Memories from Holocaust Memorial Day

My grandparents—my father’s parents—Moses and Lina Fürsetzer, never made it to Auschwitz. Neither did my Uncle Max. Nor Aunt Klara. Neither did Uncle Willy’s wife and son.

Like almost all the 1,200 Jews of Ottynia in Galicia, in what is now Ukraine but back in 1941 was a small town in Poland, they were taken to a nearby forest and gunned down by Nazis and their local henchmen.

Willy evaded death that day because he already had been hiding in fields and, sometimes, in barns belonging to sympathetic peasants. He hid for some two years until the Russian army liberated the sector at which point he was drafted and sent to Siberia for military training.

In America since January 1939 my father knew nothing of his family’s fate as the few postcards that managed to come from his mother stopped arriving in the mid 1941. The progression of the war can be discerned from their stamps and postmarks. Polish stamps on the first. Russian stamps with CCCP letters on the second reflecting Ottynia’s location in the half of Poland controlled by the Soviet Union as part of the country’s partition with Germany in September 1939. CCCP stamps on the last postcard as well, but a fading postmark of a flying eagle carrying a swastika in its talons conveyed a message of impending doom.

After the war my father reunited with Willy in New York but the two never talked to their American families about what happened in Ottynia. Until one Passover about 30 years ago when my brother Bernie and I videotaped their memories of life in the shtetl and got Willy to recount his harrowing evasion from death.

We have no idea what happened to my mother’s family. Her father, Louis Gerson, perhaps Gershonovitz before being anglicized at Ellis Island, came to New York in 1920. His wife Sarah and their four children—Solomon, Pola, Sylvia (my mother) and Vicky—arrived in 1921. A fourth daughter, Lily, was born in America.

The Gersons came from Lodz, one of Poland’s largest cities. During World War II the Nazis confined Jews from the region in the Lodz ghetto, one of the most populous they established in conquered territories. Hundreds of thousands lived in the ghetto before dying there or being transported to concentration and extermination camps. 

I have no doubt members of the Gerson family were among the dead. My mother and her sisters never talked about it. Louis and Sarah died in 1951 and 1955, respectively.

As I have previously written about our experience at  Auschwitz I had not intended to write anything about the commemoration of the liberation of the death camp 75 years ago Monday (use the search engine at the top of the blog to read past articles about Auschwitz). 

Amidst all the articles on the impeachment trial and international commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz, perhaps you missed a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that permitted the Trump administration to proceed with a plan to deny green cards to immigrants who might need public benefits like Medicaid, food stamps and housing vouchers. The plan is being contested in court, but the justices permitted interim implementation (https://nyti.ms/2RTmJPf).

Now Trump’s plan should be an impeachable offense. Not on a legal basis. On a moral one. Trump says he is against chain migration yet that is how his current wife’s parents came here. He is against illegal migrants working here but his resorts and golf courses routinely employ illegals.

 How many of our ancestors would not have been granted entry to America had Trump’s heartless guidelines been in effect when they landed on our shores?

From rags to riches is a foundational American story. Yet Trump’s policies would probably kibosh that ever happening again for an immigrant.

Auschwitz and Holocaust Memorial Day are reminders not only of mankind’s potential bestiality but also of what may transpire when people who have the power to help don’t. When people and governments who could extend comfort and protection don’t. When leaders hide behind conventions of government and do nothing instead of rising to the occasion to show their humanity.

Secrets Exposed by The Farewell Span Cultures

“The Farewell,” a new film about extraordinary acts by a family to shield its matriarch from being told she is dying, has received lots of press lately including a piece Thursday by Brian X. Chen, a Chinese-American staff writer of The New York Times (https://nyti.ms/2LDH9Lq). An underlying premise of the film is that Chinese, or for that matter many East Asian cultures, choose to keep secrets, even tell lies, rather than reveal truths that might be harmful emotionally or physically to the uninformed. 

I cannot dispute the notion but I would not limit silence as a tool to just Eastern Asian cultures. Even after my siblings and I grew up and married our parents kept quiet about health issues, about impending hospital stays. They didn’t want to burden us is how they would explain their silence. 

