Six more films by Tomek Wisniewski

At the Museum of Family History you can now view six new short films created from both pre-WWII and current photographs and film clips by Bialystok, Poland native Tomek Wisniewski.

The film titles include:
--Bialystok Cemetery: Painted Gravestone (Bialystok)
--The Fourth Partition of Poland: Bialystok Brest 1939 (Bialystok)
--Lodz Litzmanstadt 1939 (Lodz)
--Szczuczyn Kolno Wizna Łomża 1939 (Lomza)
--The Old Jewish Cemetery on Okopowa Street 1942 (Warsaw)
--Snapshots of Jewish Warsaw 1939-1942 (Warsaw)

You can find the links to these six films of Tomek's (along with links to fifty-one of his other films) by clicking here. The films and links on this page are listed according to the name of the town or city associated with the particular film.

Update on the Lodz Ghetto Cemetery Database

More names have been added to the list of those buried in the Jewish Ghetto Cemetery of Lodz, Poland, now totaling more than 3,400 burials. More will be added, but not until 2011. Not only does this list contain the names of the deceased and date and age of death, but also grave location, Hebrew name of the deceased and father and more.

The lists are displayed in two different ways, i.e. by cemetery section and alphabetically. One must also scroll across the screen the see the many columns of information available. You can also see the map of the Jewish Lodz Cemetery here and note the section number that corresponds to the individual sectional lists provided to you.

To select your preferred method of search, go to www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/ce/ghetto/lodz-ghetto-cemetery.htm and use the links provided.

Each webpage contains a photo of the cemetery, cir 1940-1944 that you might not have seen before.

This burial list is part of an upcoming online Museum exhibition entitled "The Jewish Ghetto" which will go online sometime this summer.

Two new films of interest showing deportations from Galicia, Lodz and Krakow

I'd like to invite you to see two more of the Museum of Family History's Film Series short films, showing at the Museum until April 4th.

At least three separate locales seem to be part of this first film, and one is supposedly a Galician village from during the war. You can also see during the last minute and a half of the film what appears to be the deportation of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto. I'm hoping that someone can confirm this for me. While watching the end of this film I felt that I was in the railroad car as people were boarding it. It's one thing to read about the deportations, or see still photos of it, or even see films about the Lodz ghetto, e.g. the film about Irena Sendler, but it is another thing to see the actual footage.

I am hoping that someone who once lived in these areas or are otherwise well familiar with the landmarks in these towns will be able to identify the town. If so, please let me know and I will tell those on the list in another posting. It is unlikely that you will recognize anyone in the film, but one never knows.

The name of the clip is "Deportations of Jews" (aka "Deportation to the Death Camps"), and supposedly the film was taken by a Nazi cameraman. For me, the film is powerfully evocative and at times eerie, especially if you choose to listen to the soundtrack which is said to have been added at a later date. The film is nearly eight and a half minutes long.

The film clip can be watched at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/fs-deportation-deathcamps.htm .

The second film is a shorter one, but nevertheless impactful as it shows the deportation of residents to the Krakow ghetto. The link for this short film is www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/fs-deportation-ghetto-krakow.htm .

Links to the current films available for viewing within the Museum's Film Series can be found at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/mfh-films.htm .

Lodz Ghettto Cemetery Burial List

In advance of the Museum's large online exhibition later this year about many of the Jewish Ghettos of Europe, I thought it would be good to make available to you two lists comprised of nearly fourteen hundred names of Jewish residents who perished in the Lódz Ghetto and were buried in the cemetery there. You needn't look up a specific person's name in a database; they are all there for you to see on a single web page.

These lists are by no means complete, as there were no doubt many more of our ancestors who died in the Ghetto and were buried there. However, these lists might just help some of you who had family in the Ghetto during World War II with your Lódz family research. The lists give the names of the deceased, and often the father's name, the date of death and age at death.

The lists come to you courtesy of the Lódz Jewish community through the agency of Yad LeZehava (YZI) in Kedumim Israel and with the dedicated cooperation of the officers and men in the IDF 'Witnesses in Uniform' Program.

The lists can be found at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/ce/ghetto/lodz-ghetto-cemetery.htm.

"Not Now, Not Ever" - Jadzia's Story of Survival

You will most likely be interested in reading the story of Jean Klein/Frank (Jadzia), who is a Holocaust survivor; or rather she was, as she passed away in Malibu, California in June of 2009.

She was born in Kalisz, Poland, and during the war traveled to, and lived in, Belchatow, Lodz, Warsaw and finally Czestochowa. I just finished reading and getting her complete book (only seventy-six pages) online. It is a sad story as most of these stories of survival are, yet it is also an intimate and moving account of her life and her survival.

