The Tzudiker - Wechter Family

Moshe Tzudiker Hacohen,  my  grandfather , was born in 1895 in Warsaw to Rachel and Ze'ev Tzudiker Hacohen.  He was 5 years old both his parents died and he was sent to his uncle who raised him. When he was 18 years old  he left religious life and became secular.  After he got married he came close once again to religion; kept sabbat, went to the synagogue,  not   too religious but he tried to make the best he could.
My grandmother, Chaya Gitle was born in Sokolow Podlaski  in 1894 to Avraham-Ber and Channa Wechter (Gryn). Her father was a rabbai , a well appreciated man and a very talented tailor.
During the summer vacation when she was 17, the family sent her to Warsaw to their family's house to work as a maid and bring home some money. This is how she met my grandfather.

Moshe and Chaya

My grandfather left Warsaw and came to live with her and her family in Sokolow. My grandfather had only one brother, Srul (Israel) Tzudiker, who stayed in Warsaw with their uncle. During the summer vacations he used the spend time in Sokolow with his brother. During the war time he was a student in Warsaw University, studying history.

My grandmother had a large family in Sokolow . She had 5 brothers and sisters: Roza, who got married with Avraham Malach, a shoe-maker,  had 10 children;  Tauba, also a very talented tailor  and a business- woman, who got married to a Sokolower, Yoseph Fogelman, togwther had 1 baby girl, Sara, and in 1905 left, luckily, to Argentina;  Elka, another sister got married to Alter  Penczak, and together they had 8 children. He was a butcher and had a store in the town center, before the war started he was a very wealthy man but a little before the war  started and antisemism raised its head , he no longer was able to make a  living because gentile people were not allowed to buy from Jewish stores anymore, so, when his sister in Argentina, who knew war was coming , sent vizas to all the family members, he decided to leave Poland and try his luck in Argentina., He left to Argentina alone to see how he manages first and only then to fetch the whole family but right after he had left, war started and it was too late. Poland was conquered by the Germans and he couldn't get into the country.  On the other hand, when my father's family left to Russia, his (Alter's) wife and children went with them, but when they heard that the gates of Russia are going to be closed she came back to Sokolow so that when her husband comes, she will be there. Unfortunately, he never came, and she and all her kids were killed in Treblinka.
Shaye, another brother of my grandmother, got married with Chuma (Rozenzveig) and had 5 children - they were a very artistic family and during Pessach -night they used to sing all night long. Shaye even played in the local Jewish theater;My father remembers him playing "The Dibbuk".  Gedalia,  mygranmother's brother, married  Shifra, had 6 kids and lived in his wife's town - Ostrów Mazowieckiaץ
Most of the family members were tailors. Even my father's great grandfather, who was also born in Sokolow - Shaye Wechter - was a tailor. My father's uncle Gedalia, was such a talented tailor, that he was sent to Paris to study the subject.

Previous to the war, life was still very difficult because Jews couldn't work in government offices or  factories  so they had to find their own solutions to make a living. Thus,my grandfather ,who was a bright man, became a peddler. He had a carriage and a horse and traveled from Sokolow to Warsaw - passing in the villages and selling small objects like raisors. At nights he would sleep over Jewish people's homes who  gave him abed and a supper.