Perhaps it was an Eastern European thing, as well. Our father’s closest friends all emigrated from the same small town, Ottynia, in Galicia, at various times part of Austria-Hungary, Poland and now Ukraine. Many lost relatives during the Holocaust. During their monthly poker games, wives included, nobody talked about Ottynia. Nobody talked about departed, murdered, family members. They kibitzed about the cards, about business, about everyday life. Nothing about the past. Nothing about Ottynia. 

Was it any different from veterans of the Second World War who kept the horror locked inside military-issue chests stashed in attics, basements or garages until their exploits began surfacing after Tom Brokaw’s revelatory 1998 book, “The Greatest Generation,” released their collective heroism and trauma to a nation grateful but mostly uninformed to the sacrifices they made to protect and secure freedom for peoples around the globe? 

I can think of no example of silence more profound than what transpired between my father and his best friend from Ottynia, Charlie Brooks. Charlie was the youngest of three brothers. Adolph the oldest. Next came Harry. All three with their wives were part of the poker game that floated each month from home to home of the eight or so couples who were regular players. 

Eventually, all but Charlie, his wife Lily and my parents remained alive. They would see each other often. They usually ate dinner, then played cards to pass the evening. 

His voice was loud, a combination of a cement mixer with a bad muffler. Charlie was an effusive, stocky man. Always smiling. Laughing. He always was happy to see me. And Gilda. 

Several weeks before Ellie was born in December 1981 we came with three-year-old Dan to my parents’ home in Brooklyn one Friday evening for a weekend visit. Over dinner we asked about Charlie. 

Matter of factly my mother said Charlie had died. What!?! When!?! 

Right there, at the dinette table at which we were sitting, she dispassionately related. During a card game one Saturday night in August he suffered a heart attack. While they waited for an ambulance my father tried to revive him. He couldn’t. 

Lily never forgave his failure. You have to understand. To many emigres from Ottynia my father was an unquestioned leader of extraordinary talents. It was incomprehensible that Charlie could die in his house at his dinner table. That Kopel could not save him. 

I think my parents were caught up in the complex myth, as well. So they kept Charlie’s passing a secret, to be released only because we asked of him. Gilda and I did not have the opportunity to attend his funeral or make a shiva visit. My parents felt it was better to spare us the immediate sorrow of his death. 

Charlie is buried a few yards from my parents in the communal plot assigned to members of the Ottynier Young Men’s Benevolent Association. 

As is the Jewish custom, each time I visit my parents’ graves I place rocks atop their headstones and those of my father’s brother and his wife. And one on Charlie’s, as well. 

Father's Birth Year Is a Mystery

Had several interesting conversations with my sister Lee and brother Bernie Friday on the occasion of our father’s birthday. I’d tell you how old he would have been but that was what we were trying to agree on.

Family lore has it that Kopel Fuersetzer (through several iterations Fuersetzer evolved into Forseter) was born in Ottynia on January 5, 1911. Or was it 1912? My recollection is the date disparity centered on Austria-Hungary’s military draft rules. Ottynia, a small shtetl in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in Galicia, was part of Austria prior to the Great War, World War I. 

Young men could be drafted when they turned 18 so there was reason behind the fluidity of actual birthdates in the Hapsburg Empire. At least that’s the story I grew up with. And my brother did as well. (After the war Ottynia became part of Poland. After World War II Ukraine absorbed Ottynia within its borders.)

Lee, on the other hand, remembers Dad telling her he was 35 when she was born in 1947. That would put his birth year as 1912. That’s what we had engraved on his tombstone.

But ... several official papers I reviewed Friday—his Polish good citizenship document, his U.S. military enlistment record and his death certificate—all list his birth year as 1911!

Out the window went the theory of military draft evasion. Enter the realm of supposition. 

Bernie posited he claimed being a year older because he needed that earlier date to obtain government permission, perhaps a peddler’s license, after he moved to Danzig when he was 16 or slightly older. As official records from a small shtetl would be rare to come by, it would have been easy to prop up his age in Danzig (present day Gdansk).

