It has been over a month since I last wrote about the testimonies of Shalom Hollander, my grandfather’s cousin who wrote the Yad VaShem testimonies for about 40 members of my family including my great grandparents and a great uncle. I needed time away from the visions of horrors that his testimonies put into my mind as I thought of all these relatives who were lost. (See links to blogs below.)
But there was one last family that I was determined to write about because they all perished.
A family of five died in 1941-42. They were Hirsh Tzvi Feuer, the son of Eliezer and Leah Feuer, and his wife, Dvora Amsterdam, the daughter of Tzvi and Chava Amsterdam. As I have written in earlier blogs, the names Amsterdam and Feuer are common in my grandfather’s family. My great grandmother was an Amsterdam, also named Chava, and my great grandfather was a Feuer. They, my great grandparents were first cousins. There was so much intermarriage between these two families!
I have the names of all my great great grandparents and their siblings. And, although I have the names of my three times great grandparents, I do not know the names of their siblings. I am sure, however, that Hirsh Tzvi Feuer and Dvora Amsterdam’s parents are among those names. Shalom identifies himself as a relative in these testimonies. Also he indicates that Hirsh was a farmer, and my great grandparents and their families were farmers in Trzciana.
Tzvi was born in 1895 and his wife, Dvora, in 1908, which make them contemporaries of my grandparents who were born in 1900 and 1906. I would assume that my grandfather knew them when he was a child. They lived before the war in Wola Mielecka, Poland, but they lived during the war in Trzciana, Poland, my grandfather’s home town. Wola Mielecka was close by, all the surrounding areas to the town of Mielec, Poland.
Tzvi and Hava had three children who perished. Lea Feuer who was 4. Obviously named for her grandmother. Chava Feuer, age 6, named for the other grandmother. Then the third child, Eliezer, an infant, named for his grandfather.
I hope there are other children who survived. Who were older. Hirsh Tzvi was 47 when he was murdered. Dvora was 34. I hope there could have been several children in their early teens? Perhaps I am doing wishful thinking. But in my heart, I want them to have been survived by someone besides Shalom Hollander. I do not want this entire family to have perished.
But like the family of Shalom Hollander, there is a possibility that they were all murdered along with thousands of others when the Nazi’s made the Mielec area Judenfrie. Of the almost 4000 Jewish residents of the Mielec area, only a few hundred survived.
Baruch Dayan HaEmet.
https://zicharonot.com/2018/06/07/the-sorrow-of-shalom-hollander/
https://zicharonot.com/2018/06/05/murdered-in-belzec/
https://zicharonot.com/2018/07/11/the-yad-vashem-shoah-database-each-name-becomes-a-memory/
zicharonot 
Dear Ellen,
These stories pierce my heart. Keep writing and remembering.
Shalom,
Rochelle
Thank you Rochelle. Honestly, these blogs are hard to write. I have to prepare myself. But it is so important to remember!!
Nothing breaks my heart more than when I read of children being murdered. At Auschwitz, the thing that made me sob was the case showing baby clothes. How can anyone harm, let alone murder, an innocent child? To me that is the utmost sign of the depravity, the cruelty, the complete evil of the Nazis.
It makes me sick that anyone at anytime in any place would hurt a child or separate a child from its parent!
Yes—it’s unfathomable to me.