Much of the account takes place in Czestochowa, so this should be interesting for you to read, at minimum those of you who had family there during World War II.

The link to this is www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/wims-klein-jean.htm.

"The Peretzniks (Perecowicze)": A New Film About a Jewish School in Lodz, Poland

The Museum of Family History would like to announce its twenty-second preview of films of interest to the Jewish people.

The Peretzniks' Polish premiere screenings took place in Lodz on August 29, 2009, at the Nowy Theater, during the 65th Anniversary of the Liquidation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto and in Warsaw on September 2 at The Jewish Theater during the 6th Festival of Jewish Culture "Singer's Warsaw."

The film tells the story of a Jewish school in Lodz, Poland. The school was closed down following the Communist anti-Semitic campaign, which took place in Poland in 1968. As a result of this, the Peretz School graduates are dispersed today between the US, Israel, Sweden, Poland, and other countries. The bittersweet memories of their youth in post-war Poland is what binds the Peretzniks together till this day.

The events of March '68 are still somewhat obscure in Poland. The political background is known, as are the film archives, and press coverage. However, little is known about how it was to grow up in Poland of the sixties as a Polish Jew, or as a Pole of Jewish origin. How it was to be a kid in the heart of a country still recovering from a horrific war, in a family severed by the Holocaust, and then to come of age and experience first loves at the outbreak of the disturbing March events. The experience of the 'Peretz School' pupils in Lodz in some way reflects the experience of the Jewish minority in Poland in the 50s and 60s of the previous century. It is the experience of adolescents nevertheless, who were much more interested in the Beatles than they were in politics. It was the latter, however, which caused for most of them to scatter all over the world, creating a peculiar phenomenon of a Polish-Jewish Diaspora integrated today in so many countries' identities.

You can view the film clip by clicking on www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/sr-22-peretzniks.htm .

At the Turn of the 20th Century: Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in Britain and a Fact-Finding Mission Abroad

There were nearly five million Jews who lived in Czarist Russia during the nineteenth century. They were forced to live within a specified area and were subjected to religious persecution and a life of great poverty. Many Jews emigrated during this time, about 150,000 of them immigrating to Great Britain. This wave of immigration peaked in the late 1890s when tens of thousands of mostly poor and semi-skilled and unskilled immigrants settled in the East End of London.

At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a public uproar about the rising tide of immigration that was often fueled by the media. During this period the British Brothers League was formed. Local politicians supported this organization; many anti-immigrant marches and rallies were organized and petitions were signed. They didn’t want Great Britain to become a “dumping ground” for the “scum of Europe.”

William Evans-Gordon was a conservative politician and PM within the British parliament. He also wrote a book entitled 'The Alien Immigrant', which was published in 1903, the year he took a fact-finding tour of Eastern Europe and the Baltic region.

Evans-Gordon travelled from St Petersburg to Krakow, visiting and photographing the major towns of Jewish settlement. It was his sentiment that alien immigration to Great Britain, especially Jewish immigration, should be limited. He called on the Parliament to set up a Royal Commission, and as a result of this, in 1905, the Aliens Act was passed.

The act for the first time introduced immigration controls and registration in Great Britain. The Act was designed to prevent paupers or criminals from entering the country and set up a mechanism to deport those who slipped through. It provided asylum for people fleeing religious or political persecution. Anti-Semitic elements wanted a stop or severe restrictions on Jewish immigration to Britain, but were completely defeated. The 1905 Act did not meet any of the demands of restrictionists who wanted numerical restrictions on immigration.

According to Wikipedia, “Evans-Gordon continued to campaign for further anti-immigration legislation, seeking re-election in 1906. He kept up regular correspondence with Chaim Weizmann who would later write of him:

'Sir William Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudices...he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire but he failed to see why the ghettoes of London or Leeds should be made into a branch of the ghettoes of Warsaw and Pinsk.'"

This one-page exhibition at the Museum of Family History is entitled “At the Turn of the 20th Century: The Jewish Community at Home and Abroad, Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in Britain and a Fact-Finding Mission Abroad, 1903."

By visiting this exhibition (and seeing some of the photographs taken during his visit), you can read what Evans-Gordon wrote about his European travels to Dvinsk, Vilnius, Pinsk, Libau, Lodz, Galicia and Romania. It provides an interesting perspective about how others viewed Jewish life within the Pale of Settlement and elsewhere within the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century.

You can visit this exhibition at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/20c-evans-gordon.htm.