Yitzhak Weizman opens the book with a forceful argument about the value of Holocaust testimonies and memoirs for the education of new generations of Jews and Gentiles in Israel and elsewhere. After describing his Jewish roots and family life in Gombin, a town in central Poland, he offers vivid details about the plight of the Jewish community in the Gombin ghetto until his deportation to the forced labor camp in Konin. He then goes on to provide a sober, realistic account of his experiences, feelings and thoughts as he was transferred to other concentration and forced labor camps including Andrzejow, Jedrzejow, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Stutthof, Hailfingen, Dautmergen and Dachau.
Through his reflections on the horrors of the camps, Yitzhak Weizman conveys a sense of the profound significance of survival as an act of resistance. For contemporary readers, another aspect of the value of his testimony lies in the detailed description of conditions after the war, including the underground effort to bring survivors to Mandatory Palestine and the struggles of the new immigrants to reconstruct their lives in Israel.
Gombin. The Life and Destruction of a Jewish Town in Poland. Published by the Gombin Society, Knight Printing Corp, 1969. Viewable in both Hebrew (page 1) and English (page 235).
A reproduction copy of the complete Yizkor Book can be purchased from the Yiddish Book Center, reprinted from the Yizkor Book collection in the New York Public Library. Click here to see additional information about buying Yizkor books.
This is the English translation of the memorial book Gombin, The Life and Destruction of a Jewish Town in Poland (Gombin, Dos Lebn un Umkum fun a Yidish Shtetl in Poyln), published in 1969 by the Gombiner Landsmanschaft in America.
The book is a unique source of information about the vanished Jewish community of Gombin. Its narratives, testimonies and photographs offer a vivid overview of the history, religious and secular institutions, leading personalities, social and cultural activities, and everyday life of the Gombin Jews before the Second World War. They also convey the horrors of their persecution, suffering and annihilation after Nazi Germany’s occupation of Poland. As an important addition to the original version, the book includes a new appendix with individual information about more than two thousand Gombiners who are known to have perished during the Shoah.
This publication by the Yizkor- Books-in-Print Project of JewishGen Inc. provides the English-speaking community a primary resource for researchers and for individuals seeking information about the ancestral towns of their families.
Gąbin appears on p1971-2 of the publication, which corresponds to p2109-10 of this document. If you put 2109 into the search box which appears when you hover towards the top of the window, you should get there. This listing is in part B, which is a trade directory, alphabetical by occupation.
If you arrow back or forth from this page, you are turning the pages on an alphabetical list of places within the Warszawa region, so you will come across Gostynin, Plock, Mlawa, etc.
Michael Shade is a retired teacher in the U.K. and a prolific genealogist and blogger. He describes his own work on his Jewish family’s connections in Gąbin Poland as follows:
“At the moment these notes mostly concern Shreibman, Ilitovich, Levin, Lefshitz, Alievsky, Frankenstein, Finkelstein, Waxman, Hodys, Szwarc, Faigin – mostly from what is now Belarus and Eastern Poland. If you hit two or more of these you may well be connected to me. I may also be liable to chatter on about Jewish genealogy, on genealogy in general, and on ways of telling our family stories. 21-7 because that’s my birth-day, and coincidentally it’s also the proportion of my life I seem to spend messing about on the computer.”
The Gombin Society has established partnerships with two important institutions in Gabin. The Staszic School is one of two high schools in the town and was the site of a Forum for Dialog program in 2019. The agreement commits us to work with the faculty and students to teach about the Jewish history of Gabin and promote better understanding. Razem (Together We Can Do Better) is a civic organization committed to promoting multicultural ties through ongoing projects in Gabin. They are actively supporting refugees of the Ukraine War and sending medical supplies to Ukraine.
