Julek’s Album

October: New York ablaze with hot air, as if we were in the tropics and geography just a convention. We had already passed under the Upper East Side. At the first houses of Harlem, the subway car emerged from the ground to carry us deeper and deeper into another world, suddenly very familiar, a world that entered our car in the form of beat-up shoes and chipped nail polish. It’s Sunday. Sunday and the Bronx means work on the tracks, unscheduled transfers, waiting on deserted platforms, and an endless bus ride before the tall blocks of the Co-Op City housing development emerge from the chaotic urbanism. A boy in a hoodie holds the elevator door for me.

I’m half an hour late. No problem – says Mr. Gombiński. He hasn’t been in a hurry for a long time.

In the living room, the thick, peach-colored carpet absorbs the sound of footsteps. – I did everything here myself, says Mr. Gombiński, – for my wife. His wife died. On the dresser I notice her photos; above them hangs a photograph of the Sompolno synagogue, after renovation. In the bathroom, where the walls are covered in lavender fabric, the radio automatically turns on with the light, some kind of health talk is going on, and while I wash my hands a man’s voice explains to me the mechanism of a heart attack.

As a young girl, Julek’s mother was married off to her own uncle, an older man. His name was Samuel Gombiński, and he had a house on the corner of the market square and Krótka Street. I’ve seen his signature on dozens of synagogue deeds from Sompolno. Maybe the community sent for him when they were in need of a witness? Father no longer worked – says Julek, yet he personally swept the sidewalk in front of the house every day. They lived upstairs and their rooms had wallpaper with a fashionable pattern. In a moment I’ll see that pattern in a photo of Julek playing chess with Abram Kolski. There are also two excited supporters, a tiled stove, and a bouquet of dry flowers called Judas’s silver coins.

He was an only child. His papers said Israel, his mother called him Julek. In Łódź, he learned to repair radios. He dreamed of Palestine but got a ticket to New York from an uncle who lived in the US. He thought that New York would somehow be closer to Tel Aviv.

The whole of Sompolno walked Julek to his bus when he left – Abram Bielawski, my guide to the past, told me. The whole of Sompolno must have meant all of Jewish Sompolno, and maybe one or two non-Jewish friends.

In March 1939, Julek sailed on the Batory to America. A few letters from his mother reached the Bronx. After that, only postcards in German arrived, with whole sentences covered in black ink. Eventually even they stopped. It was around this time that Julek met his future wife, also from Poland, from Kolomyia. His papers now read Julius Gombin.

Besides Abram, I managed to talk to ten other survivors from Sompolno.

He took his photo album on board the ship. He usually developed the pictures together with Jochanan Szatan, the one on whom a wall collapsed a few years later at a construction site in Bukhara.

A girl on the school steps, a boy in a hat. Julek can’t see their faces anymore. Without much hope, he now brings a magnifying glass closer to the photos. The magnifying glass has long since stopped being enough.

I look over his shoulder. I see faces. How do I match them to the people I’ve heard about so many times since I started recording stories about Sompolno?

For years, I’ve been trying to figure out who remembers what, how, and why. Or rather – what memories are they willing to share? Which memories are we able to retrieve, which ones shape our future? Jews, Poles, Germans – that’s how they referred to themselves at the time, although of course it didn’t always mean the same thing to everyone, and people could also think differently about themselves at different times. Not everyone speaks with the same intention, that’s clear, not all words carry the same weight. But in a sense, everyone is a fold in time, adding to the whole, somehow allowing its meanings to emerge. These stories are a battlefield and our space of communication. Over and over, they re-establish the country after, the phantasmagorical country in which we partly live.

We...? Who are we? All of us – those who, in Sompolno, in Łódź, in Warsaw, in Jerusalem, near Munich, or in New York, listened to these and similar stories, but also to the silences.

So, I know now who kept pigeons, and with whom, and who liked to go to the cinema with whom when they had a zloty. Who washed the hair of hairdresser Poznański’s clients (Kazia), and who learned carpentry from Walaszczyk (Abram). Who bet on the Bund (Herszenbaum), who on Jabotinsky (Wolman), and who on leftist Zionism (almost all the rest). I know who survived and returned home after the war, and I also know who made them leave. But now I look at these faces, page after page, and I can’t figure out who is who.

Many spaces are empty. The survivors of the camps, after all, usually had no photographs, neither of their loved ones nor of themselves. Someone else had been living in their homes for several years. Julek would give them the photographs he had in his album.

These blank spaces meant that somebody – perhaps a family member? – had survived. Are those who remained in the album the people whom nobody could claim because there wasn’t anybody left – no friends, no relatives?

I made scans, the entire Julek Gombiński album. A few days later I took a bus with the prints to Nanuet in the Hudson River Valley.

Nanuet – like Manhattan – is a name from the language of the Lenape, the nation that owned these lands until they were relocated to Oklahoma. Sixteen thousand North Americans still consider themselves Lenape. Nanuet in October resembles a family movie set: lawns strewn with yellow leaves, carved pumpkins on every porch. The pumpkins come from Irish tradition. Lenape spirits probably get along somehow with Éire spirits.

Lee Berendt – formerly Lipman – planted an American flag in front of his house. In a staged photo from Dachau, taken the day after the camp was actually liberated, he can be seen among the cheering prisoners, the same flag flying above them.

His daughter Debbie opens the basement door, to make me a witness. Even along the stairs Lee has made shelves and lined everything with rows of cans and jars.

– Look at that, he’s got a lifetime’s supply here, Debbie shakes her head. – He's ready for the apocalypse.

