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Tale of two survivors united by the Shoah: Jacob and Rachel Kazimierek

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Two Polish Holocaust survivors from Poland. United by shared tragedies and strengthened by the love for the children they raised. Here is their story. 

Yakov “Jacob” Kazimierek was born in Mlawa, Poland, on December 10, 1926, one of the seven children of Abraham and Hannah (Granaska) Kazimierek. The family farmed and raised cattle, which they milked or slaughtered. 

After Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, thousands of the country’s Jews were subjected to the Nazis’ persecution, terror, and exploitation. Through the Nazi’s newly established “protective detention” orders, the Kazimierek family, along with other Jews, were moved to a Jewish ghetto. In 1942, Nazis deported the family to Treblinka. Hannah and the four youngest children were immediately sent to the gas chambers.

Physically failing under the brutal demands of forced labor, Abraham was selected for murder in the gas chamber. Another brother, Hans, eventually succumbed to disease and malnutrition.

The two surviving brothers endured years of starvation diets, forced labor, and brutal beatings.“[Jacob] had to hide his food or others would take it and he would die,” his cousin Regina Markowicz wrote in an account of his life. “He worked very hard and was treated like an animal. He slept on a wood or cement slab and endured terrible winters without adequate clothing, bedding, or shoes.” Jacob bore the physical signs of his imprisonment—scars on his back from the metal slats in his bed, one finger permanently disfigured from a beating, and of course, the tattoo number “76341,” the number tattooed on his arm—on his body—for the rest of his life.

Shortly before the liberation of Auschwitz, Jacob managed to escape. Although the exact details vary in family lore—in one scenario, he escaped on a bicycle; in another telling, he and two friends escaped posing as Germans—Jacob spent the remainder of the war hiding in forests and cellars, subsisting on food foraged in the woods, stolen, or given by kind Polish Christian. After Auschwitz was freed, Jacob was reunited with his brother Aaron, leaving them as the only two of nine members of the Kazimierek family to survive. 

Sweden, a neutral country during the war, took in about 15,000 refugees, and Jacob and Aaron were among them to be sent to a displaced person’s camp in Jönköping, Sweden. Remembering the skills learned at his family’s home in Poland, Jacob worked in a slaughterhouse. In 1948, fleeing from a girlfriend who was pressing him into getting engaged, Jacob moved to Israel and enlisted in Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary organization that fought for Israel’s independence. Four years later, he returned to Jönköping, where he met a twenty-three-year-old woman, a fellow Holocaust survivor whose story was as tragic and heartbreaking as Jacob’s. 

The only child of a Jewish couple from Poland, Rachel Abromowitz Kazimierek was born on July 6, 1929. At the age of ten, she and her family were interred in the Lodz Ghetto. At the age of 13, she and her parents were among thousands of Jews deported to the concentration camps. After arriving at Auschwitz, she never saw her parents again. Rachel was placed in Bergen Belsen and assigned to work in the Wieliczka salt mines. Each day, she and other women were herded several miles each night, working in deplorable condition underground. She was freed on April 15, 1945. Her years of forced labor would have serious impacts on her visional health. 

Jacob, newly returned from Israel, and Rachel met at a dance in the displaced person’s camp. According to their daughter Hannah Lewanowski, their match was not as much born of love as of necessity. As the United States gave preference to married refugees, the couple married in November 1952. Their first child, Hannah, was born thirteen months later. Jacob’s surviving brother, settled in Sweden, where he lived with his wife and three children until his death in 1979. 

In 1954, Jacob, Rachel, and Hannah came to the United States, first settling in New Haven, Connecticut and then relocating to Waterbury. Initially working as a butcher at Bargain Food Center, he opened his own store, Brass City Beef in 1953, which he operated, with Rachel’s help, until his retirement in 1990. 

In a March 15, 2015, article in the Hartford Courant (“Holocaust survivor built new life in Waterbury”), Jacob was praised for the store’s personal service and competitive prices. “He had a good following,” said Tony Nardella, a former Waterbury police officer and customer. “He was well liked and always had a smile and a joke.”

