In 1913, Rose Kempinska traveled alone from Poland to New York City at the age of 18. Waiting for her was Jacob Bernstein, 21, who had immigrated to the U.S. from a town called Plotzk (now Plock) in the center of Poland. On a visit home, the family story goes, he had contracted with a matchmaker to find him a wife and then paid the fare for her passage.
Kempinska was from a small town about 30 minutes from the city of Lodz, which was until World War II one of the centers of Jewish life in Poland. Both she and her future husband came from impoverished circumstances, from towns not far from one another, and they knew each other not at all.
A marriage made in heaven it wasnโt, said Beverly Marshall, Roseโs granddaughter and a resident of Grantham.
As was expected of her, Rose Bernstein took care of her husband, and cared and advocated strongly for her two sons and one daughter.
Although the couple remained together until Roseโs death in 1978 (Jacob died seven months later) it was difficult for Rose to overlook the fact that the two were ill-suited to one another in a number of ways, Marshall said.
Rose never returned to Poland, and she shied away from discussing family history. When Marshall was growing up on Long Island in the 1950s, her mother, Shirley Bernstein Jochnowitz, cautioned her: Donโt press, donโt ask too many questions, your grandmother doesnโt like to think about it.
When Rose emigrated, she left behind her parents, Szlama and Laja Kempinska, and six siblings. History created a far wider gap than the distance between them: Some of Roseโs siblings and their children were murdered during World War II.
โI donโt want to talk about it because thereโs nothing left, and nothing to go back to,โ sheโd say. She turned back her granddaughterโs attempts to speak Polish with her. The information Marshall had about her grandmotherโs family was vague or non-existent.
But she knew this much: A brother and sister ended up in Paris: The sister was hidden by a family and made it through, the brother is assumed to have been deported and murdered in a death camp. Another sister was murdered at Auschwitz, although that sisterโs daughter survived and eventually moved to New York. The remaining three siblings were not heard from after the war.
This spring, Beverly Marshall did what her grandmother and mother had never done, nor really wanted to do: She traveled to Poland for the first time to see where the maternal line of her family had come from, and to discover whether any traces of them remained, unlikely though that seemed.
Marshall made the trip to Poland and Lithuania with a friend, Steve Solomon, who was also looking for family roots near the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
โIt was one of those things I had to do,โ said Marshall, who is associate director for institutional advancement at the Upper Valley Educators Institute in Lebanon. She spoke to the Valley News last month in Lebanon.
The more immediate impetus for the trip came when Marshall and Solomon saw the 2015 documentary film Raise the Roof, about a team of American and Polish artisans and students, led by the Massachusetts nonprofit Handshouse Studio, who began work in 2011 to reconstruct a 17th- and 18th-century wooden synagogue that had stood in the Polish town of Gwoลบzdziec.
The synagogue roof was renowned for its brilliant ornamentation, dazzling color and use of ancient text and symbolism, but like other synagogues across Poland it was burned to the ground by occupying German forces during World War II. The reconstructed synagogue roof would be installed eventually in the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto, where Marshall and Solomon saw it this spring.
Marshallโs relation to Judaism, however, has not really been focused on religion, she said; rather, it โhas always been about my heritage.โ
She lived in the Bronx with her parents until the death of her father when she was 5. After her mother remarried, the family moved to Smithtown, Long Island, where her mother had a second child, a son named Jay.
Her mother and stepfather (Marshall thinks of him as her father in every way) were not observant Jews, they didnโt fast on the high holy day of Yom Kippur and the family rarely went to Friday night services. Marshall did not have a bat mitzvah.
Marshall was enrolled in Hebrew School but disliked it. She had brushes with anti-Semitism as she grew up: swastikas painted on their house at Halloween, being called Jew Girl at a college mixer.
The first time Marshall began to think about the fate of European Jews during World War II was when her mother, an omnivorous reader, gave her a copy of the Leon Uris novel Exodus, a bestseller about the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, published in 1958.
When she read it, she asked her mother to explain. After that, Marshall said, she had the compulsion to โlearn more and moreโ about her grandmotherโs family.
In 2003, Marshall telephoned her mother, who was then living in Florida. With a pen and notebook in hand, Marshall said to her mother, โI need for you to tell me everything that you know.โ
In retrospect, if that conversation hadnโt happened, it would have been unlikely that Marshall would have done any subsequent research or travel, she said.
Through a series of steps that included online genealogical sites and contact with American Jews engaged in similar research, Marshall was able to get in touch with a Polish guide who could take her and Solomon through sites in and around Lodz. Another guide performed a similar task in Lithuania.
โI did not feel in Poland or Lithuania that we were tourists. We had an agenda and we did it right,โ Marshall said.
Prior to Marshallโs arrival, the Polish guide had been able to determine that Marshallโs great-grandmother Laja Kempinska was buried in the largest Jewish cemetery in Lodz, and she also had the coordinates of the grave. When they arrived at the cemetery, however, Marshall was distressed to see that there was no headstone.
โTo come all that way, and for there not to be a headstone,โ she said.
Her guide had found the written record, which contained the dates of Kempinskaโs birth and death, but because she had never been to the cemetery didnโt realize there was no marker.
Why that was the case, no one knows. Had one existed but been removed? Or had there never been one to start? A woman overseeing the cemetery told Marshall that not having a headstone was not that unusual.
There was a grace note of sorts: Laja Kempinska died in 1931, before the invasion by Germany and the worst offenses of the Nazi occupation, before some of her children and grandchildren were killed, before the obliteration of a people and culture.
Marshall experienced a sense of anti-climax and disappointment, she acknowledged. There was some information, but not a complete record; a burial site but no headstone; an uncertainty about how present-day inhabitants of Poland and Lithuania feel now about what happened then. Who was responsible, who was not. A lingering feeling of absence and loss.
โItโs so intangible. Thereโs nothing to tell, but maybe thatโs the story. They took away anything to hold onto,โ Marshall said.
What is certain is that being in the places where family lived, walking down streets they walked, made their history more palpable.
The losses cut two ways: the destruction of a living people and their centuries-old culture, and the loss of the people who never had the chance to be, because of the parents and children who were cut down, ending or shattering millions of family lines.
โMy mother had no cousins, no aunts or uncles. They were wiped away,โ Marshall said.
โI went to pay my respects because no one else could do it. I went there for my grandmother and mother who couldnโt go back and it meant it a lot to me and I felt I was there for them.โ
During the interview, Marshall pondered how the Holocaust could have happened.
โWhat would it have looked like if an entire nation said, No,โ she asked.
Such questions never go away, for people like Marshall, for any person whose family history has been profoundly altered by genocide, or for a nationโs understanding of itself.
A month later, Marshall, pondering over the larger meaning of her trip, drew a line from the experiences of her long-gone family to the events of Aug. 13, in Charlottesville, Va, in which neo-Nazis, members of the KKK and other white supremacists marched through the university town under the banner โUnite the Rightโ to protest the planned removal of a statue of the Civil War general Robert E. Lee.
Violent confrontations erupted, and one woman was killed when a car driven by a young white supremacist barrelled intentionally into a crowd protesting the presence of the young neo-Nazis.
โThose things are not very far away from us, even here,โ Marshall said.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.