Tag #155208 - Interview #103686 (Ilia Rozenfeld Biography)

The fate of my mother’s family was tragic. According to the archives grandfather Iona and grandmother were kept in the Warsaw ghetto where they perished. Her older brother Yakov also perished there. He was single and had no children. Gintsia Bialskaya, which was her family name, had three children. Her older son Elek Bialskiy, born in 1900, big, fair-haired, with nicely-groomed moustache, finished an Agricultural College in Poland before the occupation, defended his candidate’s dissertation and was a teacher. During the occupation he went to work for a landlord.  Elek did not look like a Jew and besides, his landlord gave shelter to him rescuing him from deportation to the ghetto. He survived and lived and worked in Poland for many years. Another son Avraam Bialskiy perished in 1939, when Hitler troops invaded Poland. Gintsia’s daughter Tsyrtse was married. She gave birth to a girl few days before Poland was invaded in 1939. 
 
Elek took this girl to a Catholic nunnery where he said that she was Polish and the nuns raised the girl calling her Carina. Tsyrtse and her husband and Gintsia perished in the ghetto. After the Great Patriotic War Elek began his search for this girl. He addressed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee 8, Chairman of the Soviet Informbureau Lozovskiy, and either Lozovskiy or his associate Yuzefovich went to Poland, found Carina and brought her to Moscow. Yuzefovich or one of his assistants adopted Carina. What happened was that after the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was defeated Lozovskiy and Yuzefovich were executed, and some distant relatives gave shelter to the girl and raised her.