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Jews were deported to Majdanek from the Bialystok Ghetto

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Bialystok was a cultural melting pot; the industrial city was home to Poles, Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, and an unusually large Jewish population.

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This is a document that was given to Bronka Winicka a member of the underground in the Bialystok ghetto.

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A document given to Bronka Winicka - Klibanski, a member of the underground in the Bialystok ghetto, a liaison - courier and partisan in Belorussia.

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This is for Tema Schneiderman from Bialystok.

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A forged Aryan work document for the courier Tema Schneiderman from Bialystok.

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Hand written note from the Jewish National Committee describing the Bialystok's ghetto defenses.

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A handwritten notice of the Jewish National Committee regarding the defense of the Bialystok ghetto.

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A Piece of the Fence that Surrounded the Ghetto

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A Piece of the Fence that Surrounded the Ghetto

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A section of the fence surrounding the Bialystok ghetto

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A street sign beside the ruins at the corner of Czestochowska Street in the Bialystok ghetto.

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Alley in the Jewish quarter of Bialystok

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This order declared all Poles must turn in Jews and Jewish property.

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An order issued by the German ghetto administration of Bialystok, instructing Poles to turn Jews and Jewish property over to the authorities.

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Bialystok Ghetto deportations of January 1943

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Bialystok Ghetto liquidation 15-20 August 1943

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A Certificate of Residence for the Bialystok Ghetto

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A Certificate of Residence for the Bialystok Ghetto

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Certificate of residence from the Bialystok ghetto

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Exterior view of the synagogue in Bialystok

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Jewish - owned shops on a street in Bialystok before WWII

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Showing the famous clock tower. 1920

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Jewish Quarter in Bialystok, 1920, with a view of the famous clock tower

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Jews are gathered at an assembly point during a deportation action in the Augustow ghetto in Bialystok

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Jews outside the burned synagogue in Bialystok

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One of the leaders of the underground movement

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Mordechai Tenenbaum - Tamaroff, member of the Dror youth movement and the Jewish Fighting Organization in Warsaw and Bialystok.

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Ruins of the Cooperative Bank in Bialystok

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The beit tohorah in a Jewish cemetery in Bialystok before WWII.

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The bodies of Jews who were murdered in a pogrom in Bialystok.

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Efraim Barasz

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The engineer Efraim Barasz, deputy chairman of the Judenrat in the Bialystok ghetto.

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A Group of Survivors in front of the Memorial Monument 

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A Group of Survivors in front of the Memorial Monument 

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A German Soldier Inspecting a Soviet Tank

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A German Soldier Inspecting a Soviet Tank

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During the Nazi Invasion, the Nazis pushed out the Soviets.

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He Talks about his experience returning to Bialystok many years after the war.

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Leo Melamed - child survivor of the Holocaust and former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange - remembers returning to his hometown of Bialystok as an adult and describes his childhood home there. To learn more about the Wexler Oral History Project, visit: http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/tell-your-story

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Stay about how she kept her maiden name and due to that choice found her lost family many years later.

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When Holocaust survivor Ewa Kracowska was married 67 years ago, she decided to keep her maiden name - an unusual step at the time. Her motives were pragmatic rather than feminist. She reasoned that if she did so, childhood friends who survived the war could find her.

She held no hope of finding relatives, since she was sure she was the only one in the family to have survived the Nazi carnage in the Bialystok ghetto.

Over the years, friends did locate her, but the big payoff came almost two months ago.

That was when Kracowska, 87, discovered she had an entire family in Poland on her paternal side that she hadn't known existed.

Kracowska, who is active in the Organization of Former Jewish Residents of Bialystok and its Surroundings in Israel, was invited five years ago to speak at a ceremony commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising. The Bialystok revolt took place on August 16, 1943, approximately four months after the famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The German army had entered Bialystok two years earlier, and one of their first acts was to herd 2,000 Jews into the city's synagogue and set it on fire. Ewa's father, Dr. Samuel Kracowska, was among them.

Ewa, 17 at the time of the uprising, participated in it and is among its few survivors. She had managed to escape to the forests 25 kilometers away, where she joined a military partisan group.

During her visit to Bialystok for the memorial, several Polish newspapers interviewed her. She happened to mention her prewar address in Bialystok, 7 Lipowa Street.

Earlier this summer, she received a call from a friend who works in the Bialystok municipality. A certain individual, the city employee said, had come across one of the interviews and began making inquiries .

"The friend in Bialystok had gotten an email from a Polish- Catholic man who was looking for me, saying he is my family. I told her not to bother to send the mail and to erase it, since I don't have any family in Poland and certainly not Catholic," said Kracowska in an interview at her Ramat Gan home.

That night she awoke with a start and was unable to get back to sleep. She realized the message could be from a descendant of her Aunt Ida, her father's younger sister. She began to worry that her friend might have already erased the email and she paced impatiently, waiting for an appropriate hour to call. She lasted only until 6 a.m., Polish time.

"Please don't erase the email," she urged her friend.

Kracowska got an immediate response.

Almost 100 years ago her father's sister Ida met and fell in love with a Polish-Catholic man of aristocratic German descent while studying dentistry abroad. She converted, changed her name from Ida to Yadwiga and married Stanislaw Hagemejer in church.

Some family members, including her own mother, cut all ties with her, but Ewa's father kept in touch with his beloved younger sister, who had since moved to Krakow with her husband and eventually had three children.

"I remember, when I was a child, I always saw a photo of two pretty girls on my father's desk, and he explained to me that those are my two cousins, Wanda and Helena. I knew they also had an older brother but I hadn't seen a photo of him," recalls Kracowska.

"You can't imagine how we have been longing over the years to locate someone from our grandmother's family," wrote Krzystof Hagemejer, Ida's grandson. He knew his grandmother's maiden name was Kracowska, and he had found among his father's papers a letter sent from the same address Kracowska had provided in the newspaper interview.

"I knew she had to be a relative," Hagemejer said.

It was shortly before the 70- year anniversary of the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising that the new family connection was made, and Kracowska had again been invited to participate in the ceremony, which took place this past August.

When she arrived in Warsaw with her grandson, Dan Saguy, members of her newly discovered family were eagerly waiting to meet her.

"I'm very happy to have family which is Jewish and lives in Israel," Hagemejer said in a telephone interview from Switzerland, where he works as an economist for a United Nations organization. "I read a lot about the Holocaust, but now I see it from a different perspective when I realize that it happened to members of my family."

He and his wife plan to visit Israel next April to meet the rest of the family.

"I felt like I had known them all my life," Kracowska said. "It was something extraordinary. We talked nonstop. There is a change in my life. I'm less pessimistic, and now, all of a sudden, there is family."

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Holocaust survivor from Bialystok finds long-lost family decades later

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When Holocaust survivor Ewa Kracowska was married 67 years ago, she decided to keep her maiden name - an unusual step at the time. Her motives were pragmatic rather than feminist. She reasoned that if she did so, childhood friends who survived the war could find her.

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10,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka from the Bialystok Ghetto

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Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the Bialystok Ghetto

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Children from the Bialystok ghetto were sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto.