Zarki 2010
In September 2010 my husband Norm Abramson and I met Roman Weinfeld in Warsaw. The three of us traveled together to Częstochowa, Łódź and Żarki. Roman and I had been exchanging email about our shared genealogy for over a year. We first met face to face in 2010. Our September trip together started us thinking that perhaps we should write a book about the Halborn family.
Żarki, of course, is not the original home of the Halborn family. But it is the town in which the Halborn surname first surfaced and where available records of its Jewish community, particularly the census of that community conducted in 1791-1792, allowed us to reach as far back as we have been able to go — at least so far.
In Żarki we hoped to locate the graves of some of our Halborn ancestors. Żarki is a small town and much of the old section is easily accessed on foot. Our first stop was the new municipal office building where we met with Katarazyna Kulinska-Pluta. Ms. Kulinska-Pluta provided some background about the town and kindly helped us go through reconstructed records of the town's Jewish Cemetery. But the search uncovered nothing definitive. As in Częstochowa, burial records in Żarki are incomplete and grave locations have been obscured by war and vandalism.
Next we decided to walk to the Żarki Jewish Cemetery. Along the way we came across a woman who was walking home from the municipal office. Roman stopped her to ask directions to the cemetery and an interesting conversation followed. Her name is Stanislawa Nowak. She is a former chairwoman of the Żarki town council and a retired director of the town schools. After the war, Ms. Nowak collected the school records of Jewish children who had lived in Żarki before the war and personally carried them to Yad Vashem so that they could be archived and included in the data base of Holocaust victims. She also told us that two Żarki families had hidden Jews during the Holocaust and had been named by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
Here are some photographs from our 2010 trip to Żarki, including one of Stanislawa Nowak talking with Roman on a Żarki street.
