The final part of an 8 part series of posts on the memoir of Ted Sears. After Ted retired he became convinced he needed to leave a permanent record of his past for his children, and for others —both those who knew about the Holocaust and Holocaust deniers. His memoir was a work of great effort and was the direct result of that conviction. The short letter to his sister, below, was written as part of that effort.

This is part 7 of an 8 part series of posts on the memoir of Ted Sears. In May, 1946, the first group of survivors to enter the United States under the Truman Directive arrived in New York aboard the Marine Flasher, a ship that had been used during the war to transport American troops across the Atlantic. Eight months later, on the same ship, Ted and Mickey Sears made the same journey after spending more than a year in Föhrenwald.

This is part 6 of an 8 part series of posts on the memoir of Ted Sears. Ted and his brother found a haven at Föhrenwald, a former German army base that had been turned into a displaced persons camp after the war. Föhrenwald offered food, shelter, companionship and assistance in re-uniting families and in finding new lives for the victims of the Holocaust in new countries far from the horrors of the past.

This is part 5 of an 8 part series of posts on the memoir of Ted Sears. After the SS fled, leaving Mühldorf survivors, including Ted Sears and his older brother Mickey, on the railroad siding in Seeshaupt, the two brothers roamed through the American occupied zone of Germany. As the search for food became less pressing, the need to know what had happened to their family grew and they returned home to Debrecen.

This is part 4 of an 8 part series of posts on the memoir of Ted Sears. On the morning of April 30, 1945, 15 year old Ted and his 17 year old brother, Mickey, woke in a freight car where they had spent three days without food or water. This is the story of how he and his brother Mickey escaped the Nazis.

This is part 3 of an 8 part series of posts on the memoir of Ted Sears. This excerpt is a part of a chapter Ted wrote on life in Debrecen, Hungary, before the war and before his family was sent to Auschwitz. It recounts the family's Chanukah celebrations in the mid 1930s.

This is part 2 of an 8 part series of posts on the memoir of Ted Sears. Three weeks after his incarceration at Auschwitz, Ted and his brother were sent to the slave labor camp at Mühldorf. A sub-camp of Dachau, Mühldorf was one of several underground factories the Nazi's constructed near the end of the war to enable the continued production of munitions and aircraft.

This is part 1 of an 8 part series of posts on the memoir of Ted Sears. Ted was a member of my husband Norm’s family, married to Norm’s cousin Arlene. Ted was a Hungarian Jew and a holocaust survivor, just 14 when his family was shipped from Hungary to Auschwitz and not yet 16 at the end of the war. The memoir is now part of the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Sara Tenenberg, who is in her late 80s, lives with her son in Berlin. She is still active and recently worked with a Warsaw klezmer band, teaching them Yiddish songs. This YouTube video was taken of Sara, singing a Yiddish tango with a klezmer band during the 2011 Warsaw Music Festival.

Zalma Tenenberg was born in Częstochowa, Poland in 1894. He was the second of eight children of Moszek Lejb and Chaszka Halborn Tenenberg and the uncle of Mojżesz Tenenberg, who's story we have outlined in another post. Here we relate Zalma's story.

I shared these thoughts with Mary Seidler a month before her father Jerzy's death. They were intended originally for Mary and for her niece, Anastasia Seidler, daughter of her brother Paul Seidler, who died in 2014. I’ve posted these thoughts and photos with Mary's permission.

For the past five years Roman Weinfeld and I have been trying to trace the descendants of three of the six children born in Żarki to Ankiel and Chasia Halborn — Liba, born in 1816, Chana, born in 1826, and Berek, born in 1830. In the past year, we were able to re-connect with two living branches of Berek Halborn’s family. This is an account of what we found.

This is a 3 minute home movie of Halborn descendant Roman Freulich and family camping at Big Pines in the Angeles National Forest in southern California, 1937. Family members include wife Katia and daughters Judy and Joan, as well as Katia’s sister Miriam and her husband Louis Bernstein.

In September, 2010 my husband and I traveled to Poland with our cousin Roman Weinfeld, also a Halborn descendant. One place we visited was Częstochowa, a city in southern Poland on the Warta River which currently has about 200,000 inhabitants. My father's family was from Częstochowa including his mother and my grandmother, Nisla Mirla Halborn.

These are photographs of some of our ancestors who immigrated in the last years of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. For some we have only a single, low resolution photograph. Others appear more than once, in groups with siblings or spouses and children. These are the people who braved the trip and the entry process and made it possible for us to grow up as native born Americans along with our many cousins, and our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren.

This story is about Hollywood  photographer Jack Freulich, the oldest son of Nisla Halborn and Isaac Frejlich. Jack’s pioneering career as a photographer in the movie industry was cut short by his early death, and he was largely unrecognized for years. But the Internet has brought a resurgence of interest in old photographs – particularly Hollywood photographs – and this has led to rediscovery of Jack's work. It has also led to a considerable amount of confusion and mislabeling of some of his fine portraits.

This is the story of Roman Freulich, youngest child of Isaac Freulich and Nisla Halborn Freulich. Born in 1898, he emigrated to the United States in 1912 where his older brother Jack Freulich had already established a life as a photographer in New York. After serving in World War 1, Roman was offered a job working along side his brother Jack and Jack’s son Henry as a photographer on the staff of Universal Pictures in Hollywood.

Henry Freulich was the son of Jack Freulich and the grandson of Isaac Freulich and Nisla Halborn Freulich. As far as we know, he was the first Halborn descendant to be born in the United States, in New York City on April 14, 1906. Like his father Jack and uncle Roman, Henry was a photographer for the movie studios in Los Angeles.