Sounds plausible. With Polish document in hand he would be forever recorded as having been born in 1911, though in his mind he was a year younger.

Mom and Dad always said he was six years older than she. Sylvia Gerson was born November 11, 1917, in Lodz, Poland. But was their age difference a rounded up six years from five years, 10 months, from a 1912 birth year, or a rounded down six years from 1911?

My siblings and I will never know.

Keeping Tradition Alive, Leo Wolfgang Enters the Covenant

On a snip and a prayer Rabbi Mike flew into Omaha from St. Louis to ritually circumcise Leo Wolfgang Novak, Gilda’s and my fourth grandchild. Leo joined sister Cecilia Jane as blessed children of Ellie and Donny.

Omaha has a vibrant Jewish community (there are synagogues for all three major denominations plus a Chabad House), but at 5,000 to 6,000 it is not able to sustain some of the requisites of traditional Jewish life. That includes having a resident mohel, a ritual circumciser whose function is to formally usher an eight-day-old male into the covenant God made with Abraham some 4,000 years ago.

Rabbi Mike Rovinsky flew in early Sunday afternoon a week ago for the ceremony attended in the Novak home by more than two dozen friends and relatives, many of whom had never witnessed a brit milah, the Hebrew name for the ritual snipping off of the foreskin of the penis. Done properly, professionally and expeditiously by a mohel the procedure takes about 20 seconds compared to the near half an hour it could take in a hospital by a doctor.

With more than 10,000 circumcisions to his credit since 1988, Rabbi Mike performed as advertised, explaining in detail with flashes of wit and humor the millennia-old procedure. Leo took it all like a man. I can vouch for that, as I had a close-up view as the sandek, the male who holds down the baby lying on a pillow on his lap. 

Almost eight years ago I held Finley as he was circumcised. It is a remarkable, emotional experience perhaps matched only in its powerful significance to Jewish heritage by observing a grandchild’s bar/bat mitzvah or seeing an offspring under the chupah, a wedding canopy. 

Leo Wolfgang received a name steeped in family lore. His paternal great-great-grandfather, Leo Novak, is enshrined in the West Point Hall of Fame as the winningest coach in the military academy’s history. Over a quarter of a century, from 1925-1949, Leo Novak compiled an overall record of 326-115-1. He earned more victories in men’s basketball and outdoor track and field than any other Army coach, including Bobby Knight. 

Wolfgang is in memory of his maternal great-great uncle Willy Forseter, a Holocaust survivor from the family’s ancestral village of Ottynia in Galicia, then part of southeastern Poland, now part of western Ukraine. Willy was away from the village when the Nazis rounded up the Jewish residents, marched them to a nearby forest and shot them into a previously dug mass grave. For a couple of years he survived by hiding among Polish neighbors and in the forest. When Russia liberated the region he was drafted into its army and sent to Siberia for training. After the war he returned to Poland and was reconnected with my father who had arrived in New York in 1939. Willy first made his way to Cuba and then to New York. He lived with his wife Ethel and son Max in an apartment above the 2nd Avenue Deli in the East Village and operated Willy’s Dry Goods a block away on First Avenue.  

Leo Wolfgang’s Hebrew name is Aryeh Ze’ev. Aryeh for lion. Ze’ev for wolf. 

I'm Not Ready to Applaud Ukraine

Have you been following the extraordinary, tingling news from Ukraine? Sounds like the good guys won, at least for now. Yet I am ambivalent. You see, the Ukrainians who have seemingly toppled a government are from the western portion of the country, the descendants of anti-Semitic beasts who aided the Nazi extermination of Jews, including my father’s family in Ottynia in the Galicia region, once considered a central concentration of Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe.

According to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, 1,200 Jews were killed by Ukrainians in the nearby Szeparowce Forest on July 7, 1941, just days after Germany occupied Ottynia on July 1. On August 3, Wiesenthal reported, 45 Jews were shot by Ukrainians in the town. 

