Rachael in Radzilow

Rachael (nee Gottfried/Gutferd) Zutkowitz, born in Radzilow in 1903, the youngest of six (one sister died in Radzilow), stayed behind with her parents as all her elder siblings emigrated to Rochester, NY, one by one, as they were of age to do so. Her next youngest sibling was about 15 years older than she was, so Rachael was far younger than any of the others. She remained in Radzilow through the years, along with her parents. At some point thereafter, perhaps after marriage, she moved to Trzcianne (12.5 miles to the SSE), where her three children, Chaim, Shlomo and Zehava/Golda, were born.

When the Germans invaded in 1939, Rachael and her family managed to hide. Her husband Efraim dug a hole in the swamp (presumably somewhere in the nearby Biebrza National Park marshlands, a vast area in between both towns; difficult to traverse even now, and certainly back then), all by himself, where the family was able to survive, along with two cousins of the family, Shimon and Sonia Lewin.

The family was able to reach the American zone at the end of the War, and they emigrated to Israel in 1947, through Selvino, Italy.

In 1965 Rachael traveled to Rochester to meet up with her 4 siblings after more than 50 years. The eldest sibling had left Radzilow when she was just 3 years old, so she had little, if any, recollection of any of them..

Efraim lost all his siblings in the Holocaust, and never talked about what happened. How they got food, how they kept dry and warm in the swamp area, all that is unknown.

[Editor's Note]: Though the article spells the surname as  "Zurtkowitz," in reality it was Zutkowitz, originally spelled in Polish as Rzotkiewicz (R is silent).