– Maybe he’s right? I try to turn it into a joke. – In the movies, the Martians usually start their invasion somewhere close to New York.

Lee just looks up at me.

We spread out the scans of photos from Julek Gombiński’s album in the kitchen. Lee, who has good eyesight and a retentive memory, lists the names one by one, a little impatiently. He prefers more difficult challenges. For me, however, an incarnation is taking place. People who were previously just a fragment of someone else’s story suddenly become visible.

Why didn’t I even think they might have been in the pictures? That they photographed each other, colleagues and friends, with carefree ease, at chess or in the garden, without thinking of the significance those moments would take on. The whole group in front of a haystack, and then again, just a little further away. By the pond, in the trees. On the square by the Sienkiewicz monument, right under my dad’s windows. With bicycles in the forest.

Wolman stretched out on the sofa, his eyes closed. There is something about his face that seems uniquely tangible. His arms are placed behind his head. Is he listening to music? A white headphone cable sticks out from under his jacket. No, c’mon! Imagination can play jokes; it must be the tassel of a tzitzit. I shift my gaze back to the photo. There is just a piece of string in it. The strand twists, runs out toward us, spins the dynamo of the photo. Wolman is asleep. A year or two must pass before he goes to the September campaign, to fight as a Polish soldier and then die on the snowy road to Parczew as a Jewish prisoner of war. Because the Nazi soldiers who caught them had singled out the Jews and they drove them on all night until Lajb Wolman lost his mind and they shot him there, among many others. I know this because Chaimuś Bechler was there, and when he managed to return from captivity to Sompolno a few months later, he told Abram Bielawski about it, also at night, on a balcony overhanging the market square. From the Bielawskis’ window, one could climb in the dark to the Bechlers’ balcony. And many years later Abram told me this.

However, the register of the Warsaw ghetto, found in the Ringelblum Archive unearthed after the war, shows an address at 3 Dzika Street and the entry: “Lajb Wolman, a refugee from Sompolno.” As if it were possible for Wolman to rise from his shallow winter grave near Parczew to live another life, an afterlife in the Warsaw ghetto, and eventually perish somewhere else, or perhaps even to continue wandering around, groping, with his eyes closed, carrying his dormant body through the darkness.

The two boys in paint-splattered work clothes who pose for Julek on a ladder are Lajb Wolman and Jochanan Szatan. There’s a third with them – who? You can only see the bottom of his face. But you can stare at this photo for a long time. Like the rest of them, it sets one’s thoughts in a pendulum motion. In two directions, as if this tenuous path of access to the world-as-it-was were also an isthmus toward a world-as-it-could-have-been.

They stand on the rungs of the ladder as if on a podium. As such, they bring to mind the heroic iconography of the post-war reconstruction, the whole nation building its capital, the years of raising Warsaw from the ruins and shaping the country anew, the years from which our present day somehow finally emerged. Even though in this photograph we are not in post-war Warsaw, but in pre-war Sompolno, and this is just someone’s apartment in need of renovation, the walls to be painted pale yellow or pink. And yet some potentiality creeps in here, an exercise in imagination begins. From now on, the workers in the bas-reliefs on Warsaw’s Constitution Square will bring Wolman and Szatan to my mind. A space has opened up – a place for potential history. As if it were possible to imagine some other post-war Poland in which those who survived – Abram, Lipman, Kazia Piotrkowska, Szyja Herszenbaum, Gienia Boruch, Rubin Offenbach – could simply live. And, finally, a slightly different Poland of today.

I am beginning to recognize them in the photographs myself. Jochanan Szatan, whom Kazia Piotrkowska liked, tucks his shirt collar over his jacket lapels and his hair is swept back in a wave from his forehead like Słowacki’s. Julek Gombiński is the shortest of the lot and looks a bit childish with his light curls.

Frania Bielawska, Hania Bechler, Edka Łachman. Frania holds Edka’s hand; they look into each other’s eyes.

Chaim Poznański, hairdresser. Smiling, he talks to a girl in the courtyard of the house where the Hashomer Hatzair gathered. Or does she want to pass and he is teasing her? Why did she suddenly turn her head?

But Lee only knew his peers. Who are the others – the young visitors who worked in the kibbutz on Piotrkowska Street, getting ready to leave for Palestine? And this troop of soldiers? The two women with the baby in the courtyard and those ladies in bathing suits?

The album was a bit too big, so I had to scan the pages piece by piece, fragments.

Julek mounted the photographs with black cardboard corners. Therefore, they didn’t stick tightly to the scanner glass and almost all the people came out slightly blurry. That’s how Julek’s eyes saw them over the years, weakening year by year.

Israel “Julek” Gombiński / Julius Gombin (1917–2019) died in New York, aged 102. Lee Lipman Berendt (1924–2014) died five years earlier. I sincerely thank their families for supporting my project.

Many thanks in particular to Lorie Gombin-Sperling for her permission to publish her father’s album.

Thanks to Przemyslaw Nowicki for pointing out the Ringelblum Archive record.

Olga Stanislawska’s book will be published in 2026. The research was supported by an MKDiN grant.

Israel “Julek” Gombiński / Julius Gombin (1917–2019) died in New York, aged 102, 5 weeks before his 103rd birthday. Lee Lipman Berendt (1924–2014) died five years earlier. I sincerely thank their families for supporting my project.

Many thanks in particular to Lorie Gombin for her permission to publish her father’s album.

Thanks to Przemyslaw Nowicki for pointing out the Ringelblum Archive record.             

Olga Stanislawska’s book will be published in 2026. The research was supported by an MKDiN grant.