The Letters

On August 16, 1945, a telegram arrived in Tshikapa, Belgian Congo, from Białystok, Poland. It was addressed to Dr. Ruth Simon. The message was short and to the point: “we [are] alive.” It was signed by Ruth’s sister Helen and brother-in-law, Nachman Podruznik. The last time Ruth, who had left Łomża for a new life abroad in the 1930s, heard from her sister was in April 1941. In the silence of the next four years as the horrors of the Holocaust unraveled, Ruth became convinced that Helen, like the rest of the Kochanowicz family, had perished. She assumed she would never hear from them again. That was until the telegram arrived in Tshikapa in summer 1945. Over the following months, Helen’s letters slowly pieced together the story of her and Nachman’s survival and the tragic fate of their family and friends in Łomża.

Nachman also recounted these experiences in a memoir he dictated to Helen in 1947, entitled The Counterfeit Poles. This memoir, eventually published in 2018, aimed, as Nachman made clear in the dedication, to commemorate “the six million who could not tell their own stories.” In the memoir, Podróżnik meticulously recorded the names of everyone he could remember from Łomża, along with detailed descriptions of the places where they lived and worked. This was a particularly meaningful exercise, as for many of the dead, Podróżnik’s account was the only surviving record of their lives.

That was until we discovered a collection of some of these voices in 2020. Nachman and Helen’s son, Jerry, received a folder from a cousin containing hundreds of letters written to Ruth from 1935 to 1969, including the telegram sent to Tshikapa. Ruth held onto these letters until her death in Belgium in 1993. Thanks to the letters she preserved, voices assumed lost could now speak for themselves.

The most recent edition of the Counterfeit Poles includes a selection of these letters. They were written by Ruth’s parents, Mindla and Isaac; her siblings, Joseph and Helen; her brother-in-law, Nachman; and family friend and business partner, Mosze Budnik. Through their letters, we can begin to gain a sense of Ruth’s family as people: their interests, their humor, and their worries. In turn, the letters help to restore some of the humanity taken from them in the Holocaust. This is particularly true in the case of the pre-war letters for Isaac, Mindla, Joseph, and Mosze Budnik who died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. With no one left alive today who met them, it is our job as readers to remember them, not only as victims of the Holocaust, but as humans. The letters recount their everyday lives in each age allowing us to learn about them as individuals and how they lived under, and responded to, an increasingly hostile environment in 20th century Poland.