To find documentation on survivors, I’ve done traces through the US Holocaust Museum. I believe you can also use the Arolsen Archives as well. I’ve been able to find some documentation on survivors on the Arolsen’s website before requesting a trace too. . If the individual remained in Poland, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (genealogy division) may have some records as well. Good luck!

Sharon Fleitman
Atlanta, Georgia

In Russian:

 

На память М-ел Циле Бузик (возможно) от Моисея Гейщика (возможно).

Память о худших из плохих дней моей жизни, да пройдут они скорее, вздохнуть свободной грудью.

Дзыговко

Декабрь 1912

 

Translated into English:

 

In memory of M-el Tsilya Buzik (possibly) from Moisey Geischik (possibly).

The memory of the worst of the bad days of my life, may they pass sooner, breathe free chest.

M.J.G.  Dzygovko

December 1912

Translated by Michael Ryabinky
Boynton Beach, FL

Brenda,

--
Diane Jacobs, Somerset, New Jersey

Hello Luciana and Brenda,

I am replying to the group as this topic may be of interest to others.

Fund 383 in the Lithuanian State Central Archives (LCVA) contains documents related to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A number of files in this record group contain documents from the embassy in Riga. From a distance it is impossible to know what is in these documents. I see the following in the catalog:
LCVA/383/7/35 Documents on the activities of the embassy in Latvia, 1919-1920
LCVA/383/7/72 ditto, 1920-1921
LCVA/383/7/94 Documents of the activities of Lithuanian embassies and consulates, 1919-1920 (not specific to Latvia)
LCVA/383/7/265 and 266 Documents on the activities of the embassy in Latvia, 1921-1922

There are other, similar files.

LCVA/383/15 contains applications for foreign passports submitted to the Riga embassy. The Jewish ones have all been indexed by LitvakSIG and can be searched in the All-Lithuania Database.

Independent Lithuania came into existence in 1919. Prior to that, there were no Lithuanian embassies, in Riga or anywhere else.

Finally, if you are a donor to any of the LitvakSIG research groups, you can use your login credentials on the LitvakSIG website to access our Collective Data page. Among the record groups on this page are several of direct relevance to those researching Lithuanian Jews with a Latvia connection. Included are extracts of Latvian vital records, extracts from the 1897 census, extracts from Riga house registers (interwar period), and more.

Russ Maurer
Records Acquisition and Translation coordinator, LitvakSIG

My mother's family were Blums in Boston.  Her father was from Plock guborniya in what is now Poland.  Their name was Bluman and those who came to the US became either Blum or Bloom.
--


Doug Cohen
Sarasota, Florida
Lexington, MA

Shalom Luciana🌸
Coulb be that you have done me a favor!
 My grandfather who migrated to Leeds UK  was thought to have been born in Riga.
But his father..married twice originated from Kovna,Lithuania.
I never found any listings anywhere for him or his wives (not for want to searching on every possible search engine)
So... I shall enquire about those archives.
Best wishes,
Brenda Bernstein Habshush.
Israel.

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 05:24 PM, <rivke1@...> wrote:

Generally Jews were not considered to be good soldiers so when they were conscripted they were put into labour battalions rather than fight on the front.

Rita,
That's an outrageous anti-Semitic statement, if I've ever heard one.  This is what I heard while growing up from anti-Semites , despite numerous members of my family dying on the battlefield, leaving their children to grow up without fathers and others returning wounded .  It's a shame to see these statements on a Jewish Gen list.

Easy check on Wikipedia, shows that according to the Central archive of the Ministry of Defense of Russia, there were over half a million Jews in the Soviet army, including 167000 officers of all ranks.  During the war, 198000 died in battle, from wounds, and illnesses, or were missing in action.  That's 39.6%.   According to some sources, 120-180000 died on the battle field and about 80000 were murdered in the concentration/extermination camps.  Out of the remaining 300000, 180000 were wounded and out of that number 70000 heavily wounded.  According to one historian, 27% of Jewish soldiers voluntereed and 80% of privates and junior officers served in the forward-deployed units.

Mike Vayser

Greetings from Sydney Australia!

Although I cannot help with birth records I can provide some more information about why people went to Ufa - my parents lived there until 1946 when they were repatriated to Poland and my brother was born there. I am currently researching how and why people went to Ufa and other towns in the Soviet interior.

1. When Hitler invaded Poland 1st September 1939 and Stalin invaded from the east on 17 September hundreds of thousands (not just Jews) fled east into the Soviet zone. This Zone was known as the Eastern borderlands and was basically made up of Belorus and Ukraine. The decision was made in a rush, panic was everywhere but the overriding thought was communism or fascism? Hitler or Stalin? In testimonies those who went east made comments such as:
   a. There is plunder on the one hand and plunder on the other but the Russians plunder one as a citizen and a man while the Nazis plunder one as a Jew.
   b. And so one moment decides a person's fate - one runs this way, the other that way and neither knows what the future holds in store.  But what can the future hold for a Jew I ask? Here it is bad and there it's no good.

People went by any transport available but many on foot. Parents encouraged the young ones to go, families were broken up but ecpected to be reunited. More men than women went since they were in danger of being conscripted, Women wanted to stay with parents or didn't want to travel with little children. They often employed people smugglers to help them cross  the rivers to get to the Soviet side. The two major cities they went to were Bialystok and Lwow which became intensely overcrowded with little work available.

