The Internet Was Right

… and we were wrong.

In our Halborn family history book, we included a one page sidebar about Alina Halborn, who escaped from Poland in 1939 with her father, Samuel Halborn and her aunt, Helena Halborn.

During the first years of the war Samuel Halborn, his daughter Alina, and his sister Helena were assigned by Soviet authorities to the remote village of Bajsun in Uzbekistan, where Samuel Halborn worked as the village doctor and Alina attended school. Soviet authorities prohibited the three from leaving as long as the village could provide Alina with schooling.

But the village school only offered elementary level classes. So, when Alina completed elementary school her father applied for a new posting.

Using only family memories, which we may have misinterpreted, we made the assumption that Samuel and his daughter moved to Tashkent sometime in 1944 and remained there until they were allowed to return to Poland after the war. Somewhere, on an obscure website, we were even able to track down a photo of Alina and her school classmates at her new school. The photograph listed “A. Halborn” standing second from the right end of the second row. We sent the photo on to Alina’s descendants in Israel and they confirmed that “A. Halborn” was, indeed, their grandmother.

But there was a problem. The obscure website identified the photo as an orphanage for Polish children located in Stalinabad, Tajikistan rather than a children’s house called Stalinowet in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where the family recalled she was located. So . . . without further checking we made the assumption that there was an error on the Internet and the photo had been misidentified.

By the time we discovered documentary evidence that the Internet was correct and we were wrong, our book had been published.

How did we find this information? And where did it come from?

Well, as often happens, the confirmation of a stay in Tajikistan came to us in a very circuitous manner. Months after our book was published Roman Weinfeld discovered a registration form Samuel filed with the Central Committee of Polish Jews. That form (below) while it is far from exact on dates, states that Samuel and his daughter definitely spent time in Stalinibad, in Tajikistan.