Mothers

A Mother and her Last Letter
Introduction by Sally Wasserman (Sheindle)

This is to remember and to honour the memory of a Holocaust victim.   She had a name, Toby Broda Goldblum.

The night before the liquidation of the Dabrowa ghetto, Toby wrote a letter to her sister in Toronto, Canada.

The following morning, when it was Toby's turn for deportation, she made up a small parcel of family photos, the name and address of her sister in Toronto, and the letter she wrote the night before.  She then tied this parcel around her eight year old daughter's waist.

She said good bye to her and sent her away to an elderly Polish couple.

Sheindle survived the Holocaust due to the courage and kindness of the Righteous Gentiles, Ewa and Mikolaj Turkin.   They saved Sheindle's life and by doing so the late Toby Goldblum had a grandson, Bernard Abraham, a granddaughter Hannah Rachel and two great-grandsons Dustin and Ryan.

Sheindle arrived in Toronto in 1947 and gave her Aunt Ange the letter her mother wrote to her in the Dabrowa ghetto.  Ange Kraicer still lives in Toronto.  She is 93 years old.

Toby Goldblum's original letter, written in Yiddish, has been donated by her daughter, Sheindle, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.   The letter was translated into English by Morris Rosen, originally from Dabrowa, Poland, now living in Baltimore, USA.


Pictured below is a postcard sent by Toby Goldblum to her best friend who was in a slave labour camp.  The card is postmarked October 4, 1942. This document represents a rare surviving piece of communication between relatives or friends during the Holocaust and World War II. It is important to note that the postcard is written in German rather than Yiddish or Polish. It was mandated by the German authorities that all communications in Poland must be written solely in German. This allowed them to effectively censor the information getting to the outside world.

Tody and Isak Goldblum
Toby and her two children, 1939
Salusia and Vovek, 1937.
Ewa and Mikolaj Turkin, Righteous Gentiles, with Salusia, 1946.
Toby and Ange Broda, 1928.
Toby and Moishe Broda

Click to see a larger image of the front of the postcard. Click to see a larger image of the back of the postcard.
 

© Copyright Judy Cohen, 2003.
All rights reserved.