Or, my own personal “A Real Pain”
By Max Rissman, Oct. 31st, 2025
Click Here to view on Max’s website
My great grandfather, for whom I am named, was from a small town in Poland called Gombin. Lucky for me, he moved to America in 1912, when he was 16. Lucky because 90% of the Jews in Gombin were killed at Chelmno, the first Nazi death camp, shortly after the implementation of the final solution.
I recently visited Gombin with my family and a group of other “Gombiners.” One hundred years ago, the Gombin society helped to resettle Jewish immigrants from Gombin in the united states. Today, the society still exists, and organizes tours back to the town of our ancestors.
I had always through of Gombin as a little shtetl, with some farmhouses and maybe a few stores and not much else, but it was actually a historic and culturally dynamic town in the early part of the 20th century. It had an ornate, wooden synagogue, first built in the 1700s, which was quite famous throughout the land. It had parks and hiking trails and multiple religious and secular schools. There were political and civic organizations, reflecting the new ideas and possibilities in a newly independent Poland in the post-WW1 era. It even had a cinema and a community theater.
I have always been a lover of cool, overcast, autumn days, and I felt right at home in that sort of environment. I could imagine myself strolling through the park, catching a talkie at the cinema, writing plays and watching them performed by my friends and neighbors. I might have been a member of the Jewish Socialist Bund, who advocated for Jewish rights and self-determination within Poland, where the largest Jewish population lived at that time. That would have been a big mistake, obviously.
I could imagine my great grandfather Max walking the same streets, eyes gazing over the same trees and stones. A fifteen-year-old boy on the verge of leaving his home forever, for a better life in a new world. And I could imagine my great, great grandfather Manele being forced from his home and taken to Chelmno, which was made to resemble a health resort. “Maybe this won’t be so bad,” many of them must have thought as they were led into a lavish chateau converted into a prison, and then herded into trucks made to look like showers, into which deisel exhaust had been redirected.
I came with my eleven-month-old son, and as we walked the killing fields I held him high as an act of defiance. The men who wished to snuff us out had failed. The lineage of those buried in the mass graves of Chelmno lives on. And as I continue to write plays and make movies, I will devote some small part of my work as a homage to those who once sat in the dark, small theater in Gombin and watched talkies and plays with their neighbors and friends.
