Is It Asking Too Much for a Chance and Place to Remember?

Genia and Bill Spitzer wandered down Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade last week, looking for all the world like the middle-class American retirees they are--in town from Arizona to visit their daughter.

The Spitzers were off to see “The Piano,” until they changed their minds after someone told them that it was pretty sad.

“Not a sad one,” Genia said.

The Spitzers had had enough sadness that morning.

For a couple of hours, they had spoken matter of factly, in thick Polish accents, about living in Nazi-occupied Poland, surviving slave camps in Czechoslovakia and Siberia, and about how, even though half a century has passed, they hold onto the hope that somehow their entire families didn’t perish.

“I am still looking, I am still asking,” said Genia, 67. “But so far, it is almost 50 years and nobody showed up.”

The Spitzers are home in Tucson today, participating in special ceremonies that mark the end of Holocaust Remembrance Week. Their daughter, TV producer Perri Chasin, will be with them, making a speech about the trip she and her father made to Poland in 1991.

They went to find the place in the woods where Bill Spitzer’s parents were slaughtered.

All they found was a campground, some picnic tables, a memorial to Polish soldiers who died during the war and a sooty plaque inscribed with a few names in Hebrew.

But when they came home, father and daughter were determined that Bill’s parents--and those who had died with them--would not be forgotten.

*

Bill was 24 and living in Krakow when Germany invaded Poland. He escaped across the Russian border and ended up spending four years in a Siberian labor camp before joining the Polish Resistance. Wounded by a sniper, he finished the war in a hospital bed.

After the war, he returned to Krakow. He found only his brother, who delivered terrible news:

“He told me our parents was killed in Niepolomnice, in the woods, with 10,000 Jewish people that made the graves themselves and was shot in the back of the head.”

Genia, one of seven children, was only 12 when she was shipped from her hometown to a slave labor camp in Czechoslovakia with a trainload of other girls. She spent four years there.

“I seen girls die in front of me, from hunger from thirst,” she said. “Many times I envied them because I didn’t know if I was gonna survive.”

After the war, she met and married Bill, moved to Germany, and had a daughter, who was 2 1/2 when the family came to America. Two more children were born in New York.

Three years ago, Chasin and her father, now 78, returned to Germany.

“My daughter wants to know where she is born, so I took her to Germany. And when we was in Germany, I think, ‘I’ll show her where I was born,’ so I take her to Krakow.”

As the child of Holocaust survivors, Chasin said, she felt the trip was important to establish her identity: “You go to school and all your friends have cousins. Well, you don’t have any. All your friends have grandparents. Well, you don’t have any. All your friends have pictures of their grandparents, if they don’t have grandparents. Well, you don’t have anything. You have nothing. It’s like your parents are the beginning of life. There’s no history. So I felt very rootless, and so I needed to find an anchor, something to prove that there was something before us. So we went back.”

To Niepolomnice. Where they were to be so disappointed.

Near a campground, they found a nicely maintained obelisk: “For all the Poles and others who were killed here.”

“I went crazy,” Chasin said. “ ‘Poles and others ?’ Now we’re an addendum? I was livid.”

As it turned out, that was a monument for the soldiers. They were told where to look for the one commemorating the Jews.

The next day, Chasin and her father found a small rectangular stone with 15 or 20 names inscribed in Hebrew.

“It was not a statue or a monument,” Chasin said. “There was nothing on it about victims. It was also not well-maintained. The soldiers’ monument was in a clearing, it had chain around it. This one had years of soot, you couldn’t even read the names or tell what it was for.”

*

When Chasin and her father returned to the United States, they began writing letters.

A new memorial would be nice, but at the very least, they would like the names of Bill Spitzer’s parents added to the sooty stone that they found in the woods.

They enlisted the help of Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and even the New York-based Consul General of Poland, both of whom appealed in letters to Niepolomnice’s mayor.

To date, there has been no response.

Now Chasin and her parents wonder if there are other survivors of the massacres in Niepolomnice out there somewhere, or perhaps descendants of those who were slaughtered at the site. They hope to create a group and return to Poland to lobby the little town for proper recognition of the mass grave site.

It’s not asking much.

“Everyone wants to know their ancestors are buried somewhere,” said Rabbi Hier. “You have a whole generation of people growing up who did not know what happened to their ancestors. It would be the right thing to do.”