Irene Sobel - September 8, 1998
Fate of Extended Family
Of your parents' family, you have aunts, uncles...
Yes.
...cousins, grandparents, how large would you say that the extended...
I would say that among the eight that were in Poland, each of them would probably have from, there were from two to five children if we would say on the average three children each of them had, and uh, then there were all kinds of other cousins and this--my feeling was that there were probably uh, seventy-five people there in Poland. Not a single was left.
None of them were left?
None of them.
You and your sister.
I mean, none of my uncles, cousins. Uh, the only one who survived is my sister and I and my mother. And we were in the former Soviet Union, my father died there.
And when you came, when you went back after the war, you must have found out that these people were all killed.
Yes, we tried. My mother tried through various, through the various organizations to look for them and there were Jewish organization. And there were other newspapers and people getting ???. There was not, she wasn't able to trace anyone. She did have her brothers, her three brothers and one sister were alive in France and one in Belgium. But uh, the ones in Warsaw, none survived. And neither did my father's brother and his family. They didn't survive either. They lived in a small town, I don't even know where, but they didn't survive.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn