My father Max KNISBACHER (Menahem Mordechai) of blessed memory, born April 7, 1913 in Berlin, passed away on June 2, 1995 in Baltimore. Amazingly he managed to keep and left behind various pictures, letters and documents from all the stops on the odyssey that led him to France, Palestine, England and finally the U.S. after fleeing Germany and the Nazis in 1933. Needless to say these documents were in a variety of languages: German, French, Hebrew, Polish, and a smattering of Yiddish. Since I had the good fortune to have worked as a translator and analyst for most of my career, in most of those languages, I felt it a personal duty to preserve my father’s memory and the memory of his immediate forebears, most of whom he never knew. In particular I grew up with an early memory, at age six, of the family gathered around the radio and cheering in late 1947 when the UN announced the partition of Palestine, meaning the recreation of a sovereign Jewish state after 2,000 years. At that time I certainly didn’t know the history but did know that my father had been in the war and that members of both my father’s and mother’s family had been killed. In later years the horror of the Holocaust was something that was always in the back of my mind, something I could never comprehend and yet felt a compelling need to come to terms with. The way I am doing that is what I might call my “genealogical imperative.”

I was still working at the time so my investigations came in fits and starts. Where to begin?  Apart from pictures and documents, my father also left behind a name I had never heard before, the name of his father’s birthplace, a shtetl called Lysiec. Since my job sometimes required morning meetings in DC, I decided to take those afternoons off and visit either the National Archives or the Library of Congress. It was at the latter venue that I found the first printed reference to Lysiec on a map, in Russian, about 10 km southwest of Stanislawow. The place actually existed! (Remember that back in 1995 we didn’t have all the Internet resources that are so convenient today.)

Before going any further, you might well ask why my father had never mentioned Lysiec previously? The answer is that his father Isak Moses (Yitzhak Moshe), for whom I am named, had died in the worldwide flu epidemic in 1918 at the end of WWI, when my father was just five years old. Dad was raised in a large family, but it was his mother’s family. Most of his father’s relatives remained in Poland and he never met them. What he knew about them was from two pictures that included his father, a brief contact with a paternal uncle Hermann (Hirsch), who arrived once from Königsberg to present my father with a red bicycle for his eleventh birthday; and whatever his mother knew. But she was from the big city of Tarnow, not the shtetl of Lysiec, and her knowledge was largely second hand. Still when Dad was in his last days with a terminal illness, it was important to him that we know where all of his folks had come from.

The first picture my father had of my grandfather was this undated picture of his parents together, probably taken early in their married life:

 

Dad had once told me many years before that his parents were married in London. He never said why, and after his passing I began to wonder if it were even true. After a successful search for a British records source, I eventually received the marriage certificate below in October of 1997:

Isak Moses KNISBACHER and Cilli SZYDLOW were indeed married in London, on 27 February 1911. And there was more. He was 23 years old; she, 24. His occupation was listed as “General dealer”. Their “condition”: he was a bachelor; she, a spinster. They were residing at the time at 27 Tredegar Square. His father was Berl KNISBACHER, whose occupation was “Hotel Keeper.” Her father was Meier SZYDLOW, whose occupation was “Fishmonger.” I suddenly had basic information on the family.

The second picture my father had was of his father and his father’s sister Sarah with their parents, Dov and Cirl (née BONNER or BANNER). That picture was taken in Stanislawow, as indicated on the back, which implies that it was from before Yitzhak Moshe married his wife Cilli in London, in 1911.

 

The back of the photo, apparently “enhanced” by some childhood scribbling, lists the following:

Max Tannenbaum, Artistic photography establishment, City of Stanislawow, 8 Kazimierzowska Street,
Enlargements can be made for each image, Plates are kept for future orders.

So the initial map, these pictures, and the marriage certificate were the only physical evidence I had at that point. Where to go from there? The more I pondered, the more old memories came flooding back. Dad had once mentioned a very old “Aunt Shoshana” in Israel who was the widow of one of his father’s brothers.  On another occasion he enthralled us with the tale that one of his uncles, unnamed at the time, was in China, which sounded very exotic when we first heard it as young kids. In my childhood fantasy I imagined that my father had a pigtailed Chinaman for an uncle! During the course of this research I learned that this was the same uncle Hirsch (Hermann) who had come from Königsberg to Berlin for Dad’s birthday in 1924. Much more recently the evidence of that journey has become available on the Web, via a Bremen passenger index, which provides more information about brother Hermann:

