An Heirloom to ‘Remember’ : Books: A Newport Beach man spent $50,000 to self-publish his family history and honor 115 relatives who died in concentration camps.

For nearly three years Isidore Myers has been obsessed with researching, writing and publishing a book he has no intention of selling.

“Remember: A Book to Honor the Family I Never Knew” is a self-published labor of love designed to preserve Myers’ family history and, in so doing, keep alive the memories of 115 Polish relatives verified to have been murdered in Nazi extermination camps during World War II.

Indeed, only one of Myers’ relatives living in Poland at the beginning of the war survived the Holocaust.

“We had absolutely no documented history of our family or heritage, and I felt if I could re-create as much as I possibly could it would be a legacy for my children and future generations,” said New York City-born Myers, who felt that if he did not undertake this formidable task, his family’s history would be lost forever.

The amply illustrated 279-page book includes detailed genealogies of both maternal and paternal sides of Myers’ family, with family reminiscences and excerpts from old letters fleshing out his family’s story.

To provide a broader overview of Poland during the war, Myers also includes excerpts from books written about the Holocaust and testimonials of death camp survivors. There’s even a glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish terms and answers to “36 questions often asked about the Holocaust.”

For his two sons, Jay and Todd, Myers said the book “is like family background and roots they never knew existed, and they never imagined the (total) devastation of the Holocaust.” Myers, 75, said he has been told by officials at several Holocaust research centers that “Remember” may be the only book that attempts to trace and document what happened to a single family during the Holocaust.

(Tiny Stars of David after family members’ names indicate that they were victims; one of Myers’ uncles, Smiel Schneiderman, not only has a star after his name, but there are stars after eight of his children’s names.)

“There were 6 million Jews lost in the Holocaust, and 6 million is a statistic very few people can fathom,” Myers said. “But when you trace a family that was totally wiped out, it becomes a microcosm of what happened to (all) Jewish families during the Holocaust.”

Myers, who spent $50,000 to publish and print 1,000 copies of his book, has donated about half of them to libraries and Holocaust centers.

In a letter to Myers, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, calls the book “a monumental and wonderful work.”

Joan Kaye, executive director of the Orange County Bureau of Jewish Education, which plans to use “Remember” in a course on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust for Jewish high school students, calls it “a wonderful tribute to (Myers’) family and all those who perished in the Holocaust.”

The book grew out of Myers’ long-planned first--and only--trip to Poland in 1989. Joining him, his wife Penny and his sister, Goldie Singer of Laguna Hills, were nine Israeli relatives, including cousin Mendel Barenholtz, the family’s sole Holocaust survivor from Poland who fled to Russian at the war’s outbreak.

The family’s primary destination: Wlodawa (pronounced Vlo-da-va), the small river town on the Polish-Russian border where Myers and Singer’s mother and father lived before emigrating to the United States in the early part of the century.

“We had heard about it all our lives,” said Myers, who includes a chronicle of the trip in his book. “We went to visit the town and just see where (their relatives) had lived and things like that, but then it turned out to be an emotional thing.”

Their itinerary included a visit to Sobibor extermination camp five miles outside Wlodawa where most of their relatives--and more than 250,000 other Polish Jews--were murdered.

“That was the camp that was exclusively for processing Jews to their death,” Myers said. “It took less than an hour from the time they entered camp to the time they went into the ovens. You read about these things and hear about them, but when you meet them face to face it just grabs you.”

Returning home from the trip, Myers continued to be haunted by the sight of a large glass-encased tomb filled with human ashes and bone fragments. As he writes in the book’s preface:

“I felt compelled to turn the ashes and bones into my relatives, who most likely were part of this woeful display. I became obsessed with finding out the names, relationships, faces and other evidence about them. I had to restore their memory and the facts about how they were exterminated.”

Myers, who had taken several hundred pictures on the trip, initially planned to do a photo essay, “but then I realized it didn’t begin to tell the story.”

Doing research for the book “was like turning stones,” he said. “Each time one stone was turned over I realized how much more had to be done. What I thought would take a few months became a total dedication and a total commitment.”

Myers said he made hundreds of phone calls and “wrote letters to anybody I thought would know anything about the town or the family.” He also did extensive library research. “It was like gathering a bunch of threads and making a quilt out of it,” he said.

Myers, who had inherited two-dozen old photographs from his parents, also was able to glean information from a few of their letters, which had to be translated from Yiddish.

“Whatever little snippets of information I could run across, it was like a treasure,” he said. “See, almost everything Jewish in Poland was destroyed during World War II.”

Myers, a successful Newport Beach businessman who owns an industrial and commercial real estate management and investment company, views publishing the book as his most important accomplishment.

“Almost everything I’ve done in my life has been for business or economic reasons,” he said. “I feel I’m leaving something very important not only to our family but to (all) Jewish people.”

As Myers writes in the book’s preface: “By gaining knowledge of our roots and paying tribute to the memory of our kin who were Holocaust victims, we rob Hitler of his ultimate victory--the loss of their memories.”