us-005578-irn78336-irn86331
type: RecordSet
archival history: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
biographical history: Anatol Radzinowicz (1911-1994) was born Anatol Rabinowicz in Łódź to Szewel and Sara (née Knorosowska) Rabinowicz on 10 December 1911. His mother owned a successful hat store in Łódź, and Anatol was able to attend the Szkola Handlowa in Łódź, before going to Prague to study at German University there. Following the German occupation of Prague in March 1939, just as Anatol had completed his studies and received a degree as an architectural engineer, he returned to his native Łódź. Zofia (Finia) Radzinowicz (1915 – 2007) was born on 24 June 1915 in Łódź to Froim Zryl and Kajla (née Fajngold) Rozenberg, who operated a dry cleaning and laundry business. Zofia had three siblings, a brother Stefan and two sisters, Fela and Estera. The two younger sisters, Zofia and Estera, wished to follow in the footsteps of Fela, who was a microbiologist, and studied at the Hochstein Gymnasium, as she had, but after graduation their further education was interrupted by the outbreak of war. Anatol and Zofia first met and fell in love in 1936 in Wiśniowa Góra, Poland, while Anatol was visiting during a break from his studies in Prague. Following the German invasion of Poland and the occupation of Łódź in September 1939, they decided to marry, and following their wedding on 1 November 1939, they fled to Białystok, the hometown of Anatol’s mother and on the other side of the demarcation line, in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. Meanwhile, their remaining family members on both sides opted to move to Warsaw, hoping for better conditions there. In Białystok, Anatol’s cousin Nioma found the couple a place to live, in a former orphanage, and Anatol found work as an architect at the Soviet-administered grocery distribution department. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, however, they were forced to move into the newly-constituted Jewish ghetto, where Zofia was assigned to work as a seamstress in a factory making uniforms for the German army. Anatol was assigned to …
has beginning date: 1926-01-01
has end date: 1984-12-31
has or had holder: us-005578
has or had identifier: 1
has or had some members with language: pol
has or had some members with language: deu
has or had subject: 686
has or had subject: 1106
has record set type: Item
identifier: irn86331
is or was included in: us-005578-irn78336
record resource extent: folders 11
record resource structure: The collection is arranged in four series: I. Memoirs, II. Photographs, III. Radzinowicz, Zofia, IV. Rozenberg, Estera. Files are arranged in alphabetical order by folder title within those series.
results or resulted from: 1
scope and content: The Radzinowicz family collection consists of post-war memoirs written by Anatol Radzinowicz describing his experiences in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust; a diary written in hiding by Zofia Rabinowicz in Bialystok in 1944, after her husband’s arrest; pre-war photographs of their birth families (Rabinowicz and Rozenberg families of Łódź) and post war photographs of their own family; and wartime correspondence from Zofia Radzinowicz’s sister, Estera Rozenberg, sent from the Warsaw ghetto (1940-1941) and from a French internment camp (1943). The Memoirs series contains two typescript texts from Anatol Radzinowicz, “Das Geschenk des Lebens” and “Mój kuzyn Nioma,” both numbering approximately a dozen pages, and attributed to Anatol Rattson, a name that he later used. These writings describe various facets of Radzinowicz’s experiences in occupied Poland, including the role of his cousin Nioma in helping the newlywed Radzinowicz’s after they fled to Bialystok in 1939, as well as the role of the Bagiński family in sheltering Anatol and Zofia following the liquidation of the Bialystok ghetto. The Photographs series contains pre-war photographs of the Rabinowicz and Rozenberg families, including childhood images of Anatol and Zofia, family portraits, and images of siblings, while the post-war photographs show them with their two daughters in Poland, primarily between the end of the war and the early 1950s. Also included is a photo of the Bagiński house in Bialystok and the Radzinowicz’s two daughters posing with Ludmiła Bagińska in the early 1960s. The Zofia Radzinowicz series consists of the diary pages that she wrote while in hiding, addressed in the second person to Anatol, who she feared had been killed after his capture by the Gestapo. The Estera Rozenberg series consists largely of postcards sent by her, but often with inscriptions and greetings from other family members and friends, from the Warsaw ghetto in 1940-1941, to a friend in Łódź, Irena Wojdysła…
title: Radzinowicz family papers