Introduction

I put together this webpage to gather in one place information, documents and some historical context around Grandpa Nat's journey from a small village in Eastern Europe to 1920s New York. I encourage those of you with information, photographs and documents that can add detail to share them, so that I can weave them into the story.

The nearly complete destruction of the Jewish communities of Poland and western Ukraine not only obliterated a thriving, centuries-old culture. It also erased much of its heritage. Forlorn ruins of synagogues are further desecrated as trash dumps in many Ukrainian villages today, and most of the ancient Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized, stripped of their headstones and forgotten.

It is as much a testament to what has been lost as it is a tribute to the life and memory of Nathan Prince to understand where he came from and how he arrived in the United States. As a coda, I have included some information on Jewish life in Ukraine today.

Jamie Prince

New York, NY

2004

Leopolis > Lwów > L'vov (Львов) > Lemberg > L'viv (Львів)

"Where's your family from?" In the case of Natan Prinz and many Jews from the area where he was born, the response can get a little convoluted.

The short answer is Galicia, a historic province in Eastern Europe whose various other names betray the reason why: in Polish it's Galicja, in German Galizien, in Ukrainian Галичина, in Slovak Halič, in Romanian Galiţia, in Hungarian Gácsország and in Yiddish גאליציא. Its capital, L'viv, has undergone similar name changes over the years as the title of his post indicates.

The geographic diversity of Galicia was reflected in its population. According to Paul Magocsi's A History of Ukraine, around the time Grandpa was born, the national composition of Galicia broke down as follows: 45% Poles, 43% Ukrainians, 11% Jews and 1% Germans.

Galicia, however, is not a "country". According to the passenger manifest of the Celtic, the ship on which Grandpa sailed to New York in 1921 (more on that below), he was born in the village of Nowe Selo ("New Village") in ... Poland. Poland?

In 1906, the year Grandpa was born, Galicia was part of an Austria-Hungary well into its twilight years. At that time, Poland was still stripped of its sovereignty, wiped from the map in the Third Partition of 1795, its territory divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria. The village of Nowe Selo, as well as the village of Zhuravno, where Grandpa lived at the time he emigrated, were located in the Stryj region of eastern Galicia. Click here for pictures of some historic structures in present-day Zhuravno; below are some period postcards (on the left, the ratusz, or town hall; on the right, the landing -- presumably on the bank of the Dniester -- of the Liga Morska i Kolonjalna (Maritime and Colonial League), the post-1930 name of the main organization of the interwar Polish colonial movement):

And here is the long-gone synagogue that once stood in Zhuravno:

The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and was broken up in the wake of the first World War (1914-18). Below is a satirical "obituary", published in Kraków in late 1918:

By 1921, the year of Grandpa's transatlantic voyage, Galicia had been awarded to a reconstituted independent Poland, as the Celtic's passenger manifest indicates. As a result, it listed his country of birth as "Poland"; the family would have been carrying Polish passports.

Galicia did not, however, remain "Polish" for very long. As a result of secret protocols in the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop "Non-Aggression" Pact, Poland disappeared again. Eastern Galicia -- including the Stryj region -- was absorbed into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, i.e. the Soviet Union. In 1991, Ukraine became an independent country for the first time in its history. 

Today, Nowe Selo (pop. 420) and Zhuravno (pop. 3,655) are both located in the Zydavic raion (region) of the L'viv oblast (district) of the Republic of Ukraine. (Note that zyd (жид) is the word for "Jew" in Ukrainian -- thus the nomenclature still reflects an element of the historic ethnic composition of the area. The Polish word for "Jew" is also zyd, but in Russian, zhid (жид) is the pejorative term, akin to "yid": the neutral word is evrei (еврей) in Russian (єврей in Ukrainian).)

Returning to the original question: from a modern, geographical standpoint, Grandpa is from Ukraine. This does not mean he was "Ukrainian" (or "Polish" for that matter), since even today Jews in those countries are still viewed as having a separate, somehow inorganic "nationality" apart from the Christian majorities. I was reminded of this recently at a Russian concert I attended at Lincoln Center with an American friend from my Moscow days, and an (Orthodox) Ukrainian couple my friend knows from work. At the intermission, my friend observed that she and I seemed to be the only non-Russians there. Her Ukrainian colleague immediately countered, "These people are not Russians -- they're Jews!" (Many of the attendees were in fact Jewish, since many former Soviet citizens who immigrated to the New York area in the 1970s-80s were Jews.) I was nevertheless stunned by the vehemence of the remark, but alas, not surprised at its substance. I decided to play dumb: "What would you call them, then?" I asked. "Russian-speakers", came the indignant reply, along with the following 'analogy': "Just because someone from Haiti speaks French, does not make them French." I'd heard enough and excused myself to make a phone call -- arguing would have been useless, even if I was tempted to point out that by this logic, Russians would not view this Ukrainian couple as "Russian", either: there's a strain of contempt in that relationship, as well.

