman, she’d expose a little curl of her own hair.   She also had a charitable side, ministering to the needy as a founding member of the Lines Hatsedek Committee, an organization formed in 1916 to provide aid to poor and sick people for doctors’ visits, medications, and basic financial support. 

The first slaughter of Jews in Szczuczyn by their Polish neighbors began on July 14, 1941 on a Friday night when everyone in town was peacefully asleep.  The brutal murders continued, too horrific to describe.  (Graphic eyewitness testimonies can be read on the Szczuczyn website above.)  On August 8, 1941, a fence was built around Crooked Street where our great-grandparents lived, and 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.

Our great-grandfather was regularly accosted on his way home from Shabbes services.  The local Poles took pleasure in humiliating Jewish elders by grabbing and pulling on their beards.  On Easter and Christmas, anti-Semitic torments toward the Jewish “Christ killers” were especially executed to their fullest expression. 

The grim discovery of his hat and cane in the cemetery led to a declaration of Alexander Ziskind Goldfarb’s martyrdom.   A certificate describes and memorializes the murder:

On November 2, 1942, the ghetto was liquidated.  Two hundred Jews who had outlived the pogrom massacres, 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.

Of our grandmother’s numerous siblings, only four were able to escape from Europe before the Nazi invasions.  Sharon’s Hebrew name, Sarah, comes from great-grandmother, Sara Goldfarb.  Les’ Hebrew middle name, Alexander, comes from great-grandfather, Alexander Ziskind Goldfarb. 

Z’l.  May their memories be for blessing.