Ingmar Oldberg, an associate researcher in the Russia program at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, wrote in August 2011, “According to Jewish scholars and organizations, the Ukrainian Nachtigall battalion, together with German troops and local Ukrainians, massacred Jews in the first days of July before continuing their march. At the end of the month a new pogrom was carried out in the city (of Lviv), known as the “Petliura Days”, named for the Ukrainian leader who instigated pogroms during the 1919 struggle for independence. Even after Nazi troops retreated toward the end of the war, incidents of persecution by the Ukrainians against the remaining Jews occurred throughout Galicia.”

He concluded his essay thusly: “The Holocaust of the Jews and Ukrainian complicity are still rarely addressed ... The world is still waiting for Ukrainian historians in general to admit that Ukrainians were not only victims, but also executioners. The Jews are waiting for their rightful place in Ukraine’s history and contemporary life” (http://balticworlds.com/ukraine%25E2%2580%2599s-problematic-relationship-to-the-holocaust/).

My Uncle Willy, a survivor of the extermination in Ottynia who hid from the Nazis for several years before being enlisted by the Russian army, related his own story of fear of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. When assigned to a battalion to be shipped out to fight the Germans, he asked for a transfer to a different unit. Why? Because, he told his commandant, his original unit was composed of Ukrainian soldiers. He feared being shot by them because he was Jewish. He asked for a transfer to a Russian battalion. His request was granted.

So no, I am not ready to stand up and cheer just now.

Speaking of Nazis: How’s that for a segue into my next topic, taking a small round of applause for correctly predicting Downtown Abbey’s Lady Edith’s lost-in-Munich-lover had a run-in with Brown Shirted bullies in the Bavarian capital. 

Okay, I suggested he embedded himself with the Nazis to get a scoop for his paper, instead of being assaulted or worse by them, as Lady Edith told her family, but let’s not quibble about small details, nor about my prediction he’d return in time for the birth of their love-child. 

More Kudos: For those who watch CBS Sunday Morning, yesterday’s edition featured a profile of an old-fashioned Colorado newspaper produced by Linotype machine, just as I explained to you the other day how my college newspaper, Calling Card, made it into print. 

On This Day, Time to Remember

On the eve of the Festival of Sukkot (tabernacles) which began today according to the Jewish calendar, the Jewish population of Ottynia, a small town in eastern Galicia, variably part of Austria-Hungary, Poland and Ukraine, was essentially eradicated six decades ago. Sources differ on whether it happened in 1941 or 1942. There’s reason to believe mass executions took place both years—October 5, 1941 and September 25, 1942—on the eve of one of the more joyful Jewish holidays, a time usually set aside to celebrate abundance and gratitude. 

It doesn’t matter. The “aktion” was the same: On that fateful day 61 and/or 62 years ago, German and Ukrainian beasts rounded up the Jewish residents of Ottynia and transported them by truck to a nearby forest where mass graves had been dug. They were lined up and shot. In all, some 1,400 souls departed. Though nearly 400 Ottynia Jews survived the war, Jewish life ceased to exist there. My father’s family lived in Ottynia. He had come to New York in 1939. All were slaughtered in Ottynia except his brother Willy who fled into the countryside.

Now part of Ukraine, Ottynia remains a not very hospitable place for outsiders, though one should hardly classify Jews as outsiders to Ottynia considering they had lived there since at least 1635. 

A cousin in France visited Ottynia and nearby Dora in the summer of 2011, searching for family records. Laura reported in an email that in Kolomya she met with the “last living Jew of Ottynia,” a 90-year-old man called Greenberg. He remembered my grandfather, my father and uncle. Twenty-nine members of Greenberg’s family died in the mass killings. "He was there and saw it. He saw the mass graves and the ground still moving.” 

In Ottynia Laura met an old woman who remembered our family name, Fürsetzer. But she found nothing more.