But back to Grandpa. To say that he was "Austrian", as he often did, is also not really accurate. Austria-Hungary was an intricate hodgepodge of nationalities, ethnicities and religions. The Germanic overlay imposed to help keep the fractious pieces of empire together would have seemed alien to many Galician Jews, who in any case mainly spoke Yiddish and, in the villages, lived, learned, ate and worshipped apart from the Christian peasantry.

Moreover, "Austrian" today connotes a specific culture centered around Vienna and Salzburg, which has (and had) nothing in common with the lives of poor Jews in rural Galicia. In America, it's easy to see why it appealed to Jewish immigrants from the former Hapsburg lands to cast their origins as Austrian, as it implied a provenance more refined and cultured than the crowded, muddy shtetls of Poland, Ukraine or Russia.

My answer? Grandpa was born in what is now Ukraine, a Jewish Galitzianer and a citizen of Poland, who came to this country and built a life for himself, and soon his family, in New York.

The Journey to America

Life in Galicia at the turn of the last century was difficult. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Galician Jews emigrated to the United States, seeking both better economic opportunities and relief from persecution and pogroms.

Given its small size, there are limited published accounts of pre-war Jewish life in Zhuravno. Sam Jonas --whose family also came from the town -- put together an informative website on it in 2013. See here.

Grandpa arrived at Ellis Island on October 10, 1921 via the White Star liner R.M.S. Celtic, which had sailed from Liverpool. (Some trivia: just 5 months earlier, Albert Einstein — following his first visit to the U.S. — returned home on the Celtic, on May 30, 1921)

Click here for pictures and to learn more about the ship and its history. Prior to boarding the crowded vessel (it held 2,350 third-class passengers), Grandpa faced an arduous journey from Galicia to the British port, a distance of almost 1,500 miles. The transatlantic crossing would have probably taken around 8 to 9 days.

Here is the "passenger record" on file at www.ellisislandrecords.org for Grandpa:

And here is a copy (2 parts -- it's a wide ledger) of the actual passenger manifest for the 10/10/1921 crossing. As noted above, the entry for "Natan Prinz" is at Line No. 25.  Part 1  Part 2 

Looking at the manifest, you can see that Grandpa arrived accompanied by his mother Lea, his father Leib, his sister Keila (Clara) and his younger brother Ire (Irving). Leib's brother P. (Pinkas) Prinz and his family remained in Zurawno, and Leib and his family met another brother -- Sam Prinz -- in New York. (Grandpa's other sister Evelyn was apparently not traveling with them; I don't know how or when she arrived.)

Below are pages from the Polish passport Leib Prinz obtained to emigrate to America. As you can see from the middle page, he was born in 1870 and was a resident of Zhuravno when the passport was issued. In the back of the passport (not pictured) is written "to Samuel Prince, 137 W. 116th St., NY" -- consistent with column 19 of the manifest.

The Fate of Those who Remained

What became of Pinkas Prinz, Leib's brother, who remained in Zhuravno?

Here is a photograph (click on it for larger version) of Pinkas and his family -- from left to right, son Max (Moshe), wife Zipora, younger daughter Yosefa, Pinkas, and older daughter Esther:

 

The picture looks like it was taken some time in the late 1930s. Following the Sept. 17, 1939 Red Army invasion of Poland, Galicia was annexed and Zhuravno became a town in Soviet Ukraine. A postcard sent in 1940 from Pinkas to Leon Prince in New York City has somehow survived -- note hammer-and-sickle emblem in the upper left, cyrillic lettering and Soviet stamps ("CCCP" = USSR):

The text -- written in German, not Yiddish -- is difficult to read due to the card's age and condition; here is a translation of what was legible:

16. VII. [July], 1940.-

My Dears,

Your last card of April 25 we received on [?] 12. It upsets us that [name] is ill. We hope for a  complete recovery. For three weeks we have been living with Abraham Baer Lerner in a room. My Max is home -- he works as a driver -- perhaps he'll become a guard. I now live across from my earlier apartment. At least we are all healthy. We all send our heartfelt greetings.

Pinkas.

The following year, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Pinkas, his wife and daughters were murdered in the Holocaust. Amazingly, Pinkas' son Max survived, escaping from a deportation train following a round-up of Jews in Zhuravno in October 1942. The episode is described in memoir, originally published in Israel, about then-17-year-old Yosef Laufer. Laufer was a fellow Zhuravner who separately (and apparently ahead of Max) jumped from the same train and also survived the war years through a harrowing combination of luck and hiding:

 

After the war, both Yosef and Max made their way to Israel. In late 2008, Sam Jonas, who had been referred to this webpage by a contact of Max's Israeli daughter Esti (Esther) Sela (née Prinz), emailed me. Sam, who lives in Colorado, also has family roots in Zhuravno and has even visited the contemporary town/ He is publishing an English-language version of the book about Laufer titled The Fields of Ukraine: A 17-Year-Old’s Survival of Nazi Occupation.

Max and Yosef were rare exceptions to an all-too-familiar story. Between 1941 and 1944, 30,000 Jews in the Stryj region were killed, most in the Bełżec extermination camp in the Lublin District of occupied Poland. Click here to read more about the grim fate of the Lvovian Jews.

