For 80 Years, We Didn’t Know What Happened to Our Relatives. Then We Found Them with MyHeritage

My mother, Fruma Knopf Adamowicz, immigrated to Israel from Poland in 1934 at the age of 5. She arrived with her mother, Toncia Adamowicz, and her sister, Chaya, who was two years younger. Her father, Abraham Knopf, had immigrated a year earlier and settled in the Haifa and Krayot area to prepare for the arrival of his wife and daughters.

Before my mother, her sister, and her mother traveled to the port of Constanța in Romania to board the ship that would take them to Israel, all their relatives gathered to bid them farewell in the town of Łęczyca, Poland.

Many family members appear in the photo taken at that event. One could count between 50 and 60 men and women. Everyone looks happy: my mother’s family leaving for a new life in a new land, and those remaining behind.

In time, this photo would illustrate the tragedy of the town’s residents and of Polish Jewry as a whole; for apart from my mother, her sister, her mother, and one uncle, not a single person in the photo survived. They were all murdered in the gas vans at the Chełmno extermination camp in the early 1940s.

In my home in Givatayim during the 1970s, there was a shoebox filled with black-and-white photos. Some were immediately identifiable as photos taken in Israel before the state was established, but others were from a faraway world. From Poland.

One photo showed a young girl in a studio portrait. On the back of the photo, a handwritten note read: “Rachel, daughter of Deborah Pullwermacher from Paris, cousin of Toncia” — meaning, my grandmother’s cousin.

My grandmother, a scion of the Adamowicz family, was no longer with us, and my mother couldn’t tell us who the figure in the photo was or who the Pullwermacher family from Paris was at all.

Because the photo was special, even iconic, it was etched in my memory and in the memory of my cousin Tova. From time to time, we would wonder to ourselves what had become of that girl.

We knew that the Knopf family, also related to the Adamowiczs, had left Poland in the 1920s and moved to Paris. We knew, tragically, that the father of the family, Moshe Knopf, was caught in July 1942 while walking the city streets, imprisoned with many Jews in the Drancy internment camp, and sent to his death at the Majdanek extermination camp. We also knew that his wife was left alone with 4 children in occupied Paris, but this knowledge did not lead in any way to the figure in the photo attributed to the Pullwermacher family.

When World War II began, and the burden on the residents of Łęczyca grew heavier by the day, Shlomo and Moshe, brothers of the Adamowicz family, looked for a way to escape the fate intended for the Jews of Poland. They fled toward Russia to cross into Romania and from there to Israel. Shlomo crossed the border into Russia but was caught and imprisoned for 3 years in a harsh Russian prison, where he performed forced labor. His younger brother Moshe realized it was too dangerous to cross into Russia and saved himself before crossing the border zone. Shlomo was released from prison after 3 years, when the war ended. He wandered across Europe and returned to Poland, to the town of Łęczyca, to look for relatives. Upon arriving in the town, he realized that none of his relatives had survived, and furthermore, the Polish residents of the town rudely drove him away immediately upon his arrival. During his travels in smoldering Europe, he arrived at a displaced persons camp in Salzburg, Austria. There he married Zina, a native of Ukraine, and in 1946 their eldest daughter Tova was born. The following year they set their sights on Australia, but the ship docked on its way in Israel, and they decided to stay. They settled in Kiryat Bialik. Their second son, Yaakov, was born in Israel. Tova, the eldest, eventually worked in Israel as a teacher and tour guide.

Today she lives in the U.S. and is well-versed in the history of the family through the generations.

Connecting the Pullwermacher and Adamowicz family trees, 2019

My father, Naftali Kesselman, is a Holocaust survivor from Mościska, Poland. In the town where he lived, there were 3,000 Jews before the war broke out. He is the only one of his extensive family who survived. Fewer than ten Jews from the entire town remained alive. Out of a desire to discover if there was, despite everything, information about distant family members who might have survived, we built a family tree on MyHeritage. We didn’t find new connections for my father’s family, Kesselman, but an entire branch of Pullwermacher descendants connected to my mother’s family branch.

Most of them live in France. Some are in the United States and Israel.

In 2019, I began corresponding with a granddaughter of the Pullwermachers named Annie Rochberg. The correspondence included my cousin Tova from the U.S., who is also related to her. The connection we made led to a meeting between Tova and Annie in Paris in 2021, and a meeting between me and her in 2022. The gaps in information and family history were filled in, as much as possible. We learned from her about the difficult life Jews had in France under German occupation and that people from their family were also sent to death camps in Poland and did not return.

Annie told Tova about her cousin living in the Provence region with whom she hadn’t been in contact for over 70 years. That cousin, Regine Rochberg, came to the meeting in Paris, and a year later in 2023, we held a meeting in Provence with her extended family, as well as with another cousin named Dora. Both Regine and Dora had turned to MyHeritage. The trees connected for all of us.

At the meeting in Provence, we learned that Dora is the daughter of the girl Rachel who was photographed in 1929. We eventually received another photo we didn’t have, showing Rachel’s mother with her own mother, grandmother, and Uncle Joshua from the Adamowicz family — Shlomo Adamowicz’s brother and my grandmother’s brother. As a child, Rachel Pullwermacher traveled with her mother from Paris to the town in Poland in 1929 to visit her sick grandmother.

The generation-old mystery of who the girl in the photo was had been solved. It is Rachel née Pullwermacher, Dora’s mother, and here we also received photographic documentation connecting her to a member of the Adamowicz family. Bingo. We had proof of the connection!

In 2024, Annie Rochberg passed away in Paris. Various family members from France were summoned to her funeral. At the funeral, some family members met each other for the first time. It turned out that during her life, Annie knew about several branches of the family, but they didn’t know each other at all, even though they lived in the same country and some even in the same city—Paris.

The day after the funeral, they set up a WhatsApp group called “Annie’s Cousins,” “Cousins d’Annie“. The group became very active and lively, and each time another family member of one degree of kinship or another was added. Representatives from the United States, Australia, and Israel were also added. The correspondence was lively: they discussed issues related to the Holocaust, Judaism, Israel, and universal topics: world travel, food, music, and more. Everyone agreed that correspondence was not enough and that a cousins’ reunion, a “cousinade” in French, should be scheduled.

The chosen location was the Périgord region in the Dordogne valley in France, the home of Mickey, the granddaughter of Henriette Rochberg who lived in Paris and was sent to her death in Auschwitz. The meeting, attended by people from four continents—America, Australia, Europe, and Asia—took place over several days in September 2025 and included, alongside the tours, good food, and fine wine, a gathering around a table to reminisce about family memories, as well as exchanging photos and documents relevant to life in pre-war Poland and France.

The group will meet again in the future. There is no doubt that MyHeritage has made a significant contribution to the connection created between family trees, to new discoveries about family history that were unknown to both sides, and to the creation of a lively, happy, and fascinating social group.

Many thanks to Orit Mussel for sharing her fascinating story. If you have also discovered something amazing through MyHeritage, we would love to hear about it. Please share it with us via this form or by email to stories@myheritage.com.

The post For 80 Years, We Didn’t Know What Happened to Our Relatives. Then We Found Them with MyHeritage appeared first on MyHeritage Blog.

Source: My Heritage