Herman Knisbacher

 in Web: Brem, Deutschland, Passagierlistenindex, 1907-1939

Name:	Hermann Knisbacher
Geburts­jahr:	ca. 1938
Geschlecht:	Männlich
Wohnort:	Königsberg
Jahr des Wohnortes:	1939
Datum der Abreise:	30. Mai 1939
Abreiseort:	Bremen
Alter bei der Abreise:	03.04.1890
Zielort:	Shanghai, China
Zivilstand:	verheiratet
Nationalität:	Staatenlos
Beruf:	Kaufmann
Name des Schiffs:	Marburg
Schifffahrts­gesellschaft:	Nordd. Lloyd, Bremen
Reiseklasse:	Kajüte
Passagiernummer:	11
Archivnummer:	AIII15-30.05.1939-3_N
Anmerkungen:	geb. in Lysiec/Polen
URL:

It confirms what my father had told me, that Hermann was living in Königsberg and provides, as well, his date of birth, April 3, 1890, in Lysiec. Furthermore we learn that he was lucky enough to get out of Germany just in time (shortly before the start of WWII), headed for the safe haven of Shanghai. From the 1939 Shanghai business directory, on p. 76, in yet another valuable new source, the Genealogy Indexer, we even have the exact address for Hermann in that city, 43 Chusan, where he is listed as a merchant.

So by 1997 I had learned a lot more about my paternal grandfather and now knew who my “Chinese” connection was. I then set my sights on the next order of business: locating Aunt Shoshana in Israel. She turned out to be the mother lode. During an overseas phone call with her, she provided an outline of almost the entire family. Although she was already in her 90s, she followed up with a typed letter, the first page of which I reproduce below (and then summarize in English).

Shoshana (née SCHREIER) was the widow of my father’s uncle Eliezer. The fifth paragraph of the letter above lists six of Eliezer’s siblings as follows: Frieda, Sarah, Tova, Shikl (aka Szykl,Yehoshua, Ossias), Hirsch, and Isak, my grandfather. Of course my father knew of Sarah from the picture he had of her that I reproduced above. Just this year I learned that he had left a brief listing of his father’s family with my brother back in 1995, but I had never seen it. Apparently my father knew all the names except for Tova. Interestingly, Shoshana left off Leib, who was on my brother’s list, but, as I discovered later, that was probably because he had been living in Berlin since 1922 and she must never have met him. We later learned that he and his wife had tried in vain to flee Germany and were later murdered in the Holocaust.

Shoshana’s family lived in Stanislawow but her father worked in Lysiec from Monday through Thursday, in a shoe leather factory that he owned, returning home only on Friday. He would regularly eat at the KNISBACHER restaurant (presumably an actual inn since father Berl’s occupation on Isak Moses’ marriage certificate was listed as “hotel keeper”). Shoshana tells the delightful story how, at age 16, she came to a party in Lysiec and Sarah KNISBACHER was so taken with her that she told Shoshana’s father she should marry Shikl (then 18) in two years, when Shoshana turned 18. But her father David SCHREIER became ill, closed his Lysiec factory, and contact with the KNISBACHERs was broken off.

Her actual husband-to-be, Eliezer, whom Sarah hadn’t mentioned, was in the Austrian army in WWI and then went to live with his brother Hirsch in Berlin. When he came back home for Passover in 1931, still a bachelor, his sister Sarah remembered Shoshana and sent someone to find out if she was still unmarried. Eliezer and Shoshana were engaged within the week and three weeks later, Aug. 2, 1931 were married. They moved to Königsberg and opened a restaurant. When Hitler came to power in 1933, they closed the restaurant and returned to Stanislawow and from there immigrated to Israel in 1935.

Here is the picture of the couple from their Polish passport, as shown on their immigration papers to Palestine, and a much later picture of Eliezer alone from the GENI website:

From Shoshana’s letter, I had learned my first bit of information about my grandfather’s sister Sarah; she was the matchmaker for her brother Eliezer! But there was more to follow. My next break came from a trip to the National Archives in Washington, DC, also in the late 1990s. Toward the end of WWII, as the Red Army was pushing back the German invaders, a “Soviet Extraordinary Commission” was documenting the Nazi atrocities in the liberated areas. A difficult search of often hard to read microfilm turned up this report of a “KNIZBAKHER” family from Lysiec (only readable when you zoom in):

The entries in this list are written in Ukrainian. There is a bare minimum of information here, just the names and relationships, but it is enough to tell us something we would not otherwise have known. Starting on line 79 the people are:

79 Tsirlya         grandmother (stara matya in Ukrainian)

80 Simon         head

81 Sura            wife

82 Genka         daughter

83 Montzya     daughter  (very faded, name uncertain)

This was clearly one family, and part of my father’s family since Tsirl (or Cirl) was his grandmother, whom we saw on the earlier picture of Isak and Sarah with their parents. On the other hand, Simon here was new to me, possibly a KNISBACHER son that neither Dad nor Shoshana knew about. In fact Sura was Dad’s aunt Sarah. She was the KNISBACHER, not Simon, whose real surname, we would later find out, was GOLDSTEIN (from Yad Vashem pages of testimony filled out by a Meshullam GOLDSTEIN, as well as by uncle Eliezer). As happened so often in Galicia, the Jewish husband wound up taking his wife’s surname. So now we knew Sura’s husband’s name, that she had two children, and that they were still living with her mother at the time of Holocaust. Since Sura’s father Dov was not mentioned, we could surmise that he had passed away previously.

