Family Reunited, 75+ Years After the Holocaust

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that I've done quite a bit of research on my Zubkis/Supkoff family.  The various branches of the Zubkis family moved quite a bit, generation by generation, and my particular branch ended up in what's now Shpikov, Ukraine, before coming to America.  In 1908, my great-great grandparents came to America, but I knew both from oral tradition and from records that my great-great grandfather had a brother Yosef/Yossel who had stayed in Shpikov.  Yossel had three sons who came to America in the 1920s, but we knew there were sisters who stayed behind in Russia and were killed in the Holocaust.  In fact, I mention in a post that I did in 2019 after discovering a 1902 Households List that the daughter Rivka that was mentioned was killed in the Holocaust.  Except I recently discovered that she wasn't.  And that I have living relatives in Ukraine (and England and America) who are her descendants.  So how did this happen?

The First Hint

I use JewishGen very regularly.  When I'm searching for my Zubkis family, I usually use the Ukraine database, since that family was pretty centrally located in the area covered by JewishGen's Ukraine Research Division.  But this time I used the Unified Search which covers many other databases, and I saw something intriguing.  JewishGen has partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation and displays indexed information from their numerous video testimonies.  One of those testimonies was a woman named Sofiia Aleksandovna Novik--and she says that her grandfather was Iosif Zubkis and her grandmother was Ruchel.  Now, my great-great grandfather's brother's wife was Reiza, but this still looked interesting, especially because the full record said that they lived in Shpikov, and I know from records that the only Zubkis family in the town was that of my great-great-great grandparents and their descendants.  When I went to USC's site and did a search for Zubkis, it also turned up a video for Sofiia's sister Liza which mostly hadn't been indexed--but it did mention that the grandmother was Reiza.  I requested the videos.  (I don't know why I hadn't seen this earlier; I blogged about this collection when it was added to JewishGen!) 

Sofiia Novik's Video Testimony / Courtesy USC Shoah Foundation

Both Sofiia's and her sister Liza's videos were in Russian, and each was about two hours long.  They were recorded in 1997 in Berdichev, where the sisters were living.  I got the videos transcribed and then was able to use Google Translate to get a decent gist of their stories.  Sofiia was quite young during the war, so Liza's video was much more informative of what happened, as well as containing more information about relatives.

Basically, when the Germans came in, Rivka/Riva Zubkis Fortel (my great grandmother's first cousin) was living in Shpikov with her husband and three daughters.  Her husband was conscripted into the Russian army and never returned.  Riva and the three girls (including Sofiia and Liza) as well as their grandparents (two on the Fortel side as well as Raiza Zubkis--Yossel had died before the war) were initially moved to a ghetto within Shpikov but were then taken to Pechora Camp near Shpikov, comprised mostly of women and children.  The grandparents were all killed.

Though people died around them, Riva and her three daughters survived.  I believe (Google Translate is....interesting--I'm waiting to hear from the newly-discovered cousins to find out for sure) that another of Riva's sisters survived as well.  Liza specifically mentioned in her testimony that she knew that she had three uncles that had gone to America in the 1920s, and that they had received letters and food packages from them for a time, but they had destroyed everything--addresses included--because of Soviet suspicion of people with contacts in America.

Sofiia talked about her daughter, and said that she had one teenaged grandson, Aleksey, who had become close to a Rabbi in their town of Berdichev.  That Rabbi had sent Aleksey to London to further his Jewish education.  Thanks to Facebook, I was able to find the daughter, but because we weren't friends on Facebook, she didn't read my message.  But through the daughter's mutual friends, I was able to figure out who her daughter-in-law (Aleksey/Alex's wife) was.  And then I discovered that this daughter-in-law's sister and I had a ton of mutual friends, so I messaged the sister.  I soon was in contact with Alex's wife who confirmed that I had the right family!  Alex and his family still live in England; his mother is still in Ukraine, and other relatives are in Ukraine or in America (having emigrated in the 1990s).

Sofiia and Liza have passed away since making their videos.  But they have a living 89-year-old first cousin in California as well as many more relatives descended from Riva's three brothers and from my great-great grandparents.

So I guess the lesson here is to never give up.  And that families can still be reunited decades after the Holocaust!

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