OUR COUSINS, OUR HEROES — Sharon Mark Cohen

It took over 75 years to come by secured records but from the comfort of his home, Alexey, my cousin living in Germany, retrieved WWII Russian military records online. Most importantly to our family, he uncovered reports of a military pilot whose plane went missing sometime during the night, February 26-27, 1944, over Finland.

That pilot was my grandfather’s nephew. My grandfather and his older sister, the pilot’s mother, my Grandaunt Eida had five other siblings.

Pinchas (1874-1941) and Eyda (“Eida”) (1873-1933) Kaya My grandfather Nathan’s sister

Eyda, “Eida” Muravina Kaya with her six siblings, and eight children with their spouses

Since the birth of my first child, my mission has been to piece together the history of our children’s extended family. For years, sitting at library and Jewish history museum tables, countless hours went by as I scoured through microfilm reels and documents.

Simply calling various agencies from our landline telephone, before the invention of cell phones or even portable wireless house phones, required unwaveringly trying to avoid stretching out the coiled wire attached to the phone, which hooked onto the kitchen wall. Continuing the investigation meant tirelessly looking through voluminous books, interviewing relatives, and visiting far-reaching cemeteries.

Then came the internet. When thinking back nostalgically, there were no family tree programs available at the start of my project, and we did not yet own a computer. Now, there are digitized records easily accessible online.

With computers at hand, relatives from around the world who share my passion, speak the languages of our ancestors, and offer help filling in the missing details, any remaining blanks in the family tree readily populate our charts. The most insignificant seeming bits of information that were typed into “notes” in my family tree program turned out to be most helpful.

We face an additional challenge tracking and recording all the information about our ancestors. Yiddish names, Hebrew names, adopted Russian names, and nicknames are added to the mix. Family name changes are another consideration. In the case of Eida’s family, Cousin Harry first offered the spelling of their family name as Koya.

When another cousin, Polina, entered the picture, I can recall working with her to figure out an English spelling of her mother Esther’s maiden name. We settled on Kaya since the English alphabet does not have one of the Russian characters used for the last letter.

My Russian-born cousins, researching our ancestry with the name of Kaya, are experimenting with various spellings of that family name. The most recent letter I copied for them offers a new name suggestion of Katz.

June 20, 2004 letter from Misha (“Mikhail”) Fishman in Chudnov
Note: Raja referred to as “aunt” was Cousin Raya and Erika is referred to as Harry’s granddaughter, however, she is a cousin

That letter, written by the son of Esther Kaya, shows her maiden name to be Katz. It’s just another lead for the cousins researching the Kaya ancestry to go on. That’s why saving the correspondence from the old country was so helpful. There are unexpected clues that pave the way for piecing together lost family.

Names my relatives were “also known as” are often used to help understand the differences in the variety of monikers used in translations of letters from my ancestors. To interpret the history of family names, I rely on my foreign-born cousins in distant lands. I found several of those long-lost cousins with the help of The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, known as HIAS.

HIAS representatives from three of my cousins living in Russia in 2007

Immediately upon learning that Russian military records were available online, replete with photos, I listed a dozen more deceased cousins for Alexey to scout through records online to find. WhatsApp on the iPhone made it easy to take pictures of my family tree charts and share the necessary information, including many variations of names. With a click of the button, the data appeared abroad. Using masterful language skills, Alexey worked with the flood of files that came to him instantaneously on WhatsApp, combined with any tidbits of details about each cousin, to secure their posthumous records.

The losses suffered by our family in Eastern Europe were overwhelming. One cousin, age 37, the older brother of the pilot, was born in 1906. He was a sergeant when he died at a military hospital on January 6, 1943, leaving a wife and one son. With the records Alexey secured, also listed was his grave location. Another Kaya brother, born in 1904, married and, the father of three, also died at war in 1943.

Alexey was back on WhatsApp the next day, with more photos of relatives in the prime of their lives shown dressed in their military uniforms. It was mind-boggling to observe family traits while filling in photo histories.

Checking my records, to see which of our Grandaunts and Granduncles lived to get word of their sons killed on the battlefields, often with more than one of their sons on the list, was heart-wrenching. Some parents, spouses, siblings, and children lived their lives with a loved one missing in action, while others knew the gruesome fate of their dearest family members.

It takes my breath away knowing that one family lost three of four brothers at war. Their mother, my grandfather’s sister, Eida, died of natural causes in 1938, before the war, when three of her four sons serving in the military never returned home.

Ruthlessly, Eida’s husband Pinchas, their eldest daughter Shejndl (Zhenya), and her husband, along with two young sons, were killed in our native Chudnov in 1941. Those travesties happened before the deaths of the three of Eida and Pinchas’s sons, brothers of Shejndl (Zhenya), who were military heroes.

Words my cousin wrote about the death of Shejndl* (Zhenya) and her husband Aaron are searingly detailed and have shaken me to the core.

Cousin Harry Langsam, z”l wrote: “My wife’s cousin Shejndl (Zhenya), her husband Abrasha Rojtman with their two sons were among young people on a truck on their way to the park to die. They knew already what was waiting for them so they decided to take their fate in their own hands. When the truck reached the place where the road was forking off in different directions, one that led to the brewery and the other to the pits in the park they jumped off the truck. While jumping off the truck they held each other’s hands and jumped together. The Nazis opened a hail of fire into their holy bodies and they were instantly killed. The Rojtmans choose to die on their own volition and not being killed near the pit.

“Local people who lived nearby buried the bodies at the place where they were killed, near the bridge over the little creek. After the war a monument in their memory was erected at the place where their holy bodies rest in peace. This story was told to me by my sister-in-law Muravina Raya Zacharovna which was told to her by a distant relative of her mother by the name of Bliudoj who survived the shootings at the pits.”

