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Gates of Tears: The Holocaust in the Lublin District, by David Silberklang, Jerusalem: Yad Yashem, 2013,497 pp.
Reviewed by LAURENCE WEINBAUM
On June 24, 1939, Benjamin Hirsch Bilgoraj, age 54, the brother of my maternal grandfather, received American immigration quota number 34556 from the American Consul in Warsaw. His wife Hencia, 45, and their daughters Lucia, 17, and Felá, 15, received successive numbers 34577-34559. Tragically, he and his family never reached American shores and their relatives in New York who were eagerly awaiting them. On September 1,1939, the two girls were in eastern Galicia, spending their summer holidays in Czortków and Skala nad Zbruczem with their aged grandparents, their uncles, aunts and many cousins. The conquest and division [the fourth partition] of Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union separated the parents from their daughters: the former were in Germanoccupied Poland and the latter, in the Soviet zone. In December 1940, Uncle Benjamin, and Aunt Hencia were deported from their home at ulica Lobzowska 47 in Krakow-a building vividly described in the autobiographical novel of the late Israeli writer, Miriam Akavia.1
According to German documents, Benjamin was deportee no. 159, aboard Transport No. 3, and was sent first to Lublin and then to the Piaski Ghetto-a distance ofsome 30 kilometers. Other than a few postcards and letters that arrived before the United States entered World War II, and several faded photographs of a serious-looking, bespectacled man, almost no trace of him remains and we have no precise details of the circumstances of his death.2 After his departure for Lublin, it was as if he were dispatched to an unknown Sheol from which he would never return.
A dumping ground for Jews from other parts of Poland and several cities beyond, such as Vienna, Stettin and Ostrava Moravská, the Piaski Ghetto was a place of appalling misery and cruelty. With the exception of experts in the history of the Holocaust in Poland, few have ever heard of it or of other towns and camps in the Lublin District that served as way stations for Jews. Even Belzec, where some 500,000 Jews, mainly from Galicia and the Lublin District, were murdered, is little known among the general public.
Lublin and its environs were immortalized in the...