Winds of Change.NET: Kristallnacht: Shimon's Story

November 9, 2003

Kristallnacht: Shimon's Story

by Joe Katzman at November 9, 2003 11:33 PM

I've spent the day in cemetaries, walking amongst the gravestones surrounded by the crispness of fall and the fuzzy shades of memory. Some of it was for people I knew and loved. Some of it was for people I never knew. Like Shima.

Shimon Cholewa came from Shedlov, a small town in Poland near Kielce. When her stepmother abused her, my grandmother would go to Shimon's mother - her older sister - to hide out. There was no fairy godmother in this Cinderella story, just a kindly relative or two. No pumpkin coach, just a ship so dirty and unstable that several of my relatives got off at England and vowed to face any punishment rather than continue even one more day on board.

"Shima" wasn't on that voyage. Unlike many of their relatives, his family never left Poland. But my grandmother would see her nephew again one day. Sort of...

Understand that pogroms were common in Poland. Murders, rapes, neighbours who were nice one day but turned on you the next at the instigation or tolerance of the local Catholic Priest or others in authority. In Eastern Europe, that was a normal existence for Jews. What was to come, was not.

65 years ago today, Kristallnacht was the first serious portent of a history we know only too well. First they came for the Jews. Then they came for the rest.

They almost succeeded.

After the war, and the final defeat of the Nazi regime, Shimon Cholewa finally emerged from the concentration camps and made his way to the New World. Alone. The sister my grandmother had sheltered with, and all of her family, were gone. Murdered, for the crime of being Jewish. All save Shima.

To this day, every one of my relatives says he was the saddest person they ever saw. For the rest of his life, nothing could dispel the horror film that played, endlessly, in his head. A wound so deep that some of it can be found still in the pitying and horrified expressions it evokes on the faces of those who saw him.

My grandparents did their best to pay back the old debt: comfort for comfort, shelter for shelter. But for Shima there was no comfort - and no escape to a better place. He lived as a recluse and died in 1970, his will to live crushed by the tortures he had seen and experienced as a child. The raising of his gravestone was my grandmother's final payment on a debt of kindness and obligation.

His gravestone, like his life, stands alone in a sea of others. There's no-one to remember, and no-one to visit. Where the other graves are dotted with small stones left by those who remember, his remains bare. And so it is that whenever my mother goes to the cemetary to visit her parents, she also visits Shima. As do I. That he, too, may be remembered.

Walking through the gravestones of the older Shedlover cemetary today, I saw many, many graves with inscriptions honouring and recalling parents and family members who perished in the Holocaust. A mute reminder of what Kristallnacht really was, and what it foretold.

But not so sad, or so poignant, as the graves - so many! - that stand alone. Because there is no-one left to remember.

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Comments

#1 from David Blue at 2:58 am on Nov 10, 2003

Hi, Joe.

It was good that you did this, and that you posted this. It's important to remember, and the dead should not be friendless.

#2 from Bart (Kansas) at 2:39 pm on Nov 10, 2003

Lyublin, Poland. Before the war, 80, 90, maybe 100 thousand Jews. Major centre of art, literature, film, and commerce.

After the war, they could not get together 10 men for a worship service.

It was an old Auschwitz-survivor friend, Sara [Nomberg] Przytyk, from whom I learnt my stumbling bits of Polish. Liberated in May of 1945, weighing 71 pounds. Fourteen months later she and her hastily-chosen husband presented the world with their first child. The re-building had begun.

She always told me it was far better to /learn/ to love than to fall in love.

Her second liberation came in the 1980s when a young German woman came to her son's farm as an exchange student. Sara spoke no English, only Polish, French, and German (which she understandably hated).

I had the privilege of watching them communicate in German, and seeing years of resentment fade away in the growing realisation that this young woman's /mother/ had been born after the war.

While we celebrate resiliency, renewal, and healing, may we always remember the horror and the unmitigated evil of what happened.

The silent breeze still rustles past, unheard, bearing the screams of millions.

#3 from Richard Meixner at 3:25 pm on Nov 10, 2003

Thank you. In the ever-widening circle of contact, we only deny ourself when, for whatever reasons, we attempt to be 'neo-isolationsists'. Your sensitivity and commitment to tradition AND diversity (Shabbat Shalom) are inspiring.

#4 from Steve at 3:54 pm on Nov 10, 2003

If Arendt was right, after Hitler was finished with the Jews, he was going to start on the Poles. She wrote that some already had badges.

What fools they were. What fools many Europeans still are. They think that, by throwing Israel to the forces of Islamic fascism, they will be spared. To quote Dave Barry, "If you can't trust an insane, spittle-emitting dictator, who can you trust?"

#5 from Patrick Brown at 7:31 pm on Apr 19, 2004

It is not one story about six million people that we have to remember, but six million stories, each about one person.

In order to remember, we may have to be reminded often. But if the reminders are both frequent and artless, they may succeed only in deadening us to what happened. Thanks for telling us this story so skilfully.

#6 from Pierre Cholewa at 11:04 pm on Nov 27, 2004

It is very interesting for me to know, that somemore of the Jewish Cholewa family survived the holocaust. My grand-father Pinchas (born 1871) came from Warszawa to Switzerland before world-war I and he, his sons Chaim (1902), Simcha called Simon (1906), Boruch (1907), Jidel (1913), Gerschon (1915), his Brother Sejza Sisskind, his sister Hinendla and their children survided in Switzerland.

#7 from Joe Katzman at 7:31 pm on Nov 28, 2004

There's an even darker side to this tale, one I hadn't mentioned before - and it concerns the stepmother.

As the youngest child, my grandmother suffered the most. It's fairly clear, however, that she did not suffer alone. The other siblings who preceded her to the New World sponsored each other, and eventually they sponsored my grandmother when she was in her late teens. Who needs the prince's ball when you have North America?

They also offered to sponsor their father - on the sole and inflexible condition that he come alone.

He refused, and stayed with her in Shedlov, Poland. Then the war began, and the Nazis came... and the end of this Cinderella tale goes far beyond anything in the pages of the Brothers Grimm.

Now, the comment from Switzerland. Stories within stories within stories.

I've responded by email to Pierre, telling him what little we know. Unfortunately, we only know Shimon, his father, and his mother - no insight into the rest of the Cholewa family tree, alas. But I've passed that on, and maybe it will be helpful.

It would be nice if the simple power of a blog helped Shima find others who would remember. As I say, stories within stories within stories. Many rescued in the most unexpected ways. Many more lost forever.

#8 from Marvin Shedlov at 7:59 pm on Apr 16, 2007

Joe, you say Shimon came from Shedlov, a small town near Kielce. Is that the Anglesized form for Szydlow? If it is than that might inply that my grandfather got the name Shedlov at Ellis Island aroung 1898 and that his family came from Poland and not Lithuania like I was told. Can you share any insite?