For 62 years, Zalman Schmulewicz thought he was the only member of his large family to survive the Holocaust. And for 62 years, he was right.
Or so he thought.
Earlier this month, a thick envelope adorned with exotic stamps dropped through the front door of the cozy San Francisco home that he and his wife, Gertrude, have lived in for nearly 50 years, a minute’s stroll from the whitecaps of Ocean Beach.
The letter was written in a jumble of French — one of the few European languages Schmulewicz doesn’t speak — and broken English. But the message was clear: He was not alone. While his parents and six brothers did indeed die in the Holocaust, his niece, Rachel, is alive and well in Brussels. And she found him.
What’s more, she sent the 86-year-old retired textile worker a cache of old family photos he believed had perished along with his family. It’s the first time he has seen his parents’ faces since the Nazis took them away. There’s even a photo of a 12-year-old Schmulewicz, and one of each of his brothers.
“Oh, I was surprised. The excitement after 75 years,” said Schmulewicz, laughing, in his heavy Polish accent. “I hope to have some pictures for us, for the family. We saw the pictures, and I was very happy.”
Schmulewicz is a short, bald man with a devilish, enchanting smile and an energy level that belies his age. He frequently vaulted out of his easy chair to retrieve his newfound photographic treasures or re-enact wartime stories, like the time he ate the lunch of a Nazi work-camp guard and then escaped into a crowd. Or the time he leapt from a second-story window to elude pursuing soldiers.
Following the war, the Red Cross confirmed that all of his family was dead. He took the news hard and subsisted in Germany for the next few years. In 1948 he boarded a ship for Israel and fought in the War of Independence, taking a bullet in the arm. He returned to Europe and met his wife in Munich in the 1950s. The two sailed for America in 1956.
Yet the same Red Cross that gave Schmulewicz the bad news 62 years ago gave his niece good news this year. His niece, 76-year-old Rachel Szmuliowicz — her name was altered in Belgium — uncovered Zalman’s location after several years of exchanging letters with Israel’s Yad Vashem and the Red Cross International Tracing Service.
Her detective work also uncovered the fate of her less fortunate uncles and her own father, Abram. In her handwritten letter to Schmulewicz, she denoted the date that her father (“ton frère”— “your brother”) was deported to Auschwitz, and when he “décédé la-bas” (“deceased there”).
Schmulewicz can only shake his head when he ponders how he avoided his brothers’ fate. Like so many Holocaust survivors, it came down to an unpredictable mix of smarts, resourcefulness and dumb luck.
When he worked at a slave labor camp producing German munitions (which he often sabotaged), guards enjoyed planting bullets in workers’ jacket pockets as a pretense for executing them. They got the guys next to Schmulewicz, but they never chose him.
When the Nazis rousted his slave labor camp and forced the prisoners on a death march, he managed to keep pace. When his starved friend ate berries off a tree and doubled over in pain, Schmulewicz carried him for miles. Slow pace was a death sentence, but once again the Nazis chose to kill others.
Schmulewicz is unsure what sort of relationship will blossom from his newfound niece’s diligence. The two never met prior to the war. By that time his much-older brother Abram had moved to Danzig, while he was still living in Lodz. He last heard from Abram was when his brother sent a letter to their parents urging them to attempt to escape to the Soviet Union. Schmulewicz’s oldest brother, Israel, tried. He was never heard from again.
In her letter, Rachel wrote that she would love to visit Schmulewicz in the United States. And he would like that. He’d love to know how she survived the war. Was she hidden by a Christian family? By a church? He has no idea. Because of the language barrier, he’s not sure how to ask.
A telephone call between Schmulewicz and Szmuliowicz was not so productive — “I got a hard time. She talk, talk and I don’t know! I said on phone, ‘Bring me someone speak a little Polish.'”
He added that “right now, I don’t have” a spare room. But accommodations could be made. There is always the couch in the front room, which sits beneath a smattering of family photos tacked into the frame of a mountain landscape.
Among them is an old high school shot of Zalman and Gertrude’s granddaughter, also named Rachel. Now there is a montage of all seven Schmulewicz brothers too: the two youngest in cowboy and Indian garb and Zalman in a suit and tie, his hair pomaded back into a shiny black sheen. And there’s Abram, with a cigar jutting out the side of his mouth, his cap at a slightly rakish tilt, as he strides toward the camera — young, confident and full of life.