A Story About My Mother and My Aunt

In December of 2003, I made the acquaintance of Jack Jackson, son of Michael (Jackubowicz) Jackson, who wrote about his life growing up in Torun , the shtetl a few kilometers north of Bystra where my mother had relatives. Jack and I believe that we must be distantly related. Jack asked his father for any memories about Bystra and here’s what he said. (Jack’s comments are in brackets.)

 Michael (Jakubowics) Jackson in 1934

Bystra was very anti-Zionist. They had about 100 [Jewish] families, so it was smaller than Torun. There were only a few boys and girls that used to come on Saturday in summer [to our gatherings]. We would meet halfway between Torun and Bystra; it was only a few kilometers.

There were only two girls that made aliyah in the early 1930’s. [It’s not clear to me whether he meant your mother and aunt with this remark or two others, and I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of this story.] They had started a kibbutz – it was an area where, during the War of Independence, their kibbutz was attacked by the Egyptians. They held [the Egyptians] back and that’s where it [the Egyptian forces] stopped. They were very courageous.

Anyway, this one time, two girls [your mother and aunt] were in Torun and they missed the bus [back to Bystra] and for some reason or other they wanted to sleep over. I was alone in the house. My father had built a permanent sukkah [which was a fairly elaborate affair, with a separate eating area, a kitchen and a bedroom]. In the summer I used to sleep in the bedroom with [his older brother] Zvi. Zvi wasn’t there at that time, and they asked to let the two of them stay there and I would take the responsibility.

There were two beds. But this was no good. I told her [he never specified who this was, your mother or her sister] that I could give them my bike and they could use that to get back to Bystra. That didn’t work out either. What happened eventually was there was a guy [in Torun, at the time] who was a bike salesman. He found them bikes and, finally, he went and biked them back to Bystra.”

My mother has no recall of this incident. My aunt Pnina made aliyah in the middle to late 1930’s and helped found Kibbutz Gevaram, which is very close to Gaza. My mother followed in the early 1940’s.

Photo from Jackson, Michael (Jakubowics). Head of the Line: A Holocaust Survivor's Memoir. No city: Moriah Press Offset Corp., 2000..  Used with permission of Jack Jackson.