By Joel Rosenkranz
In 2013, six years before his death at the age of 101, my father Sol Rosenkranz returned to his hometown of Krosniewice in central Poland, in yet another futile attempt to recover family property. He was accompanied by me – his son Joel – and by the chief rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, who was based in Warsaw.
While there, my father was asked by a kindly local resident if he would like to see the Jewish cemetery, and we were soon taken to the outskirts of town. There, flanked by a cornfield on one side and a town maintenance facility on the other, we found a large field overrun with mature trees, hedges and tall weeds. Untamed nature had returned in full force since the 71 years that Sol and the Rosenkranz family of nine had last lived in the town. We stumbled through the overgrowth and over the rocky, uneven ground and finally came upon a makeshift, anonymous memorial comprised of a few broken fragments of matzevot (upright tombstones) cemented into a mound-shaped bulge in the landscape. This was the work, we learned, of a righteous gentile.
As we stood at this abandoned site, the permanent home of countless forgotten Jews, Sol made a promise to himself, and to us, that he would “restore” the cemetery. Standing there alongside my father, I was struck by how quickly he made this decision, and I was certain that he would keep his promise.
In 1945, after surviving six Nazi labor camps and being liberated at Theresienstadt, Sol returned to his hometown of Krosniewice to see if any of his family had survived and to recover some family valuables. When the war broke out, he had buried these valuables in a wax-lined metal milk can in the back of the house, a few countable steps from a tree, in the hopes of retrieving them after the war. Although Sol was not able to connect with any family members when he was in Krosniwiece, he did recover the valuables. (He would later sell some of these items on the black market in Łódź in order to live.)
During this brief visit to Krosniewice Sol saw that the town square in front of the church was paved with Jewish matzevot that had been removed from the cemetery during the war. Not only had the matzevot been removed, but they were face up (rather than upright), magnifying the desecration. Sol would remember this sight for the rest of his life.
Sol left Krosniewice and made his way to the DP camp at Bergen-Belsen. There, in March 1946, he reunited with his sole surviving family member: his brother, Henry. While at the DP camp, he also met Sala Kuperwasser, who was from Zaklikow, a town in the southeast of Poland. Sol and Sala fell in love quickly, and were married by a Jewish chaplain on April 27th, 1946. Through luck and timing, the newlyweds secured a place on the Marine Perch, the second boat leaving Hanover, Germany for America. On July 20th, 1946, they arrived in the United States to start their new life together.
With the aid of HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) in New York, the young couple found a place to live on the Lower East Side. Sol learned skills that within a few years would enable him to relocate to Midwood, Brooklyn, and open a small slipcover business, Joe-Mell Decorators, in Bensonhurst. The name of his business honored his young sons: Joel and Mel.
In the late 1960s, Sol partnered with his brother-in-law, Felix Cooper (another Holocaust survivor), to open Belair Fashion, Inc., which was a bustling factory in the garment district, manufacturing leather and suede clothing. These were prosperous years for Sol and his family. While they continued to be part of a close-knit Yiddish-speaking survivor community, the family (now including daughter Rita) focused on becoming Americans. While Sala – now called Sally – had survived Auschwitz and her forearm bore an indelible number, she never discussed her war years at length with her children. Similarly, Sol did not share his survival story at length with his children as they were growing up.
In 1974, Sally increasingly needed a dry, warm climate for her health, and the family relocated to Los Angeles, where Sol continued work as a manager of a leather factory and later as a drapery and upholstery salesman. In 1983, finally retired, he began volunteering in the library at The Simon Wiesenthal Center, where, for thirteen years, he translated Yiddish letters and documents. In January 1995, Sol was interviewed by the USC Shoah Foundation when he told his full life story, including family background, the war years, and post-war life in America.
Life changed abruptly when Sally unexpectedly passed away in September 1996.
Sol returned to New York that year and in 1997 joined the newly established Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust as a gallery educator. For two decades, he told his own remarkable story to thousands of visitors at the Museum, as well as at scores of schools and other institutions.
In recognition of his commitment to Holocaust education and his distinguished and active role as a witness, Sol was named “New Yorker of the Week” by New York 1 (TV station) in 2013.
In 2002, Sol and his three adult children traveled to Poland together for the first time, where they visited Krosniewice and Zaklikow. When Sol asked about the fate of the matzevot in the town square, the mayor of Krosniewice demurred, but the fate of the headstones was clear. As Krzyzsztof Bielawski examined in his exhaustively researched book, The Destruction of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland (2024), during and after the war headstones were widely stolen and appropriated by local citizens without fear of punishment. Their ceremonial significance completely disrespected, the locals used these stones for their own mundane purposes, in everything from road and building materials to millstones and whetstones.
As mentioned at the beginning of the piece, eleven years later in 2013, Sol again returned to Poland with his family, this time committed to one day restoring the cemetery in Krosniewice. His partner in this endeavor was Rabbi Schudrich, who explained that in order to clear the land, no heavy equipment could be used for fear of disturbing the sanctified ground.
But the key partner was FODZ (The Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland), the organization in Warsaw responsible for supervision of Jewish sites in Poland, including cemeteries. Their indefatigable leader was Monika Krawczyk, an extraordinary woman who advised on countless issues: land surveys; permit requirements; fencing materials (avoid metal, which might be vandalized); how to communicate with local civic, religious and educational authorities, as well as the media; and, finally, how to engage a team of workers to cut down decades of unrestrained growth.
Over the course of a year, the cemetery was cleared of growth, surveyed, fenced, and marked with Star of David iron gates and flanked by a tablet summarizing (in Polish, English, and Hebrew) the history of Jews in Krosniewice. In August 2014, the cemetery was formally dedicated. Sol and his family, along with his late brother Henry’s family, were in attendance, as well as key players who had been vital to the project.
Our hope that local authorities might participate in the maintenance of the cemetery proved groundless. By the time I was able to return to the cemetery four years later, in 2018, nature had come roaring back. There was overgrowth everywhere.
In the interim, I had learned of the activities of the Matzevah Foundation run by Steven Reese. Each summer, volunteers from this organization travelled to Poland from America to clean a particular cemetery. A free-thinking Baptist minister, Steven believed it was his Christian duty to respect Jewish sacred sites. Steven and I used weed whackers and clippers in a feeble, undermanned effort to cut back some of the growth. Clearly, we needed another solution.
At Steven’s suggestion, I contacted Dan Oren, a Connecticut-based physician, who founded a non-profit Friends of Jewish Heritage in Poland. This organization collaborated with FODZ, now headed by Piotr Puchta, in the restoration of selected cemetery sites.
In 2019, Dan proposed that we create a fund to support the perpetual care of the cemetery. My sister Rita and I agreed. That same year, with the goal of raising $100,000 with the help of donors, we established the Sol Rosenkranz Krosniewice Cemetery Fund to be invested by the Jewish Foundation of Greater New Haven. Interest accrued by the fund pays for the annual maintenance of the cemetery to be handled in perpetuity by FODZ.
That same year on October 27th, Sol died in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan after a short illness. He was 101.
Despite the many challenges involved over the years in “restoring” the cemetery, Rita and I have embraced this responsibility as a singular privilege – a way to honor our father Sol’s commitment to life, to his lost family, and to respect the memory of many hundreds of nameless and forgotten Jews who are buried in that ground.
It is an enduring refrain in our family that our father’s favorite four-letter word was “HOPE.”