“What I was personally looking for, I found it in Dora, where my grandmother was born,” Laura wrote. “There, we met people who remembered her parents Chaim and Rivka Fürsetzer. We found the place where their shop was. We found the mass graves where they are probably buried. And most important, in the archives building of Stanislawow, we found a complete file showing that my grandmother had tried to save them by taking them to France in 1934, one year after Hitler came to power. She did not succeed but the file is still in the building, with letters, visas, everything.”

Last summer another descendant of Ottynia, a man from New Jersey, ventured back to his family roots. I came across his video on YouTube. Ottynia was never a garden spot of the world. It surely did not improve in the years under Soviet domination and as part of an independent Ukraine. There was little to make one empathetic to the life of our ancestors there.

At the conclusion of Sukkot services at temple this morning, I stood to recite the kaddish memorial prayer for my relatives from Ottynia. In front of me, arrayed on the steps leading up to the bimah, about 30 children sat, giggling, fidgety, happy, expressive proof the Nazis were not successful. I thought back to a time when children in the sanctuary of our synagogue were not very welcome. Dan was three, Ellie roughly six months old when we began bringing them to services. 

We sat in a makeshift back row of portable chairs up against the rear wall with other young families, among them the Lauchheimers. Michael Lauchheimer and I had attended summer camp together, he as a camper, I as his counselor. Together with other families we forced a change in temple protocol. No longer were children persona non grata. 

Twenty-three years ago, on the first day of Sukkot, Michael passed away. His friends still miss him.

Present and Past Stories of Tragedy and War

The present has a way of intruding into my past. 

The Associated Press ran a story Monday about the discovery in the Everglades of a piece of jewelry thought to be from a passenger on one of two planes that crashed in the swampy muck. The crashes occurred 17 and 40 years ago. All 109 people aboard ValuJet Flight 592 perished in the 1996 crash; 99 of 176 aboard Eastern Airlines Flight 401 died (http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_289563/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=ueMPa6OF).

I’m not sure what attracted me to read the article as the headline gave no clue to the tragedies. The headline: “Man hunting for pythons finds mysterious jewelry.” But as I read the story it struck a chord. My first year as a reporter for The New Haven Register, in Seymour, Conn., I interviewed a man who survived Eastern Airlines Flight 401 from New York to Miami when it went down in the Everglades December 29, 1972. I didn’t remember his name but I did recall he was a big man, that his legs were broken and deeply lacerated, the latter injury causing lingering pain for months as the guck from the Everglades infected his body. 

This being the age of the Internet, I trolled the Web deep into the night looking for a report on the crash. Here’s what I found, an excerpt from Crash by Rob and Sarah Elder:

“Quietly, during the flight, Edward Ulrich proposed to Sandra Burt; she accepted. He was forty-four, fair haired and balding, a big man who used to play college football. She was thirty-two and as slight as he was large. They both lived in Seymour, Connecticut, where he was a salesman for a copper company and she was a secretary in a bank. ‘I thought you'd like to see this,’ he said reaching into his pocket and producing a diamond ring. She looked at the ring, smiled and said ‘Thank you.’ They laughed and drank a champagne cocktail. It was ironic that the flight had more than five dozen empty seats, for when they booked, they were told the only seats available were in first class. Burt bought the tickets anyway. He and Sandra boarded the plane early and sat near the front in seats 4A and 4B. Directly ahead of them were a row of seats and the first class lounge, where there were several additional empty seats and a buffet of cheese and crackers. To their right were more empty seats. And behind them, an airplane carrying 176 people. Yet, Ed and Sandra were very much alone.”

I interviewed Ulrich several weeks after the crash in his home in Seymour. I can’t tell you if he and Sandra married, though I believe they did. Several months later I was transferred to another beat. I haven’t thought about that crash or my interview with Ulrich for decades, even though one of the retail industry leaders I covered, the head of Target, Robert Ulrich, shared the same last name. Why I chose to read the story about a python hunt is beyond my ken. Just another example of my life intersecting with events beyond my sphere of daily influence.

On the other hand, I do know why I was attracted to the following article about Jewish veterans of the Red Army in World War II (http://nyti.ms/18zNEUY). 

My Uncle Willy’s wartime experience had all the suspense and plot twists of a Hollywood movie. Unlike my father who moved from Ottynia, a shtetl in Galicia, the southeastern part of Poland, to Danzig, and from there to New York, in January 1939, his brother Willy returned from Danzig to their small town where he married and had a son. At the outbreak of World War II, the Soviet Union took control of the area as part of the Polish Partition agreement it secretly negotiated with Nazi Germany. 

In June 1941 Germany invaded Russian territory, quickly occupying the Galicia region. Mass executions of Jews began. Willy survived the first mass killings because he happened to be away from the village that day. He would sneak back into town to see his mother until it was no longer possible to do so before she too was murdered with the rest of the known Jewish residents in October. For the next two years he hid out in barns and fields as German soldiers and their Ukrainian sympathizers searched for the few who had managed to escape. His existence depended on an ability to stay one step ahead of the Nazis and to find Polish peasants willing to risk their lives to shield Jews. Moving from one hiding place to another. Staying stone silent inside a hidden chamber of a potato bin as a soldier banged his rifle butt on the side listening for a hollow sound. Jumping into an open cesspool when German troops came to the barn he was hiding in. Finally, joining up with partisans to fight, eventually being liberated by the advancing Russian army which conscripted him and sent him to Siberia for basic training where he ate grass to survive for lack of food. 

When it was time to go to the front Willy was saved by a peculiar Russian military custom. When his unit was ready to be sent to the Western Front to fight the Germans, they mustered at the base. The commandant asked if any soldier had reason not to be sent to the battle lines. Willy and several other Jewish soldiers stepped forward. They told the officer they did not fear the Germans. What they feared was getting shot in the back by their fellow soldiers, many of whom were anti-Semitic Ukraines. The commandant kept them in Siberia. Willy always suspected he was sympathetic because secretly he might have been Jewish.

Could be. Some 500,000 Jews served in the Red Army during the war. Here’s a link from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, that details the participation of Jews in the armed forces of the Allies who fought Nazi Germany: http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/about/07/jewish_soldiers.asp.

Marking a Birthday

The yahrzeit memorial candle commemorating the 13th Jewish calendar anniversary of my father’s death burned longer than 24 hours. It flickered Wednesday night, the eve, by coincidence, of my father’s secular calendar birthday, January 5. He would have been 101 today. Or maybe 100. My brother, sister and I simply don’t know.

Several Polish documents—a “morality testimony” and a “certificate of belonging”— list his birthday in 1911. But he often said records were not very exact in Ottynia, the little town, a shtetl, in Galicia where he was born. He would say he was born in 1912. So that’s what we put on his tombstone.

Now part of Ukraine, Ottynia passed through many hands over the centuries. When my dad was born, Ottynia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After World War I it reverted to Poland. During World War II, Ottynia fell under Soviet Union control as part of the partition of Poland pact Stalin forged with Hitler. Nazi Germany overwhelmed Ottynia after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. At the end of the war, Ottynia became a military-restricted area in Ukraine.

My father left Ottynia when he was 16, venturing first to the Free City of Danzig (now known as Gdansk) on the Baltic Sea before coming to America via England in January 1939, months before the second world war broke out. All of his immediate family, except his younger brother, Willy, were killed. Though he would tell his children folklore stories, really parables, about life in the Old Country while we were growing up in Brooklyn, he rarely talked about conditions in Ottynia or Danzig.

Perhaps they were too painful to relate. Trying to raise funds to bring other members of his family here, he was powerless to relieve the pressure on their lives. Among his possessions when he died were three postcards from his parents we’d never previously seen. In painstakingly small Yiddish handwriting, they convey the sorrow of parents who haven’t seen their eldest child in two years, the agony of life in a weakened state. The first two were postmarked by Russian authorities. Stamped on the front of the third and final postcard, just under his name, is a symbol of the Nazi flying eagle holding a swastika.

Images of the Past

Every now and then Gilda and I engage in an intellectual discussion on the merits of ending our print subscription to the NY Times, retaining just the online version. We always wind up keeping both, not the least because of my devotion as an ex-newspaper reporter to the tactile experience of holding newsprint in my hands but also because of the serendipity of finding stories in print I most probably would not have engaged had I been surfing the Web site.

Last Sunday’s Style section provides a compelling, and for me, personal, example. I didn’t get a chance to read the section on Sunday. It lay untouched until Tuesday night as I prepared the weekly recycling pile. Before I chucked it, I checked the wedding announcements. You never can tell when you’ll see someone you know; one time I discovered the marriage of a young man who was a camper in my bunk when he was 12 years old and I was his counselor. All the other kids hated him. He must have done something right, however, to have won The Times’ wedding pic lottery. But I digress...

Back on page 19 of the 20-page section, The Times ran a story on “the lost art of the group portrait at events,” highlighted by a 10.5-by-5.5 inch photo of the guests at the recent wedding reception of Brenda Malloy and Hal Reiter (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/fashion/weddings/banquet-photos-put-everyone-in-the-picture-field-notes.html?scp=1&sq=hal%20reiter&st=cse).

Two things about that photo. First, I believe I know the aforementioned Hal Reiter. If he’s the guy I think he is, he’s the chairman and CEO of a major retail industry executive search firm, Herbert Mines Associates. (For those searching for the happy couple amid the group, Hal and Brenda are in the middle. He’s in shirtsleeves, she’s wearing an off the shoulder white dress.)

But more importantly, the group photo is similar to a picture that hangs on the wall of my den. It’s of the 50th Golden Jubilee dinner of the First Ottynier Young Men’s Benevolent Association at the Hotel Commodore in Manhattan on December 24, 1950. There must have been at least 500 people in this group photo, with my parents easily visible sitting two tables to the left of the dais.

Ottynier (sometimes spelled Ottynia) is a small village, a shtetl, part of an area known as Galicia, controlled over the centuries by different countries. When my father was born there 100 years ago, Ottynier was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I it became part of Poland. The Soviet Union took over after Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland in 1939. Germany conquered the area in 1941. Today it is in the southwest corner of Ukraine.

In 1931, Jews totaled 1,116 of the town’s 4,059 residents. Historically, Jews comprised about 25% to 40% of the population. That is, until they were eliminated by the Nazis and their Ukrainian sympathizers.

Jews began emigrating to America from Ottynier in the 19th century. Like most of their cohorts from Eastern Europe, they formed fraternal organizations, societies to help acclimate newcomers to America and to send funds to those back in the Old Country. After my father came to the United States in January 1939, he became active in the FOYMBA, eventually serving many years as its president.

In keeping with one of the founding principles of the group, to have social and cultural events, much of my parents’ entertainment activities revolved around the society. Aside from the annual dinner dance and smaller, more casual affairs, my parents had a floating monthly poker game with seven couples of their closest friends. They played penny-nickel stakes, husbands in one room, wives in the other. When I was around 10 years old they’d let me play one or two hands for either parent, in between my chore of making highballs for all who asked.

I look at that group photo almost every day. Though they don’t appear so, most of those in the picture were younger than I am today. My father was approaching his 40th birthday, my mother a mere 33 years old. Today, there are fewer than 50 members of the society who meet once a year for a deli luncheon. Most of those who attend are distant cousins of mine. It’s hard to get younger generations involved. I’m as guilty of indifference as the rest.

A young cousin from France recently visited Ottynier. Laura’s trip might be included in a French documentary about families who trace their roots back to Poland. She wrote me:

“We met an old man name Greenberg who lives in the suburbs of Kolomya now; he's more than 90 years old. He is the last living Jew from Ottynier apparently. Born there, he was hiding when the mass murders took place.

“I showed him pictures and he recognized Wolf (my uncle Willy) immediately. When I said "Fursetzer" (the original version of our name), he remembered: ‘Yes, two sons went to the USA, one before the war, the other after’.

“We went to Ottynier and met with old people. They do recall the name Fursetzer. We did not find much more. We went to the Jewish cemetery, there are almost no tombstones left. Most of the Jews of Ottynier were shot and buried there, it's a mass grave.”