In Memoriam

IN MEMORIAM
Mary Baran/Roza Kluger

Dear friends,

I am very sad to tell you that my mother died in Montreal on Wednesday, October 22. The night before, she watched "Tootsie" (for the umpteenth time) with Angela, a caring staff member at her nursing home, and they laughed uproariously. On Wednesday she was well and cheerful, read a magazine, and enjoyed every last bite of lunch. Afterwards, she lay down for a nap on a golden fall afternoon, and had a fatal arrhythmia. She was 87.

I have spoken of her in the context of our recent revelations and my history with her in that regard, as well as my first reactions to the discovery. I wanted to tell you a little more about her and her life, and how much of what I value in my own life I learned from her. She was born on March 11, 1923 in Przemysl, Poland. She was an outgoing, vivacious, very attractive and intelligent young woman growing up before the war. She learned many languages fluently, English, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Russian, German, Italian, French, ancient Greek, Latin and, I recently discovered, Hebrew and Yiddish. (My uncle just gave me her book of off-color Yiddish jokes, where I found a number of grammar corrections in her hand). She played the accordion amazingly, dancing with a big 120 bass Scandalli like it was made of paper. She was also a virtuoso whistler -- she had practiced under the covers at night when she was a child. She was close to her handsome and gentle brother, Zygmunt, two years her junior, and to her parents, Dorka (Halpern), an incomparable cook, and Bernard Kluger, a powerfully built machinist with an almost Zen aura of peacefulness. The family was not deeply religious, but they observed the holidays and traditions of a Jewish household.

Mary was eighteen when the war broke out, but still went to Lwow and studied medicine until the Germans invaded Russia. She returned to Przemysl where she was interred in the ghetto, and did forced labor. She met my father Jakub Cytryn around this time, a civil engineer whose mother's brother was the revered David Guzik, JDC Director in Poland. Around the time of the first set of Aktions she and her parents escaped with forged documents and new identities, surviving the war by hiding in a dirt floor hut owned by a Polish man named Sawitzki in Mogila (outside of Krakow). She supported her parents by bicycling many kilometers every day to work in a tobacco factory. Zygmunt survived the war, too, fighting with the First Polish Armored Division under General Maczek that became part of the First Canadian Army. Many other relatives were lost in the Holocaust. My father was the only one of his large immediate family who survived.

After the war, Mary lived with my father, now known as John Baran, in Silesia, where she ran his construction office. I was born in Zabrze in 1947. In 1949 we emigrated to Israel. We fled Poland with almost no possessions, but Mary would not leave without our enormous black Giant Schnauzer, Peter, a German messenger dog whom she rescued at the end of the war when he was about to be shot by the retreating army. Peter was undoubtedly the only Nazi-trained dog to make Aliyah. Later Peter drowned off the beaches of Tel Aviv, and my parents walked up and down the sand for weeks looking for him.

We emigrated to Montreal in 1951, and Mary taught Kindergarten and finished a
Ph.D. in Classics. She worked hard, raised me, struggled with anxiety and
depression, and also struggled in a sometimes difficult marriage. My father's
war experiences had wrought their damage on him, too, but she was devoted to him for life.

She was a natural teacher, and had immense patience, with me, and with the hundreds of Kindergarten students fortunate enough to start their school careers in her "magic kingdom" of a classroom. She taught me to love learning, and to
approach the world with intellectual curiosity. She taught me to love music, not just passively, but with hands-on gusto. Even when she stopped recognizing people and didn't speak, she could sit down at the little keyboard in her room and play through a Gershwin tune, in time and with all the complicated chords. She taught me to fall madly in love with animals, starting, of course, with Peter. She had a wicked sense of humor, and even when rendered non-verbal by Alzheimer's, she'd make sight gags with small props. She taught me to find humor in the detail of everyday life. And she tried to teach me, not altogether successfully, to be "a mild judge of others," as her beloved father Bernard had put it.

Like her father, Mary had endless stories and sayings, an "apropos" for every occasion. When someone proposed an activity she had decided not participate in, she would say "Include me out!" I hear myself using the phrase now and then, in her intonation. After a long, complex life, Mary included herself out. I feel the loss even more keenly having just found a large piece of her life she had successfully hidden for so long.

-- Roma Baran

Edward Wichura 1927 - 2006

Obituary by Lukasz Biedka

The Jewish-Polish actor Edward Wichura passed away on June 4, 2006 in Warsaw. Born in Przemysl on July 5, 1927 as Esriel Leimsieder, he was the son of Moritz Hut of Zablotka, Brody and Mirla Leimsieder.

Wichura was the only survivor from the final liquidation of the Przemysl Ghetto - the Nazi transport from Zwangsarbeitslager Przemysl to the Stalowa Wola forced camp during September, 1943. He lost all his entire family in the Shoah - his father was beaten to death by Germans while his mother and sister perished in gas chambers of Belzec.

After graduating from the Polish State Theatrical Academy in 1951, he made his stage debut at the Nowy Theater in Lodz where he remained a featured player until 1961. Edward then moved to Warsaw, where he acted in several prominent theaters – Polski (1962-65), Klasyczny (1965-69), and Rozmaitosci (1972-88).

A highly regarded and universally recognised face in Polish cinema, Wichura appeared in lead and supporting roles in at least 25 feature films from 1953 to 1989. He was also popular on the small screen, playing major parts in several dramatic and action series on Polish television, including the role of Shmaltzovnik, a policeman who blackmails Jews (“Kolumbowie”, 1970.)

Edward Wichura left behind a short testimony entitled “Notes of my memory – on Jewish martyrdom in Przemysl ghetto” which will be published next year by the Polish Center for Holocaust Research.

Dr. John Hartman's Obit of Rozia Felner

Obituary Department: New York Times

This is pertinent information about the death of Ernestyna Felner, the last remaining Jewish woman in Przemysl Poland who survived the Holocaust.

Sincerely,

John J. Hartman, Ph.D.

Executive Director, Remembrance and Reconciliation, Inc.

300 S. Hyde Park Avenue, Suite 150

Tampa, FL 33606

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ERNESTYNA FELNER, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR DIES AT 92

Ernestyna Rozia Felner died in Przemysl, Poland on October 22, 2006 at the age of 92 after a short illness. Mrs. Felner was the last Jewish woman known to have survived the Holocaust in her home town where she lived all of her life. Born Ernestyna Alweiss, she married her husband, Edmund, an accountant. When the Germans invaded Poland in September, 1939 her two brothers, Pinkas and Jakob, were among 600 Jewish men killed by special ethnic cleansing units of the SS known as Einsatzgruppen. She and her husband were forced to live in the Ghetto created by the SS , but they escaped before the first transports took the inhabitants of the Ghetto, including the remainder of her family, to the death camp at Belzec. They were hidden by Ukrainians in a secret second story room where they survived the war. She worked as an economic planner after the war and after her husband’s death in 1978 became a living symbol of Jewish life in this eastern Polish town on the Ukrainian border. Her life story was recounted in the book, ‘I Remember Every Day..’ The Fate of the Jews of Przemysl During World War II. Ironically, her death came on the very day that a ceremony was held commemorating the restoration of the Jewish cemetery and memorializing the Jews of Galicia who died in the Holocaust.