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Today, another story, the starting point of which was a trace of a mezuzah found by Janka from Krakuska City Guide and secured by Aleksander from Mi Polin in a tenement house at ul. Sebastiana 19 in Krakow. Let’s see who lived there once.
Photos by Aleksander Prugar
One of the families living in a Kraków tenement house at ul. Sebastiana 19 was the
Wachtel family – Henryk, Helena and their daughter Maria.
Henryk and Helena, in fact, Chaim Wachtel and Chaja Baustein, got married on June 30th, 1908, in Jarosław, where the groom held the position of a private clerk. It is not known how
they both ended up in a city several hundred kilometres away from their homeland, but they spent several years there.
Henryk was born in Słotwina on August 11th, 1881 as the son of Izak Wachtel and Rywka née Gleitsman, while Helena came from Podgórze, where she was born on April 1st, 1885 as the daughter of the merchant Joshua Baustein and Malka Schudmak.
A piece of Chaim Henryk Wachtel and Chaja Helena Baustein’s marriage record / Source: State Archive in Przemyśl
One and a half year after their wedding day, their first child, the daughter Maria, was born
in house number 161 on September 12th, 1909. After the next 4 years and moving into the new house at number 52, their son Osias was born on August 19th, 1913. Osias changed his
name two times – first to Oskar, and finally to Aleksander.
In the meantime, Henryk worked as a clerk in Jarosław and Krosno. After 1914, the family settled permanently in Kraków, and Henryk started a timber business – he began running a construction and carpentry timber yard based at ul. Kamienna 22 (I found a bill from
1935 at the Internet auction!)
Henryk Wachtel’s construction and carpentry timber yard’s bill / Source: Aleksander Prugar
The address book from 1936
Henryk and Helena survived the war – the notes in the marriage certificate evidence this, according to them, in the 1950s, they officially changed their names and surnames: from
Chaim to Henryk, from Chaja to Helena, from Wachtel to Wachniewicz. After the war, they lived in Warsaw, where their son Aleksander started a new life. He buried his mother in 1964 in the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street. The fate of Maria, the daughter of Henryk and Helena, Alexander’s sister, remains unknown.
A photography of Maria Wachtel / Source: Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw
A protocol concerning Jewish inhabitants of Kraków – in the picture: Henryk Wachtel, 1940 / Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
A grave of Helena Wachtel buried at Jewish cemetery in Warsaw on Okopowa Street / Source: Foundation for Documentation of Jewish Cemetries in Poland
Sources:
E-book Duchy Przodków. Poradnik genealogiczny już w sprzedaży!
Odkryj historię swoich przodków już teraz.
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