Where Was Rafał?
Rafał Jeleń in front of the Lodz Altshul in March, 1938.
At the end of October 2017, Jewish Records Indexing Poland and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) announced an agreement to enable searches of the JDC Archives names database.
The newly available data gave us the opportunity to fill in a gap in in the story of our cousin Rafał. Our post about Nisla Halborn Freulich's grandson was called Cousin Rafal, and was on our website for a few months when the new JDC record source was announced. And surprisingly, we found his name in those records.
A Missing Link
A few years after the Holocaust, decades before records began to be digitized, one of Rafał's cousins, a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw, placed a record in Yad Vashem stating that Rafał had perished in the Łódź ghetto. Nothing else was known about his fate. But decades later, when digitized records became available, I found that Rafał's name was completely absent from Łódź Ghetto records.
Eventually, with the help of the International Tracing Service, I was able to find some information about Rafał's fate. But that information covered only the last seven months of World War Two. The earliest record was dated July 29, 1944. It documented Rafał's transfer from Kauen concentration camp in Lithuania to Dachau sub camp Kaufering, and his subsequent transfer on January 7, 1945 from Kaufering to Flossenbürg sub camp Leitmeritz. Other records dated from his time in Leitmeritz. And finally, several records showed that Rafał was included in a group of Leitmeritz survivors sent by the SS to Bergen-Belsen on March 7, 1945, just weeks before the end of the war.
In our earlier post about Rafał we speculated:
Did Rafał, like thousands of others, leave Łódź in the first days of war to find and join a Polish army unit or resistance group? Did he try to cross the border into Russian territory or seek refuge somewhere within Poland but away from the fighting? Was he caught up by Nazi troops while fleeing Łódź and sent, with thousands of other healthy young people for forced labor? Was he even in Łódź at the time of the Nazi invasion? Relatives who submitted information to Yad Vashem after the war seemed to think so. But unless some hidden cache of records still remains to be uncovered we will never be sure.
Vilnius and the American JDC
A search of the American Joint Distribution Committee archives produced a a letter and a list that explained why we could not find Rafał in Łódź ghetto records. The records shortened the five year gap in his history by only five months. But they did provide a partial answer to our questions. And they showed that the newly released JDC archive can be a useful resource for all of us searching for family members missing in other Holocaust records. The JDC archive can be accessed by following this link..
Like many of our family members, Rafał had left Lodz at the beginning of the Nazi invasion of Poland and fled to the northeast to Soviet controlled territory. He had headed to the Lithuanian city of Vilnius.
In the time between the two 20th century World Wars the American JDC had established one of its principle Eastern European offices in Vilnius. The city had a population of about 200,000 people before the war. About 55,000 of them were Jews. And in 1939 the city saw an influx of thousands more Jews from Poland and Germany.
Vilnius and Lithuania changed hands several times after the German invasion of Poland. For part of the time before the United States entered the war the JDC office in Vilnius remained open and workers attempted to assist refugees and to gain visas for as many as possible to leave Europe. But success was limited. And in February, 1940, Rafał was still in Vilnius along with thousands of Polish Jews who had fled before the advancing German army.
Cover letter sent from Vilnius office of the JDC in early 1940 accompanying a list of over 9,000 Polish refugees in Vilnius. Not all refugees were listed: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that in October 1939 between 12,000 and 15,000 Jewish refugees from German occupied Poland were in the city.
Rafał's name is number 2563 in the list of Polish refugees the Joint Distribution Committee was trying to assist in leaving Europe during early 1940.
Kovno - Kaunus - Kauen
In the last days of 1944, Rafał was in the Kauen concentration camp, located in what was left of the Lithuanian city of Kovno (Kaunus), about 100 kilometers to the southeast of Vilnius. The SS run camp was located in the remains of the Kaunus ghetto.
How and why he went from Vilnius to Kaunus is still not known. It is possible that in 1940 he fled once again, this time from Vilnius deeper into Soviet territory. It is more likely that he was already a slave laborer of the Nazis and was sent east by his captors. The record, so far remains silent and we will continue to search as more documents become available.
In our earlier post we noted; Almost five years — Holocaust years — are missing from Rafał's young life.
Rafał's final wartime months were spent in two slave labor sub camps before he and other survivors were transported or marched to Bergen-Belsen. One fact remains unchanged by the newly released JDC records: Rafał never arrived at Bergen Belsen. He did not survive the Holocaust.
Rafał Jeleń and his uncle, Roman Freulich, in Częstochowa, March 1938.