As was common in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe, Shejndl (Zhenya) and her husband Aaron were 1st cousins. Each of them was also a 1st cousin to my father. See Here We Go Again, dated May 17, 2022.

My grandfather’s sister Rose Roitman wrote that her son Aaron married their sister Ida’s (Eida’s) daughter, Sheindl Kaya, and they live in Chudnov. Translated by Harry Langsam, z”l

Shejndl (Zhenya) and Aaron had one son who survived WWII. The last word the family received was that our surviving cousin, and his family, were in Piarny, Estonia.

In January 2022, a cousin living in Russia said he was acquainted with the man and his son in Russia. While he did not know the exact relationship to his father’s family, he recalled that the younger cousin graduated from a prestigious medical school in Leningrad, where he later ran the hospital. He understood that the doctor married and moved to a nearby locale. Several cousins in all parts of the world, including me, are feverishly searching for the physician or his descendants.

From Eida’s family, one son survived the atrocities. Living to age 78, he procreated and left several generations of descendants, who grew into wonderful, productive families. From Eida’s offspring, two of her daughters also were spared. They lived the rest of their lives in Eastern Europe. Of the two, Rachel married but divorced, and she died childless in 1967. Her sister Esther, the married mother of two, passed away in 1971.

Esther was the younger daughter of Eida and Pinchas. Esther’s daughter Polina and her family eventually immigrated to America. In 1991, they settled in Owings Mills, Maryland. They visited us in 1994 and, then, we made a point of visiting numerous times after, in Owings Mills.

Polina’s brother Mikhail, who cared for the graves at the Jewish cemetery, died on January 4, 2011, in the shtetl of our ancestry, Chudnov. We believe that his descendants are the only living members of our family who still reside in Ukraine.

My father and his older brother emigrated with their mother at a very young age, and my younger uncles and aunt, born in America, never knew any of those cousins. Miraculously, some descendants of Eida and I are now in contact.

Much of our handsome squad of young cousins were among the ranks of the injured at war and worse. The stories go on and on. Through years of genealogy research, finding and befriending lost relatives has been thrilling. Serendipitously, finding photos to put faces with the names of those we never got to know is unbelievable, miraculous.

Here in America, my husband’s four paternal uncles and several cousins returned safely from combat in World War II, as did my father’s three brothers and my mother’s three. Additionally, my mother had a brother who served in the United States military in WWI, as did my mother-in-law, and they both safely returned. My father, and father-in-law, both born in 1911, were exempt from entering the military because they were already married, and each man had a child.

Life was hard enough for our grandparents and parents living in America. The thought of them never coming to America and how different their lives could have turned out is unimaginable.

Three of the four brothers in this photograph perished at war. They were 1st cousins of my father and all, including my father, were born in our ancestral Chudnov.
Avrum or Abram (aka Arkadiy) (1909-1987) Lova (aka Leonid) (1917-1944) Moishe or Misha (aka Michael) (1906-1943) Yellik or Y(J)oil (aka Yuriy) (1904-1943)
These four men also had three sisters:
Sura Sheindl Kaya Roitman - (aka Shejndl (Zhenya)) known as Sheindl (1896-1941) Killed in Chudnov. We have no pictures of Sheindl - She was married twice. Her second husband was her 1st cousin Aaron Roitman. She had one son from her first marriage and two with Aaron. One of the two sons from Aaron survived the war with his wife and son. His son became a medical doctor in Leningrad. Esther Kaya Fishman (1903-1971) She had a daughter and a son; Polina (1929-2009) and Mikhail (1935-2011) Rachel (Raisa) Kaya married Leiser Roitman (1914-1967). They had no children.

Joil Kaya with his family abt 1938 and 1940

Esther Kaya Fishman (1903-1971) Chudnov, Ukraine

Rachel (Raisa) Kaya Roitman (Born 1911, in Chudnov, Ukraine - Died of cancer in 1967, in Leningrad, Russia)

Young Rachel (Raisa) Kaya and Leizer Roitman - they divorced with no children

Three photographs of the Tenenbaums throughout the years. Polina (September 13, 1929 in Chudnov - October 13, 2009 in Owings Mills, MD USA) and Mikhail (February 19, 1928 in Kyiv - February 3, 2016, Columbia, MD) with their children, Pavel (November 7, 1964 in Chudnov - ) and Ilana (April 29, 1967 - October 15, 2016 in Owings Mills, MD). Pavel, living in California, is married and the father of three and grandfather of two. We met Pavel and his eldest son at his father’s 80th birthday celebration in Owings Mills. We met lovely Ilana, a nurse, and her children, several times while visiting her parents before her untimely death from the aftereffects of the Chernobyl disaster.

Mikhail and Polina Tenenbaum with their daughter Ilana, and her children, their grandchildren, Eduard and Erika Portman

February 24, 2008 Owing Mills, Maryland Mikhail’s 80th birthday celebration Rina, Moss Cohen, Kevin Tenin, Sharon Cohen, Polina Tenenbaum, Pavel Tenin

The Tenenbaums - Polina and Mikhail with Pavel and Ilana October 2009 - Polina’s 80th birthday

The letter written June 20, 2004, by Misha (Mikhail) Fishman, Polina’s brother in Chudnov, and translated by unknown “friend” of a fellow Chudnover, is relevant to this blog post, and also to What Was Their Story of Survival, dated April 12, 2022, and Who’s That Wearing a Hat?, dated August 2, 2022. There is so much information and memorabilia in this somber series of blog posts, that I made the best effort not to duplicate postings.