A little over three months ago, Stu and I set out on this journey that we have called In The Footsteps of Our Families. The idea was to retrace the journeys made by our immigrant forebears, from eastern and central Europe to the UK and US. This wee...
It's blowing a gale, and thunderous waves are crashing against the sea wall. I've brought my 95-year-old father to the pretty little town of Peel, on the west coast of the Isle of Man, and the weather is not being kind.
On 13 April 1939, my father boarded the SS President Roosevelt and sailed from Hamburg to Southampton. Three months later, my mother (they didn’t meet until 1943) made the same voyage on board the SS Washington (pictured above).
My perspective on an immigrant’s journey is almost wholly defined by my paternal grandparents, Sara and Julius Seidel. I knew them. I knew their accents. I knew that just about everything in their lives grew from leaving their childhood homes and ma...
I suppose it’s not surprising, if you embark on a journey in search of your family roots, that you end up visiting a lot of cemeteries. That is, after all, where you’re most likely to find your forebears.
Setting out to follow the footsteps of my paternal grandparents, Sara (nee. Jaffe) and Julius Seidel, from their birthplaces in Eastern Europe to America, has been a lesson in realizing how few details I know about their lives — and how the spec...
In a far corner of the “new” Jewish cemetery (opened 1902) in the Polish city of Wrocław, Piotr Gotowicki is hacking away at the thick ivy that has grown over a gravestone lying flat on the ground.
It’s not just any old gravestone, as Piotr knows...
Poland was so extensively devastated during World War II that it can seem a 65-year-old visitor to the country is nearly the oldest thing standing, particularly in the “Old Towns” of Warsaw and Wroclaw where meticulously faithful replicas of flatten...
Like most tourists visiting Europe, Robin Lustig and I set out on our current trip to Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Germany in search of the old. We sought to retrace the journeys of our forbearers as they fled their homes for safety and opportunit...
