To Write a History of Klodawa Requires a Rich Imagination
On the flight to Poland....July 7, 2001:
To me, the story of Klodowa is one carved in black-and-white. One dimensional. There are faces on fading photographs. There are maps, pinpointing the villages proximity to Warsaw and Kolo. But the town and its Jewish population exist only in the memories of a few, aging former residents.
To me, the story of Klodowa is one carved in black-and-white. One dimensional. There are faces on fading photographs. There are maps, pinpointing the villages proximity to Warsaw and Kolo. But the town and its Jewish population exist only in the memories of a few, aging former residents.
I would like to have enough talent that my writing could revive the family members whose names I've matched to photos, but about whom I know little more. I'd like to preserve in writing what it was like to live and work and die in Klodawa before World War II. But those memories are extinct. I have not the skills to recreate the village as it was.
I am heading there in search of vapors. Some smell, some breeze, some shadow that might give me a clue as to what life once held for my father and the other residents of Klodawa. From the little I know about the place, it was no great bargain, even in its pre-War heyday.
Jews lived in Klodawa for hundreds of years before my greatgrandparents names appeared on the town's birth registers. When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, between 1,000 and 2,500 Jews lived among a community of non-Jews who outnumbered them by 10 or 15 to one.
Why anyone at all lived in Klodawa when only 70 kilometers to the Southeast was the thriving Jewish community of Warsaw is a mystery to me. Inertia was a strong force among the villagers and tiny shtetls of Eastern Europe. Whatever brought or drove Jews to Klodawa in the first place, their descendants remained on long after the original impetus had faded far from memory.
In truth, Klodawa reminds me of a single tombstone in the acres of tombstones of Jewish communities that perished in the Shoah. When I visit any cemetary, I'm always struck by the forgotten whose lives are marked therein, but for whom no one remains alive to bear witness to their lives.
Klodawa, like an unknown skelaton six-feet under in a rambling graveyard, once breathed air in its lungs. It wept at its hardships, persecutions and losses. It sang joyous songs on Simchat Torah and filled the pockets of its children with "gelt" on Chanukah.
Klodawa dreamed and it feared. In the end, it is no more and no less important than ten thousand other communities just like it. Each should rightfully be mourned and celebrated and chronicled. And even still, not one of them can be truly captured, recreated or suitably memorialized.
To write a history of Klodawa requires a rich imagination. It is some form of palientology. Scraps and fragments of materials from which one tries to construct some reasonable hypothesis of how the whole creature moved, fed itself, reproduced and died.
In Klodawa's case, the knowledge of death is the easy part. Almost all of the residents were rounded up around 1942 and perished in the nearby Chelmno extermination camp, along with residents of such nearby villages as Kolo and Grabnow, etc. The few Klodawa residents "lucky" enough to be sent early on to concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, had at least a minimal chance to survive.
How odd, that being sent to Auschwitz was a lifesaving event.
My family and I are visiting Klodawa and Kolo in a few weeks. My Grand parents were born in Klodawa and then lived in Kolo before travelling to the UK.
Her name was Hinda Nicinski (born 15 June 1897) daughter of Jacob Mordecai Nicinski and her husband was Max Hants (born 9 August 1889), his father Isaac Jacob Hanc (born 9 August 1863)
I am looking for information on them and there family. An address in Klodawa would be brilliant. Any help would be appreciated.
Paul Davison
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Dear Paul: I am one of the hosts of Klodawa.org. I myself visited Klodawa in 2000 and would be happy to share my experiences and insights with you. Perhaps they can make your visit more productive. Also, we would love to have you file "reports" and photos from your trip for our web site.
Please provide me a phone number (office and/or home) where I can reach you next week. I'm traveling now and don't have my Klodawa files handy.
I have posted your request and hope that someone from our small community may be of help.
My private email is dean@klodawa.org.
Dean Rotbart
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