2. Stalin immediately wanted to turn his new territories into extensions of the communist state. Permanent residents immediately became Soviet citizens and a chaotic process called "Sovietization" began. As well as severe economic consequences, the NKVD quickly began to identify class enemies and other undesirables who were then deported to the gulags or special settlements. The refugees who had fled to the Soviet zone were offered Soviet "passports". If they refused they were to be sent back to Poland - one of Stalin's ruses. They were in fact put on cattle trains for weeks and weeks and travelled deep into remote territories to liv and work in appalling conditions.

Becoming a citizen could also mean being conscripted into the Red Army and then be sent anywhere they were needed. Generally Jews were not considered to be good soldiers so when they were conscripted they were put into labour battalions rather than fight on the front. I believe this is what happened to my father and why he ended up in Ufa where he worked on the railways. He even received an invalid pension after his leg was injured in a  railway accident. My mother also worked for the Red Army as a seamstress - her job was to sew the long Russian nightshirts worn by the officers.

3. When Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in June 1941, more chaos ensued.  Stalin ordered factories and war plants to be dismantled and put on trains to get them out of the hands of the Germans. He chose major centres such as Ufa where the factories and plants were rebuilt to provide machinery and vehicles for the war effort. He also evacuated betweeen 1 and 2 million civilians many of whom were needed to run the factories and work in them. Ufa was a particularly useful area - oilfields, railways, mines and a major waterway. So your relatives could have been caught up in these evacuations. I haven't ruled out the possibility that my parents were caught up in these evacuation also.
You say that your family were from Lwow originally but perhaps they were not Lwow born - perhaps they also fled to Lwow from Poland escaping Hitler. Even if they were Lwow natives they still might have taken the opportunity to escape the Nazi invasion.

The overwhelming tragedy of this story is that those Jews who had fled to the Soviet zone and were unable or unwilling  to move further east in June 1941 were then subject to the brutal murders perpetrated in Belarus and Ukriane by the Einsatzgruppen. About 1 million Jews were murdered. The irony was that those who were deported to "Siberia" survived and formed the She'erit Hapletah or the surviving remnant of the Jews of POland. Although up to 30% perished in Siberia due to  disease, hunger, hard labour and terrible weather, around 250,000 did ultimately survive and were repatriated to Poland mostly in 1946. Stalin did not set out intentionally to save these Jews - he was after all fairly anti-Semitic. It was more that he benignly accepted their presence and they were to come into good use post war (a completely different yet fascinating story).

This part of the Holocaust story has been largely neglected till recently - it's a story that fell through the cracks. Up till recently, a  holocaust  survivor was defined by being in a camp or in hiding or  under false papers. People who "ran away" could not be classed as survivors. Historians have begun unravelling this extraordinary tale. It's a story that has many parts - a most fascinating one is about about when the refugees and deportees were amnestied and the all flocked to Central Asia where they spent years in Tashkent and Samarkand and other exotoc places. 

It's a complex piece of history and has taken me along time and a lot of reading to unravel this geo-political tale. But I do hope this helps to explain part of the Lwow/Ufa story.

Rita Nash
Sydney
 







   

 

--
Susan Goldsmith
San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
jcwsmg@...
Researching GOLDSHMIDT, F(P)ILVINSKY, SHLIOMOVICH, GITTES (GADIE,GADYE, GIDUSH, GITES) Seta, Jonava, Kaunas, Adustiskes, Zemaiciu Naumiestes, Keidainiai, Ukmerge, Vandziogala, Lithuania

Jenny,
In the Soviet Union all metrical records were handed over to the civil authorities (Registry office - ZAGS in Russia, RAGS in Ukraine, etc) around 1920. All registrations after that time were recorded in that office using their standard forms for births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. After a certain number of years these records are turned over to the city or district archives.  Birth records for 1920 are definitely no longer in the Registry office, which is why I suggested to contact the city archive.  Naturally, there are privacy laws involved with these types of records and, hopefully, you can obtain the information for an event that took place 100 years ago.

Mike Vayser

hello from Paris
thank you for your answer
1) I do not know when they do in Ufa neither when they arrived
2) henry is born in 1920 in Ufa : does that mean it is available to ask to the civil authorities ?
3) they were in strasbourg in 1924 when my mother is born : I do not know what they do between
4) I wrote to the two adresses you gave me ; thanks again
thanks a lot
jenny Grosslerner

I’m trying to trace my grandfathers ancestors.  i believe the name had been changed. 
why is BLUM such a common name?   growing up
in michigan there weren’t that many, but in NYC There are a million.  i’ve not be able to find his naturalization papers, but his records show he was was Satanov/Sataniv.  His grave is also in a section with that city designation.  Any recommendation as to how i might find his original surname?  
thanks for any suggestions.  
--
Barbara Blum

snyder lipsky bemdersky grossberg

I'm currently using Ancestry, My Heritage and also GEDmatch as a comparison site, can anyone suggest any others, please? I love the tools on GEDmatch and comparing the Ancient DNA, but match-wise I don't appear to be finding matches above 55cm and largest segment 19.5, I'm gathering not everybody knows about this one? How does everybody get on with this one?

Mandy Molava
Researching Belarus, Brest, Hungary Galacia

On JewishGen, I find the following entry:

Pinkas HaNitzolim II, WASSERSZPRING, Irena; Warszawa, pg 280

Is there a way to order a copy of the original card which this survivor completed?  I am attempting to help Irena's son find information on his family.  Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Elizabeth Jackson

I need a English translation from the yizkor boob of zelow poland
--
Paulette Turner

From the online G.R.O. index this Simon Abrahams was 77 when he died.....

1890  D Quarter in MANCHESTER  Volume 08D  Page 232

Mike Coleman, London U.K.