“He came to this country with no money,” said Hannah.“He had no English. He worked seven days a week. He made it.” The Kazimiereks developed a strong community with other Holocaust survivors. They socialized with each other, often sitting around a large table sharing schnapps and pastries while the children played together. 

Meanwhile, Rachel continued to deal with eye infections, possibly a result of working in the mines. In 1961, she had her left eye surgically removed and was fitted with a prosthetic eye. In 1966, she had a detached retina, which resulted in vision loss in her right eye. From that time on, the children were cared for by a nanny. Determined, Rachel moved on with her life, using a cane to walk. Despite her initially limited English, Rachel volunteered at the local Easter Seals to help other visually impaired individuals and visited schools to share stories of her Holocaust experiences. 

Jacob passed away in 2014. Rachel, 95, remains in the home she and Jacob originally purchased in Waterbury, Connecticut. She has 24-hour-care but still prides herself in her independence and cognitive abilities. “My brain, sweetheart, is very clear and very good,” she shared during a February 2025 interview. “I still remember birthdays and anniversaries,” she said, rattling off the important dates of her children and grandchildren. Freida Winnick, a daughter who lives near her in Connecticut, provides additional support and care.

Rachel attends monthly Holocaust survivor luncheons in West Hartford, Connecticut. She also attends presentations organized by “Voices of Hope,” a non-profit educational organization created by descendants of Holocaust survivors from across Connecticut to raise social awareness. 

Rachel emphasizes that she holds no ill will despite her harrowing past. “I am not against anyone,” she said. I get along with everybody.” 

Originally published May 15, 2025

Kazimierek Family
Photos of Jacob and Rachel Kazimierek

Holocaust Stories Needed!

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“You really need to talk to Harry.”

My friend Marilyn Glaser gave me this advice before one of our Friday night Shabbat services in our Florida synagogue. I was aware that Harry Lowenstein was a Holocaust survivor. But Marilyn, the shul president, knew I was a writer, and she knew his story needed to be preserved.

By this time, I had been writing for the (Capital Region, NY) Jewish World for over four years. The majority of my stories had been about my family: growing up in a small North Country town in New York; meeting my husband in 1973 to learning to live with him after our retirement in 2010; raising two children; moving to “The Sunshine State” in 2015. Up until that point, I had not tackled biographies. Fortunately, Harry was a willing story teller.

 As I sat at his kitchen table, I was riveted by his description of four years of hell, first in a ghetto and then in Nazi concentration camps. After liberation, Harry returned home to find that every one of his relatives had been murdered by the Nazis. He eventually made it to the United States, married Carol Sainker, raised three children, and owned and operated a clothing store in Kissimmee. Meanwhile, he was determined to carry on his family’s legacy. “I saw a synagogue burn,” said Harry, “and I was determined to build another one.” With the contributions from friends and fellow Holocaust survivors, the Lowensteins raised enough money to build our synagogue.

After Harry’s story was published, my writing became more diversified. I was still writing my sometimes funny, sometimes poignant family stories, but I also took pleasure from interviewing what I referred to as “ordinary people with extraordinary lives.” A woman who has raised over $150,000 for cancer research after losing her 32 year old daughter to leukemia. A man whose introduction to a doomed ship as a boy resulted in his becoming a “Titanic fanatic;” a group of former Catskill workers celebrating a reunion.

But the stories that moved me the most were about who lived through—or died in—World War II. Jewish soldiers. Concentration survivors who were haunted with their memories until their passing. Righteous gentiles who had rescued others from the horrors. 

I have never been shy about my retirement avocation and never fail to tell friends and strangers I am a writer. This summer, I shared this information with Eva Nozik, who was visiting Summit County, Colorado. 

“My aunt, Golda Goldin Gelfer, who recently passed away, was a Holocaust survivor,”Eva said.”You need to talk to her children.” 