But in 2016 we learned even more about Sura and also about some of the other siblings whom Shoshana had written about. Hirsch’s granddaughter Atara in Israel was going through her mother Dina’s effects when she came across a trove of undated pictures. Apparently Uncle Hirsch had sent his twin daughters Dina and Frieda on at least one summer vacation from Königsberg back to Hirsch’s home town of Lysiec. The two girls were born in September, 1918. From their appearance in the photos below, we can probably date the pictures that include them to the mid 1930s. So now we have some pictures of these lost family members. Here is a picture of Hermann’s twin sisters Dina and Frieda with their first cousins, Aunt Sura’s daughters Henya (the older) and Bronya (the younger), listed in the Ukrainian page above as Genka and (a merely possible) Montzya.. (The Yiddish ‘h’ for Henya, a diminutive of Hannah, does not have an exact equivalent in Ukrainian and is often replaced with a ‘g’ sound, as it almost always is in Russian.)

Dina is on the left, her twin Frieda on the right. In between them are the older girl Henya, in the white blouse, and the younger girl,

Dina is on the left, her twin Frieda on the right. In between them are the older girl Henya, in the white blouse, and the younger girl, Bronya. And there is another picture, apparently taken at the same time and similarly posed:

Dina and Frieda are in the same relative positions as before, with Henya now on the right. The woman in the middle is presumably Henya and Bronya’s mother, my father’s Aunt Sura, thus a much later picture of her than the one my father had.

 

Remember Shoshana’s story that this same Sura had been taken with her and originally wanted her to marry brother Shikl when Shoshana turned 18? Well Dina and Frieda also brought back with them a picture of their uncle Shikl with his son Dov when the latter was very young.

And here is a later picture of Dov alone, probably already in school:

From other information, we know that Dov was born in 1927. Presumably he was named for his grandfather, Dov BANNER, which corroborates our guess above that the elder Dov had passed away before the Holocaust.

The next sister of my grandfather’s that Shoshana mentioned was Tova (married to a GROCH), In 1998, at about the same time I got in contact with Shoshana, I was sharing research with a friend in Israel. One of his findings was of a GROCH family on a page of testimony submitted by a KNISBACHER. Years later I found that page on the Web:

Submitted by uncle Eliezer KNISBACHER, it lists a Yitzhak GROCH, his parents Natan and Toiva, with Yitzhak born in Horen, Czechoslovakia in the year 1914. Clearly Toibe was my father’s aunt Tova. From other later information, I now know that the birthplace of “Horen” was a misunderstanding of the second half of Teplitz-Türn, where Türn was a suburb of today’s Teplice, in the Czech Republic. Lysiec was in the line of fire at the outbreak of WWI, with Russian troops invading, so many Jews fled west to get away from the fighting. Of course Teplitz at the time was still Austria-Hungary, not Czechoslovakia, which only came into being after the war. Although Dina and Frieda did not have a picture of Tova, they did have two of their first cousin Yitzhak. Here is a picture of Yitzhak alone:

From notations on the back of the photo we know that he went by the nickname Izo (pronounced Eetso)

And here is another of him with his first cousin, Hermann’s daughter Frieda:

Now the oldest sibling in my grandfather’s generation was his sister Frieda, whom my father would only meet when he arrived in the States in October, 1938, a few weeks before Kristallnacht. She had left Germany in 1907, before my father was born. Here is her arrival document:

Now the oldest sibling in my grandfather’s generation was his sister Frieda, whom my father would only meet when he arrived in the States in October, 1938, a few weeks before Kristallnacht. She had left Germany in 1907, before my father was born. Here is her arrival document:

A separate Ellis Island document shows her arriving with an infant son, also named Max, like my father.

To conclude, we now know at least a little bit about my Lysiec family, who they were and what some of them looked like, and in that limited way, can honor their memory!

 

 

 

Jeffrey (Yitzkhaq Moshe) KNISBACHER was born in 1941, Baltimore, Maryland of Galician descent on my father’s side and Ukrainian, on my mother’s. His education includes a BA from Johns Hopkins University, BHK from Baltimore Hebrew College, MA and PhD from Brown University.

He has worked at the IBM Research Center, University of Pittsburgh, and as a teacher and analyst for the US government. Jeffrey has published widely.