So who was this man my mother was going to marry?

Father Number One

The first documents in the genealogical file are these “origin” documents. There was never any birth certificate, and we have not been able to find one since.

These certificates say he was born in 1908, was arrested in 1942 and was liberated in 1945 from the (German) camp Bergen Belsen, the notorious Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany. Somehow he got back to Brussels where he had lived before the war, and these two documents issued in Brussels were at first his only documentation. However he was lucky, because apart from surviving the concentration camp itself, he managed not to be trapped in a displaced persons camp, sited right next door to the concentration camp from which he was liberated. This happened at Belsen and must have been terrible for the previous inmates to live nearby the site of their torture and the deaths of colleagues.

According to the document his birthplace was Stanislau, when it was in Austrian Galicia before WWI. Afterwards, it became Stanislawow when it transferred to Poland in the interwar period, and Ivano-Frankovsk in the USSR, then Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine. See the map in an earlier post here.

What’s strange to us is that we have never found any other Kosmyryks, (with exactly that spelling) except one, Stephan Kosmyryk, who is first recorded as wounded and then dead in 1914, in a place called Pniow, not far from Stanislau. It’s not clear from the Austrian list of wounded or killed in which he appears, whether he was actually from Pniow, or just died there. Google shows Pniv, one hour’s drive from Ivano-Frankivsk, so we assumed there might be a cemetery with his grave. But although Pniv has a ruined castle, the Museum of the Galician oil fields and and a Museum of Chivalry, there is no cemetery with a Kosmyryk.

There are too many other spellings of something similar to Kosmyryk, that we have never bothered to research them.

From these certificates we could consider that he was Jewish, but when questioned he would say (sometimes) his mother was Jewish and (other times) his father was Jewish. He never displayed any other indication of Jewishness, so if anything he was a secular Jew. Perhaps, if you lost all your documents in a camp, and you were Jewish, this was the only place to start.

Most of the documents following at the time, the food stamps, the expenses statements, are provided by the Aide aux Israelites Victimes de la Guerre, or the Palestinian Office in Brussels. The registration in the Etterbeek commune in Brussels confirms that he was in Germany during the war, and was repatriated from Belsen.

Later in his UK travel document, we can find out that his parents were Michael Kosmyryk from Lviv born 1890 and Helene Esterman born 1888. But we have never been able to trace them. In his British Alien Registration document of March 1948, after he married my mother, it says he was in Polish government service in the Polish army from 1939-42 and then a prisoner of war in Germany.

Only when we were older did we have more searching questions about his past, but our mother warned us not to ask him about the war or about his past, as there were no answers, or only contradictory answers. She said that basically he told a different story every time and she considered him like Baron von Munchhausen, (someone telling fantastic stories). She told us that his father had died in WWI and he said once or twice that his mother had gone off…. , so we realised he had had a tough childhood.

Later I remember asking her how she could marry him, knowing so little about his past life. She said that, immediately after the war, no one wanted to think about the terrible things that happened during the war, just to get on with building a happier life and a new future.

So there were few opportunities to ask him more questions. Once in my 40s, he mentioned that his father had died in the battle of (a name I didn’t know and so can’t remember now), but I stupidly interrupted him, saying it was the first time I had heard him talk about his father, and immediately he shut up and that was that.

So this is literally all we know about Father Number one, from a genealogical point of view. Nothing else has ever turned up. And we have searched.