She set up a Zoom call with Anna Livits and Sofia Zukerman, Golda’s two daughters, and other members of the Goldin family. The Nazis, they told me, invaded Glusk, Belarus, on June 22, 1942, Golda’s 14th birthday. Six months later, Germans and local supporters rounded up and murdered over 1000 Jews, including Golda’s mother Elke and her two sisters, Chaisoshe (19) and Malka (8). Golda and her father Meir escaped certain death by hiding in an attic and eventually finding their way into the forest. The two soon joined Soviet partisans in their efforts to sabotage the Nazi offensive until Belarussian liberation on July 4, 1944. Several revisions (and many nightmares about the Holocaust) later, it was finished and ready The Jewish World’s next issue.

Even before it was published,, Anna expressed her gratitude. “I don’t have enough words to thank you for the work you have done,”she wrote me in a December 13 email. “I had a dream today that my mom was smiling. It’s like  she was in peace that we remember her family, Elke, Chaisoshe, and Malka.”

The descendants of Meir and Elke Goldin have more stories to tell. They are eager to recount Golda’s time in the woods, her life in the Soviet Union after the war, her move with her children to the United States. They also want me to connect with the son of a cousin who survived “murder by bullets” by falling into the pit.And, by the way, they have a friend whose parents survived the Warsaw ghetto. 

Meanwhile, I have other stories on my “To Be Written” file. My cousin Eric (Z’L) Silverman came over on a stolen visa just before the war. Trudi Larkin Wolfe’s parents, both concentration camp survivors, recently passed away, but their oral history is preserved on video as part of Stephen Spielberg’s Shoah project, and she and her sister will fill in any gaps. Ruth Gruber, a brilliant Jewish woman who was appointed by the FDR administration to oversee the Oswego Project, a refuge for Jews that is the subject of a New York State Museum exhibit. And I made a promise to a friend that I would write an article about his father, who came to the United States in the early 1900s via, of all places, China.

After hearing Golda’s story at the most recent meeting of SOL Writers, my group of fellow writers said that I am “a woman on a mission.” “You make the unbearable bearable,” one said. “Keep writing.”

Despite my passion, I initially questioned about pursuing more stories about this terrible time in humankind’s history.The Holocaust has already been the subject of innumerable novels, memoirs, plays, movies, and, and even children’s books.

I found the answer in a teaching from Pirkei Avot, a compilation of the ethical teachings and maxims from Rabbinic Jewish tradition. “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work,” wrote Rabbi Tarfon (46 CE-117 CE), “but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.” (Pirkei Avot 2:21) When the Anti-Defamation League reports that Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms have “cracks in enforcement” that allow Holocaust deniers to disseminate hate speech; when a school administrator in Texas can tell a group of educators during a training session to “have an opposing view” when teaching the Holocaust; when 77 years after Soviets liberated Auschwitz, anti-semitism is on the rise; I must continue to tell the stories. My writing will certainly not “complete” the work of masters such as Elie Wiesel, Victor Frankel, and Steven Spielberg. But I cannot use that as an excuse.Whether my articles and, in the future, my book is widely read or languishes in an Amazon warehouse, at least I did not “desist.”

But I need help. If any of you have a Holocaust story you would like to be preserved in writing, please contact me via email at shapcomp18@gmail. com. Those who were lost as well as those who survive deserve to have their lives remembered and honored. Never again.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Jewish World News, a bi-weekly subscription-based newspaper in upstate New York.

Oregon Holocaust Memorial

What Makes Us the Same? Trip to Shoah Museum Inspires Writer to Find Commonality

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oregon-holocaust-memorial

On a recent visit to Portland, Oregon, Larry and I visited the Holocaust Memorial. A pathway strewn with bronze sculptures of unfinished lives—a violin, a teddy bear, a torn prayer book, —brought us to a curved wall. Two columns were engraved with the brief history of the events that led to Hitler’s rise and its unfathomable consequences on Europe and the world. Plaques etched with memories from survivors are placed on a wall representing barbed wire. One read “As I looked back, my mother turned her face to avoid mine and my little sister gave me a frail and knowing wave;” another, “The fear has never left me.”On the back of wall were carved the names of family members of Oregonians who were lost in the Shoah. Below the names was the following statement:

Our precious life rests not on our ability to see what makes us different, one from another, but rather on our ability to recognize what makes us the same. What ultimately defines us is the moral strength to believe in our common humanity, and to act on this belief.

