Honouring the legacy Ronit Fraid and Vivien Rosenfeld
Isaac Gorodzinski (right) with his parents and siblings, 1922 (l-r) Mark and Dina Munzer
I
t is impossible to comprehend the depths of grief and loss in our family’s Holocaust history, let alone the millions of others likewise impacted. Our parents, Marek (Mark) Munzer (z”l) and Dina Gorodzinski, were both preteens in 1939. They escaped the worst ravages of wartime Europe, with our father’s nuclear family leaving Krakow in the month before the Germans invaded Poland. Our mother and her parents were transported from Poland to Siberia by the Russians, having escaped Warsaw to Zambrow after the Nazi invasion. As our parents did not have to endure the horrors of the concentration camps, they never identified as ‘Holocaust survivors’. Consequently we, their daughters, never considered them as such. Both Mum and Dad spent their teenage years and early adulthood in Palestine and experienced the traumas, as well as the halcyon days of the rebirth of Israel. They met in their hometown of Tel Aviv, married and had their first child, leaving Israel in 1956 to seek personal and economic security in Australia. We grew up, blessed with two sets of living grandparents, which was very unusual for the generation of children born in the shadow of the Holocaust. Our mother’s parents lived near us in Melbourne. Both had lost their entire families – parents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles – in the Shoah, but they never spoke of it to us, probably keen to protect us from the knowledge of their horrific losses.
Our mother’s father Yitzhak, carried his grief heavily. When he arrived in Palestine in the early 1940s and witnessed the vibrant café culture of Tel Aviv, he found it incomprehensible that Jews could be socialising and enjoying life while their brethren were being massacred in Europe. On discovering his family’s fate after the war, he swore off God and religion, although after his passing, we found a well-worn siddur in his bedside table. His parents had been well-respected leaders in the Jewish community of Zambrow. His mother was known for her charitable nature. Every Friday she would prepare and distribute meals discreetly to needy Jewish families, always careful to protect their dignity. At the beginning of the German occupation, Grandpa Yitzhak’s father was taken into the town square and shot, together with other community leaders. His mother, disguised as a Polish peasant, was inadvertently betrayed when a neighbour, upon recognising her and shocked to see her in such reduced circumstances, exclaimed aloud, ‘Pani Gorodzinski, what are you doing here?’ His brothers, sisters and their children found their terrible fate in concentration camps. Our mother’s mother, Zahava, a sweet and gentle lady, lost her beautiful family similarly. Our grandparents on our father’s side lived in Israel, so our knowledge of them and the fate of their families is more limited. We know that our grandmother Lusia had a surviving sister who sadly committed suicide after the war, and a brother, our greatuncle Ziga, who lost his wife and baby daughter in the Shoah. We actually met him and his second wife, Hela, who were brought together by their shared grief, but we didn’t know them at all well. We feel it is a privilege and a responsibility to continue the philanthropic work of our family. Supporting the Jewish Holocaust Centre is a way of honouring the legacy of our parents, grandparents (z”l) and Am Yisrael. We believe that the Jewish Holocaust Centre is doing vital work, educating both Jewish and non-Jewish children about our history, and in this important way, is helping to counteract the scourge of rising antisemitism in the world.
JHC Centre News
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