我的父亲出生在大屠杀的灰烬;My Son Looks Just Like Him

Yael Feder Devonshire recently submitted an entry into the Father’s Day Lookalike Contest that caught our attention. Not only was the resemblance between her father Gershon Feder and son David (“Davey”) Feder Devonshire striking, but she also explained how special it is for her family to pass their family name to the next generation — since most of her family was tragically killed during the Holocaust. We asked her to tell us how her paternal grandparents (Gershon’s parents), Luba and Chaim Feder, survived the war.

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Yael shares an abridged version:

An orphaned teenager in Chelm

Luba was born in 1924 to her parents Hinda and Gershon in the town of Chelm, Poland. She was the oldest of three daughters.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Izaksons felt — as did many of Chelm’s Jewish residents — that it was dangerous for Jewish men to stay, but that women and children would be safe from harm. Little did they know how barbaric the Nazis were. Luba’s father Gershon snuck into the nearby Russian-occupied town of Kowel, while Hinda and the daughters remained in German-occupied Chelm. In 1940, 16-year-old Luba, her mother, and her younger sisters were forced to move into the newly-established Jewish ghetto in Chelm. Luba was assigned the job of cleaning the German police headquarters.

In the summer of 1942, the Germans rounded up Chelm’s Jews and sent them to their deaths at the Sobibor extermination camp. Luba’s mother and sisters were among the victims. Luba was spared deportation because she was needed for forced labor. Luba was devastated by the loss of her mother and sisters, and then further heartbroken to learn of her father Gershon’s murder in the Kowel ghetto liquidation.

She found comfort through her friendship with fellow laborer Sara, another Jewish teenage girl orphaned as a result of the deportations. Earlier, Sara’s family had contacted a Polish Catholic friend named Wanda to arrange for help should circumstances worsen.萨拉带着鲁巴去旺达在切尔姆的家吃了一顿热乎乎的饭。这是鲁巴唯一一次见到旺达。

Luba and Sara had a small amount of money their parents had given them. Starving on their rations, they took turns sneaking out of their barracks to purchase bread early in the morning, before their work shift. One morning in 1943, it was Luba’s turn to purchase bread. As she returned, she witnessed gun-bearing Nazis loading Sara and other Jewish ghetto residents onto a wagon transport to Sobibor. Terrified, Luba ran to Wanda’s house for shelter. Wanda took her in and consoled the terrified and depressed teenager that one day the war would end, and this helped Luba have the will to continue living without her family.

Returning to find his whole family was gone

1912年，查姆·费德出生在附近的杜比恩卡村，在切尔姆长大并生活。他结婚了，有两个儿子。查姆是一名裁缝，客户既有犹太人，也有天主教徒。

After the Nazi occupation, Chaim placed his wife and two little boys in Dubienka for safekeeping, because he assumed women and children in a rural village would not be in danger. Chaim then snuck across the German-Russian occupation border and continued to Moscow. He was arrested for being a foreigner and sent to a labor camp in the Komi Republic. In the summer of 1940, Chaim was released. Hoping to re-establish contact with his wife and children, he went to Kowel. Chaim miraculously escaped the Kowel ghetto liquidation in 1942, because he could not reach his planned hiding spot in the attic in time and hid under the kitchen table instead, where the raiding Germans and Ukrainian collaborators did not look to find him. The other occupants of his house — and thousands of other residents of the Jewish ghetto in Kowel — were murdered.

查姆只有一个地方可以求助:他以前的一个客户的科维尔之家，一位在切尔姆-科维尔火车头线工作的波兰天主教火车员工。这个勇敢的人把他的火车员工制服借给了查姆，这样查姆就可以偷偷潜入查姆的犹太人区，试图找到他的家人。世界杯东道主2022

就这样，查姆于1942年来到切姆贫民区，得知了一个悲惨的消息:他的妻子和两个小男孩，以及他的父母和兄弟姐妹，在他到达前几周被送到索比堡处死。

Chaim escaped the ghetto and took shelter at the home of another former Polish Catholic client in exchange for performing tailoring work. While it was a business arrangement, it was very courageous of this Chelm neighbor to help, because aiding Jews was a crime punishable by death under the Nazi occupation regime.

Out of the ashes, a love story was born

In 1944, Wanda’s neighbor accused her of hiding a Jewish fugitive and endangering the lives of the entire street. Wanda knew that someone else in the neighborhood (the neighbor hiding Chaim) was also hiding a Jew. Wanda proposed that if Luba stayed at the other house temporarily, the neighbor would stop pestering her after being able to come in and “inspect” Wanda’s house and find no Jews hiding there.

Luba went to this woman (we shall call her Mrs. Demsky) and left a letter “in case a Jewish man comes for mail.” In this way, Luba did not directly accuse Mrs. Demsky of harboring a Jew, but gave a secret hint that she knew Chaim was living there.

Chaim and Luba did not know each other before the war, since Chaim was 12 years older than Luba and already married with two young children.But after reading the letter from Luba, Chaim wanted to help her and asked Mrs. Demsky to allow Luba into the home with them for one month. Mrs. Demsky agreed, and one month later, Wanda happily reported that the neighbor was no longer bothering her and Luba could safely return.

然而，与此同时，Luba和Chaim已经坠入爱河，并希望继续在一起。所以Luba和Chaim住在一起，他们一起在天黑的时候去了Wanda的家几次，这样他们就可以不被发现的走了。

Shortly after Chelm’s liberation in late July 1944, Chaim and Luba married. In 1946, they left Poland to stay at a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany. In 1947, Gershon (named for Luba’s father) was born.

1949年，他们移民到以色列，女儿Bat Sheva(以Chaim的母亲的名字命名)在那里出生，几年后，Gershon移民到美国，他现在住在那里。In 2018, Gershon helped to ensure that Wanda’s heroic deed was recognized posthumously by Yad Vashem with the esteemed award of “Righteous Among the Nations.”

I have always been interested in history and genealogy, but wasn’t able to dedicate time to my hobby until taking a break from the workforce to be home with our son. Among the many exciting discoveries I have made in my research, a special one involves theDNA matches from MyHeritage: we reconnected with a “lost branch” of our Feder family!

Many, many thanks to Yael for sharing this deeply moving story and the wonderful photos of her father and son.

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