LI woman solves her family’s Shoah puzzle

Last week, Leba Sonneberg, a resident of North Woodmere, traced her father’s escape from Germany before the Shoah, and discovered what had happened to her grandparents and uncle during the war. She came upon this information late in her father’s life, and after he passed away her journey continued.

I resolved to travel to Mszana Dolna to visit Kever Avot and try to find more information about what had happened to my uncle from the day of the massacre (8/19/42) until the day of his death (12/25/42). I contacted a woman named Agnieska Jozefika who worked for the mayor and she agreed to find a guide to assist me, but the trip was delayed for various reasons, including my February wedding to Alter Glass; my granddaughter Sigal’s Bat Mitzvah and Pesach were coming up soon after that.

During the wedding, my sister Rena encountered two of my father’s cousins, Josh Adler and Margaret Sussman, and mentioned my research into Mszana Dolna and my plan to visit Poland. As it turned out, Josh Adler’s nephew, Rabbi Aron Adler of Yerushalayim, was leading a tour to Poland in July 2013. The rest is history.

The 10-day tour was life-changing. We visited cities where Jewish life was active and rich before the war, saw magnificent restored shuls and the remnants of many that were left in destruction, visited cemeteries where gedolim and martyrs were buried, visited concentration camps and saw firsthand the horrors that we read about for so many years. It was extremely difficult in the short time that we were in Poland to process all the history that was imparted to us by our brilliant guide Rabbi Aron Adler.

The highlight for me was the morning that my sister Rena and I spent in Mszana Dolna with Joanna Huber, our guide from the town. We were shown where the shul once stood and where the Jewish neighborhood had once been. We visited the old cemetery which miraculously had not been destroyed by the Nazis. We were taken to a grave where 22 Jewish men were murdered by the Nazis on June 15, 1942. Then we came to the area of my grandparents’ gravesite. Although I knew through my research that the area was well kept by the town I was not prepared for what I saw. At the road there was a brass plaque mounted on a large stone dedicated to the memory of the Jews of Mszana Dolna.

An attractive brick walkway named The Alley of The Holocaust led to the gravesite. There is also a large sign with a full description, in Polish, of all that happened to the Jews of Mszana Dolna on Aug. 19, 1942. Rena and I walked the path walked by 881 Jews; we wept at the sight of the matzava and said the appropriate tefilot and lit yahrtzeit candles. We left photos and a family tree of the 22 descendants (to date, kain yerbu) of Leibe Feige z’l and Nachum Stern z’l, who came to exist because their son, our father, Yisroel Yitzchak Stern z’l, had the foresight to leave Europe in 1937.

Shortly before leaving the town, our guide there asked us if we knew Moses Aftergut, an individual who had been visiting the town every year on the yahrtzeit of the massacre. The moment she uttered the name it triggered a memory. Rena and I looked at each other. We immediately realized that he was the person we were looking for, the man who disclosed our family’s history to our father. She promised to email to me the information about Mr. Aftergut so that I might contact him.

After I returned home from Poland I was all the more obsessed with my family research project. I called Mr. Aftergut and he confirmed that he was the man who contacted my father to tell him what had happened to his family and to provide the yahrtzeits. I wanted to hear more from him but it was difficult on the phone. He agreed to meet with me in the near future.

Another strange turn of events occurred a few weeks later when I had dinner with two close friends from work. They both knew about my family research and were eager to hear about my trip to Poland. When I mentioned Moses Aftergut one of my friends, Carol Lempel, jumped out of her seat. “I know him,” she said — her father knew him in Poland and Mr. Aftergut was at her wedding. She too wanted to meet with Mr. Aftergut because he had letters that her father, who passed away some years ago, had written to him.

Meanwhile, I learned from my friend Tamara that Mr. Aftergut’s grandson was soon to be bar mitzvahed. Her cousin Chani graciously invited me.

At the bar mitzvah, in a shul in Flatbush not far from where I grew up, Mr. Aftergut told me about life in Mszana Dolna. He described the personalities of my grandparents and my uncle. He said that one day, while he and his friend Naftali (my uncle) were working on a road for the Nazis, a soldier approached and said that he was taking Naftali to a convalescent home in Rabka because he was too sick to do the work. Soon after that, Mr. Aftergut continued, he received a letter from my uncle which he recited to me verbatim in Yiddish, then translated.

The letter said to consider the 17th day of Tevet as his yartzeit as he knew that he would not be alive another day and to get that information to his brother Yisrael Stern in America if possible.

The letter contained an address in Boro Park and a telephone number which was the last contact information that he had. Mr. Aftergut told me that he was in Bolivia for some time after leaving Poland and he arrived in Boro Park in 1946, the contents of the letter in his head. When he met my father, Mr. Aftergut almost fainted because he looked so much like Naftali that he thought it was techiat hamaitim (resurrection of the dead). With great difficulty he gave my father the details about the 1942 massacre and he related the words of the letter he received from Naftali with his yahrtzeit. At the time of this meeting, Moses Aftergut was about 20 years old and my father was 25. He then went on to describe to me his many trips back to Mszana Dolna for the yahrtzeit of the massacre and the ceremonies that are conducted there each year by the mayor of the town, other dignitaries and school children. The matzava and the surrounding area are maintained by the municipality. He asked me to visit him at his home whenever possible in the near future so that we could talk further.

When we sat down to dinner I felt as if I finally came as close to closure with the past as I will ever be. I was seated at the table near my dear friend Tamara of 30 years who —unbeknownst to me all these years, through which we shared so many good times and hard times — was strongly connected to me through family and past events. I sat next to Tamara Klein and her mother Bertha Kurtz and her sister-in-law Marcy Kurtz, all whom I have known for many years,and I listened to Moses Aftergut, my uncle’s friend from Mszana Dolna, speak words of inspiration in Yiddish to his youngest grandson. It was truly a feeling of great fulfillment for me.