For a translated excerpt from Die Stadt Stryj ohne Juden, die zeit: Sommer 1943 ("The Town of Stryj without Jews: Summer 1943") by Schaje Schmerler (unpublished), click here.

Zhuravno Today

It's estimated that there were 350,000 - 400,000 Jews living in Ukraine as of 2014, constituting the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, exceeded only by the USA, Israel and Russia. Jews are mainly concentrated in Kyiv(100,000), Odessa (70,000), Dnipropetrovs'k (60,000) and Kharkiv (50,000). For more on Jewish life in Ukraine today, click here.

Western Ukraine, which includes historical Galicia, has only a small remnant of its former Jewish population, with L'viv and Chernovtsy each having only about 6,000 Jews.

The former synagogue in Stryj is a roofless, weed-choked shell:

Zhuravno is virtually devoid of Jews today; what remains of its Jewish cemetery is a sad, neglected and slowly-disappearing wreck.

Eloquent photographic elegies to the world of pre-war Jewish Galicia can be found in Roman Vishniac's classic A Vanished Word and Jeffrey Gusky's Silent Places: Landscapes of Jewish Life and Loss in Eastern Europe:

To learn more about the remnants of pre-war Jewry in Ukraine today, see Rita Ostrovskaya's Jews in the Ukraine: 1989-1994:

Finally, even though it's not about L'viv, an intriguing account of another storied city in the region that has gone through wrenching transformations over the course of a millenium can be found in Norman Davies' Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City:

Additional Information?

This page is intended to be a work in progress and a catalyst for gathering additional information. If any family members have knowledge, pictures or documents to add to this story, contact me and I'll augment it (photographs and documents can be scanned and uploaded and the originals returned).

I would be interested in compiling a companion site dedicated to Grandma Helen's story, but I don't have much to go on -- so any information on her journey to New York would be most appreciated.

Update: Grandma Helen

After I posted this page, Uncle Izzy (Grandma Helen's late brother) wrote to me with the following information about Grandma:

Your Great Grandmother, Sarah Sugarman come into the USA via Canada. I believe she came in illegally, with your Grandmother "chi-yidis" (Helen) and Helen's brother Louis (Leibel?). They came here in 1921, since I was born in 1922. Great grandpa Samuel (Shmuel) was here legitimately quite a few years earlier, trying to bring them over. Sarah was born in Wierzbenik, Poland (forgive the spelling) as was your grandma. I have tried looking it up, but not too successful. That is about all I can tell you.

I once asked Grandma where in Poland she was from, and I remember her saying it was a village near Radom, an industrial city located roughly in the center of the present-day borders country. Since she also mentioned Wierzbnik, I assume she was referring to Wierzbnik-Starachowice -- now Starachowice, a town of ~50,000.

Wierzbnik-Starachowice was founded in 1624. In 1827 it had a total population of 441, with 8 Jews (1.8%), but by 1921, the year Grandma left, the total population had increased to 5,459 with 2,159 Jews (almost 40%).

On 1 September 1939, the Germans bombed Wierzbnik-Starachowice (it had munitions factories). Many residents fled to nearby villages, and on 9 September the town fell to the Germans. Abuse of the Jews predictably began almost immediately:

"In September 1939, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Germans broke into the synagogue and while beating the Jews forced them out to the street. Some worshippers were pulled by their beards, and the group of Amishov Hasidim, who prayed in their own shtibel [prayer house] were singled out for special cruelty. After this, the synagogue was set ablaze."

Ironically, the Jewish population if the town increased during this period as refugees from Łódź and Pomerania in Western Poland arrived in Wierzbnik-Starachowice. By February, the number of Jews in Wierzbnik-Starachowice had grown to 3,156 and in May 1941 to some 3,600.

The Jews of Wierzbnik-Starachowice were put in a ghetto on 2 April 1940. Two and a half years later, they were taken away in a great aktzia [deportation]. On 27 October 1942, the 4,000 Jews in the ghetto were herded to the market square. Some 2,000 men fit for work were separated during the 'selection,' and sent to local work camps. The remaining 2,000 Jews, mostly women, children and the elderly, were transported to the death camp Treblinka.

Work camps were established near the munitions factories in Wierzbnik-Starachowice. There were more than 3,000 workers, including most of the Jews pulled from the ghetto for forced labor. One of the camps was in operation until June 1943, and the other until July 1944.

In March 1943, 140 Jews who could no longer work were murdered in the Starachowice camp. A large 'selection' took place at the end of the summer of 1943 after which more than 100 sick Jews were murdered in the adjacent forest. In July 1944, with the advance of the Red Army to the area, the Germans abandoned the camps. At the time of the evacuation, the prisoners rebelled, and 100 succeeded in fleeing to the forests. The Germans chased after them and many of the escapees were captured and killed.

At the end of the war, a few of the survivors returned to Starachowice. In May 1945, Polish members of the anti-Semitic Krayova Army broke into the house of Leibush Brodbeker, and murdered him and several members of his family and beat other Jews. In the wake of these events, the last Jews left the town and moved to Łódź.