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.