These words struck me especially hard on that beautiful June afternoon. Larry and I had flown out of Florida just days after the Orlando Pulse tragedy. As I stood in front of the memorial, I was overwhelmed with grief for all those lost in the Shoah.  I also thought of those innocent lives lost to another madman who could only focus on differences and destroy so many lives with another act of senseless violence.  I began to reflect on my own live  and question as to whether I had done enough to focus on “what makes us the same.”

As a child, I knew I was different from most of the people in our small upstate New York town. Along with one other family, we were eleven Jews in a Christian town, an overwhelming .5% of the population. There were a few anti-Semitic instances: A teenage boy yelling “Heil Hitler!” and giving me the Nazi salute as the six-year-old me played innocently on my front yard; “lost” invitations to parties by those my parents tagged as anti-Semites; whispered jokes about my Jewish nose that went unnoticed by my teachers. For the most part, however, the people Keeseville embraced us, shared their Christmas trimming with us; came over for matzoh brie around our formica covered kitchen table. We focused on what we have in common.

Although exposed to diversity on our family’s visits to New York City , as a student at University at Albany, and through—as always— countries and cultures explored through reading, my everyday encounters rarely took me far from my white, Judeo-Christian environment. This changed, however,  when I took a teaching position with the Capital District Educational Opportunity Center

The EOC, a  division of Hudson Valley Community College, offers tuition-free academic and workforce development opportunities to disadvantaged and educationally under-prepared New York State residents sixteen years and older. Through my interactions with staff and students, I learned to appreciate many different cultures and backgrounds and their personal struggles. A Muslim pharmacist,  after being imprisoned in her native country for giving medicine to a Christian, disguised herself as a Bedouin to flee to Egypt then to Albany. A young man had escaped with his family as one of the Vietnamese boat people. Both completed our GED and College Preparation Program and  then graduated from Hudson Valley Community College. One of my fellow instructors had overcome a troubled background in Schenectady’s inner city to graduate from the cosmetology program, open his own salon, and then come back to the EOC to instruct hundreds of cosmetology students in the technical and life skills to succeed in his chosen field.  I may have taught my students essay writing and grammar and study skills, but the people I encountered at the EOC taught me about courage and dignity and overcoming incredible obstacles. Our differences were secondary to our common goal of creating a better life for ourselves and our families. We all believed in our common humanity and acted on those beliefs. Even when I moved out of the classroom and into an administrative position, my greatest joy was meeting with students, having them share their stories with me, and promote the EOC through its many different success stories.

In the past few weeks, our country has experienced numerous tragedies that resulted from actions by those who failed to believe in the common humanity. Orlando, Florida. St. Paul, Minnesota. Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Dallas,Texas. The list of cities where incidents of senseless violence continues to grow.

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice,” wrote the late Elie Wiesel, “but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” My protests may not take me to the streets, but it will take me to the written word, where I hope I can make a difference.

But maybe, it must start with children. When we lived in Clifton Park, our next door neighbors were an interracial couple—he a Caucasian from Massachusetts and she a Whitney Houston look-alike from Jamaica. We shared our yards and our lives with them and their four children who had inherited their mother’s brown eyes, mocha skin, and curly hair. One day, Julie and Katie, who were the same age, were shopping for matching lockets.  When we brought the jewelry up to the counter, Julie, my blue eyed, blonde haired daughter, announced to the sales clerk, “I know we look like twin sisters. We’re not. We’re just best friends.”

Best friends. Or just friends or neighbors or fellow citizens. Whatever it takes, let us all strive to recognize what makes us the same, to prevent injustice, to repair the world. Tikkun Olam. Amen.

Originally published July 22, 2016. Revised April 2025. 

Photo of Oregon Holocaust Memorial courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.