My father tells me that as little boy, he wanted to travel with him to see places but apart from one time - he wouldn't take him, tellinghim he , "the man in the family" had to stay and take care of his mother and his younger sisters and brothers.
Even so, what my father remembers from the time before war is a poor but happy life.  All the family members lived nearby and he was always surrounded by aunts, uncles and lots lots  of cousins. The relationships were very close and warm. They would help each other a lot. When some woman gave birth, she would rest for several weeks, and the rest of the family's women took care of her, her baby and the  house.  When someone was short in money, they would give him even when they themselves didn't have much.
The holidays were spent together. The whole family would  gather  around  a table full of good food and wine and celebrate. A lot of joy was there. Their house had one room only -  for  7 people.  During the night they would take out mattresses  and lay them on the floor. During the days they would fold them up again and the house looked clean and tidy.
My grandmother was a housewife and she was busy making 3 meals a day to her children - especially during the winter time when it was so cold. On Thursdays she prepared all the meals for Sabbath and on the evening went out to collect money for the poor people. On Saturdays and holidays they would walk to the synagogue and walk by foot around the town, in the park. My father, when he was small studied in the yeshiva in the rabbai's house - Zelig Morgernstern, he was very good friends with his grandson - also named Zelig. My father tells me he would get fresh rolls from the rabbai's grandson - and to hm it looked like a treasure. When he was older he started working in order to help the family. At first he would just deliver the clothes that his uncle and grandfather were sewing and then he started working in sewing fur coats. He says he was very good at his job.

My father also remembers the Jewish youth movements - Hashomer Hatzair. He wanted to join them very much. He remembers them passing in the streets, singing, or having their wood festivals in Lag Baomer - a Jewish holiday. His father wouldn't allow him because they were secular and also because he had to work already as a child. Another memory of him is their neighbor , who was a barber. He had a daughter who used to sing and my father used to put his ears close the wall and listen to her beautiful singing.

When my father was a kid he liked to play football. One Friday he was playing football with some boys and he forgot himself. In the course of the game he was hit in his ankle. That was when he realized the late hour - he had to come home early to prepare going to the synagogue - being afraid of his father's anger, he went to his grandparents house, crying for his hurt leg. But then his father came in and without mercy hit him with his blt on his buts."I will show you what it's like to forget our Shabeth" he said.
The family spoke Yiddish and only my grandfather spoke also polish. My father had 4 more brothers and sisters-Tauba, Mirele, Yosef and Rachel.
Rachel Tzudiker was only 10 years old when she was killed by German air bomb on the street to her way to school. It was the first of September and Rachel, being a hard - working student, was walking gladly to school with her friend, who was also killed that day. The bomb hit an electricity column,which fell on both of them, leaving their school-bags and family alone and in grief.
Rachel was the youngest daughter of Moshe and Chaya-Gittel Tzudiker - my grandparents. She had black hair and blue eyes - like my father's. She had a smile like an angel. The whole family, together with their plenty of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, lived in the same town of Sokolow Podlaski in the heart of Poland. I will never know Rachel. I will neither know any of the dozens other family members my father grew up with. They were all humiliated and killed in the death camps of Treblinka and Aushwitz. Some of them were writers, some of them doctors, artists, shoemakers, butchers. Most of them were tailors - a talent that ran in the family for generations.
Among them there were lots and lots of kids. Kids with blue eyes and black hair - exactly like my father's, Masha, Eli, Srul, Akiva, Tauba, and many others.

My father and his family succeeded escaping the Nazis' gas chambers. Thanks to his father's intuitive understanding that this time the Germans weren't going to be as civilized as they were during the first world war, the family escaped to Russia. Even tough most of people thought differently, my grandfather took his family (he had to take his wife by force because she wouldn't leave her new wooden house and her old parents behind), crossed the Bug river - being the border now after the Molotov agreement - and went to live in Ukraine. There they lived like refugees. When the Nazis came close the Russians deported those who didn't have a visa to Sibiria.

A lot of people thinking rationally - thought at the time that having visa was good and legal so a lot of people who didn't have one arranged themselves a visa - thus dooming their destiny to be shot and thrown to the notorious pit in Babi Yar.

During their stay in  Sibiria  they were frozen, sick, hungry. They used to eat potatoes' peels and in the springtime they ate wood fruit. most of the time they were sick ,weak and suffering unimaginable cold
I wish I could change this horrible history and make  my family  large and whole again. I can't But I can remember them and tell their story so that  future generations will know them too, so that ,in a way, they'll keep being alive, even if it is just as a memory.

Shoshi Shatit