On March 14, Lena Gebotszrajber Gilbert of Springville stands next to her parents’ headstone at Eben Israel Cemetery in Cedar Rapids. The marker includes a memorial to Gilbert’s family and others who died during the Holocaust. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)
Lena Gebotszrajber Gilbert talks about the difficulty of finding official documents when researching her family genealogy. A charred death certificate for one of her relatives is one of the few documents she was able to find. She is pictured at her home in Springville on March 7. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)
Lena Gebotszrajber Gilbert made this tile in memory of her father Felek “Fred” Gebotszrajber, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, and her mother Chana “Ann” Zylbersztajn, who was born in Szydlowiec, Poland, and survived the Holocaust. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)
A copy of a charred death certificate for one of Lena Gebotszrajber Gilbert’s relatives is one of the few documents she was able to find in her search to recover her Polish heritage. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)
SPRINGVILLE — On her kitchen counter, Lena Gebotszrajber Gilbert treasures a handmade, baked tile that symbolizes what she’s been trying to do for 23 years: trace a lineage erased by the flames of the Holocaust.
“Forever and ever,” it is written in Hebrew at the bottom, under the Polish names and hometowns of his parents.
Gilbert is unable to prove that most of his other Polish family members were born or died. In a 15-page draft binder is the only evidence of her lineage – the sum of three trips to Poland since 1999, where she spent two months visiting archives across the country.
The only death certificate proving that one of his family members died during the Holocaust was nearly wiped out by the Nazis. This proves that a distant relative of Gilbert’s father, Fred, died of starvation in the Warsaw ghetto. The information, barely legible with heavy fire damage, is one of the only remaining links to the family’s extensive Polish heritage.
“You can see from this DIY family tree that it was a huge – huge family,” Gilbert said, looking over to his father’s side. “Of this huge family, six people out of several hundred” survived.
Out of hundreds on her mother’s and father’s side, she cannot prove that one of them is dead.
Gilbert’s parents spent about five years in concentration camps in Europe but survived and immigrated to the United States.
When Gilbert took over the mission her parents had given up on after countless standoffs with various agencies, her goal was not to pursue the Polish citizenship she expects to obtain in about six months. It was simply to find something about his family that would add something.
Without knowing who his family was or what they looked like, the genealogy of families who lived through the Holocaust is not easy. Gilbert has a marriage license for his mother’s parents, a birth certificate for his mother, handwritten pages detailing the birth of his great-grandfather, and phone book pages proving that his father’s family lived in Warsaw.
The Nazis recorded the number of slices of bread each prisoner received, but destroyed most of the birth and death certificates of those in their concentration camps.
For most of his life, Gilbert lived without even the inheritance of his name — something his parents ditched for an easy-to-pronounce “Gilbert,” on the advice of an immigration judge when they have become citizens.
In 2010, she added Gebotszrajber’s surname to her name.
His father’s home address in these telephone directories, 33 Emilii Plater in Warsaw, is now home to a large Marriott hotel. Nearby on the block today is a piece of public art: an electric neon sign that reads “All the Things That Might Happen Next.”
Knowing no other surviving family members, her parents played grandparents, aunts and uncles to make sure their children felt nothing was broken or missing.
“We never felt like something was missing because we didn’t know anything different. But something is missing. He is missing a lot,” Gilbert said. “When you can’t even prove someone was born, it’s pretty heartbreaking. I can’t even prove that my father was born.
After decades of hard work with embassies and the help of a specialized law firm in Warsaw to obtain his Polish citizenship, the goal is not restoration or consolation, but it would mean something: that Hitler did not succeed.
“It’s validation that everything my parents went through, and the fact that they survived, that it happened, and that they lived to tell it,” she said. “And the madman who perpetrated all this did not succeed.”
Gilbert’s parents, Fred and Ann – Felek Gebotszrajber and Chana Zylbersztajn, as their names were written in Polish before they came to America – spent nearly five years being shipped across Europe during the Holocaust. Fred came from an integrated community in Warsaw; Ann was from a mostly segregated Jewish community in the small town of Szydlowiec.
Gilbert’s mother was abducted from her hometown in 1942, months before most of the remaining Jewish population was taken to the Treblinka extermination camp and wiped out. She survived a faulty gas chamber by pretending to be dead in the group that had mostly collapsed in sheer terror, her daughter said. Later, she crawled under a pile of bodies sent to the crematorium and snuck into another barracks.
Gilbert’s father nearly died when his toe was cut off for being a late second on roll call at one of the camps. His missing toe was living proof of his experience, though he couldn’t prove he was born.
Gilbert’s parents met at the fence separating the women’s and men’s camps when the camps were liberated in April 1945. They were together until Ann’s death in 2008.
“He and my mom have never been apart since that day,” Gilbert said.
Gilbert will be happy to tell anyone the story of his parents’ life and his family’s legacy.
But she did not tell her siblings that she wanted to obtain Polish citizenship. Although her two siblings inherited the surviving gene, they lived their lives differently.
“Getting my citizenship is the only thing under my control,” Gilbert said. “I don’t want to tell (my sister) until it’s done. I don’t want to take her on the (emotional) journey with me.
This ride, Gilbert said, began when she was 7 or 8 when she found her parents’ tattered ID cards with names very different from the ones she knew them by. That’s when it all started to click – why her parents spoke with an accent and why they were still giving interviews to The Gazette.
Today they rest in Eben Israel Cemetery in Cedar Rapids. There they designated the back of their tombstone to symbolically serve as the final resting place for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who perished in the Holocaust. Written in stone, the words commemorate what no one else could recognize.
Gilbert’s journey will reach a milestone when she can enter Poland through the Citizens Immigration Line, with a passport that proves her parents were robbed by their own neighbors.
“That feeling of standing at that window that says ‘Polish citizens’ – that’s what’s deep,” she said. “They couldn’t believe their own neighbors would let them down.”
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Lena Gebotszrajber Gilbert talks about her father’s family tree. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)
Lena Gebotszrajber Gilbert talks about the tile she made in memory of her father Felek “Fred” Gebotszrajber, born in Warsaw, Poland, and her mother Chana “Ann” Zylbersztajn, born in Szydlowiec, Poland, while she looks at the documents she was able to find in her research to recover her Polish inheritance at her home in Springville on March 7. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)
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