Franny and Irene on memory, experience, and the stories we carry – a Pinsk Holocaust legacy

By Tasha Ackerman

My interview with Franny Schwartz and Irene Stundel begins with technical glitches—Franny can’t get her microphone to work, so Irene begins lip-reading for her sister. While we sort through the technical difficulties, I thank Irene for “translating,” to which she responds: “Listen, I’ve been hearing impaired since I was 18 months old in Russia and then in Poland…you do what you have to do to survive, right?” Even through a Zoom screen, I was beginning to understand sisters’ resourcefulness and relationship with one another. It’s a fitting metaphor for what’s to come: two sisters navigating memory and their commitment to remembering the past.

Their parents, Jenny and Michael Goldberg, lived through Stalinist repression, the Holocaust, and Soviet antisemitism before emigrating to the United States in 1961. Later in life, they both wrote memoirs, passing down stories to their children to leave a legacy for future generations. Franny and Irene finally had the opportunity to understand what their father had endured, a history he had not been open about for the majority of his life.  Irene and Franny grew up navigating the space between what they experienced as new immigrants and their parents’ experiences that were largely left unsaid, piecing together their family’s history through memories, documents, and eventually their own voices.

As I began speaking with Irene and Franny, what struck me most was how each sister carries forward the legacy in her own way. Together, they offer insights into how memory travels across generations: forming a strong interest in the past and investment to bring that into the future. 

Franny and Irene were born in Pinsk, a town that was then part of the Soviet Union and is now in Belarus. In the inter-war years Pinsk was a part of Poland. In 1939 under the partition of Poland, it became part of the Belarus region of the Soviet Union. The sisters lived in a home with a garden. In fact, it was the house that their father had grown up in. Michael, their father, later wrote of this period: “We lived a primitive life similar to that of centuries ago. We had to get water from a well a few blocks away… Jenny did the laundry outside in the backyard, without sanitation and running water… So much effort went just for survival, none for luxury.” 

Yet, Irene and Franny’s memories of their childhood diverge in meaningful ways. Franny, the older of the two, recalls the move to Poland as disorienting and painful. She mourned the beloved books she was forced to leave behind and felt the loss of her cat and familiar surroundings. During the years they lived in Poland, from 1958-1960, the country was under Russian rule, they remember being able to see a red army post from their building. They attended a Jewish school with Russian teachers. She remembers being confused about how everyone knew she was Jewish until she realised that it was printed right on her uniform. She found these years in Poland very challenging. 

Irene, by contrast, remembers Poland differently, a transition between their life in Pinsk and their eventual move to America in 1961. She describes herself as a self-contained, insular child, something she attributes partly to her hearing impairment and partly, she jokes, to her astrological sign, Leo. Her school life, for example, was shaped more by playing cops and robbers with the neighbourhood boys than by her past or identity in Poland. Still, there were moments that pierced that through. She recalled an antisemitic incident where a teenage boy in their building who, upon seeing her, ran up the stairs and hurled a rock down at her.

As Irene and Franny got older, they themselves became more interested in Jewish life and the experiences of their parents and ancestors. Yet, it wasn’t until Irene and Franny began having children of their own that their parents’ complete stories started emerging and at this point, their parents wrote their memoirs. Their father, Michael, had rarely spoken about the war or the family he had lost. Their mother, Jenny, was more open, though even her stories were fragmented memories of her past. Yet, from their years in Pinsk through their lives in America, their parents remained active in Zionist organisations that kept them connected to Pinskers and their Jewish identity. 

Irene and Franny’s father, Michael Goldberg, was born Moshe Goldberg in 1916 in Okhovo, a small village west of Pinsk, during the First World War. His mother gave birth under German military occupation. Pinsk had become a frontline between German and Russian forces. So ironically, Michael was delivered by German military doctors. Growing up in Pinsk meant navigating changing regimes and a complex political landscape. As a child, he lived in a house shared by extended family, where windows were kept covered and escape routes were built into the furniture. He witnessed soldiers storming his home in search of hidden men, anti-Jewish violence in the streets, and mass executions, including a horrific moment in which he watched 36 members of the Jewish community buried alive in a mass grave outside his attic window. 

Michael attended a modernised cheder that emphasised both Jewish heritage and Polish language and mathematics, and for a time he was deeply religious, praying three times a day and aspiring to become a rabbi. His mother supported his religious aspirations, but his father showed less enthusiasm. His politically active father was a Marxist-Zionist who took Michael to party meetings and introduced him to secular ideas through the local party library. When his mother fell ill and his family faced economic hardship, Michael eventually chose to forgo his education to support the household. At sixteen, he began working in his father’s tailoring business, first to save the cost of hired labour and later out of necessity. Tailoring would become not only his trade but, in time, a means of survival.

When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Michael was drafted into the Soviet army and spent much of the war as a soldier, experiencing its horrors through the lens of battle, retreat, and survival. Though he rarely spoke about this period while his daughters were growing up, his memoir reveals a man who endured loss upon loss—friends, fellow soldiers, and family. 

When Michael returned to Pinsk in late 1945, he discovered his first wife and infant child had been murdered. Franny would eventually uncover their names in the Pinsk Ghetto records through her later research with JewishGen. Michael seemed to channel his grief into activism. He worked with the Bricha, a clandestine network that helped Jewish survivors escape Eastern Europe. It was during this time that he met Jenny Tunkel, and in 1946, they married.

Later in America, he helped rebuild Jewish life through community networks and remained close to fellow Pinskers, yet much of his personal history remained unspoken. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when Irene encouraged him to record his memories, that Michael began to share the full story. Irene typed while he dictated. The process revealed truths his daughters had never known. The memoir became his offering—not just to his children, but to the generations that would follow.

Jenny’s story, by contrast, was one she had been telling in fragments all along. Born in 1925 in Stalino (now Donetsk, Ukraine), she grew up in Soviet Ukraine during the Stalinist era. Jenny was a bright, ambitious student who dreamed of becoming an aerospace engineer, even as she was fed Communist propaganda at school and confronted antisemitism both inside and outside the classroom.

When the war began, Jenny and her family fled eastward by horse and train, trying to stay ahead of the advancing Nazis. One moment that haunted her was a disturbing encounter during her family’s flight: a woman in a village screamed that “the dirty Jews had brought on the war” and lunged at her father, while a policeman stood silently by. It was a moment that shattered Jenny’s belief in the ideals of Communist equality and marked the beginning of her disillusionment. They eventually landed in a rural Mordovian village, where Jenny formed a deep bond with an elderly woman, Babushka Ivanova, who treated her like a granddaughter. Despite her childhood dreams of becoming an aerospace engineer, she then found herself supporting her family through physical labour, for which she was paid in potatoes. 

In 1942, Jenny entered pharmacy school in Chelyabinsk, working gruelling hours and fighting to be taken seriously as a Jewish woman in a deeply hostile environment. Yet, she was independent and made close friendships during this time. In her memoir, she reflected how extra bread cost 300 rubles, so to distract themselves from hunger, she and her friends spent a lot of time going to movies or the circus, which only cost a few rubles. 

Throughout her years in pharmacy school, Jenny encountered persistent and often painful antisemitism—both subtle and overt. In her first year, a substitute teacher publicly shamed the class for being outperformed by “a Jew,” turning Jenny’s academic excellence into a source of humiliation. On a crowded streetcar, a group of students verbally and physically assaulted her, laughing and kicking her while refusing to let her exit. Yet, Jenny continued to work hard, and she eventually became a pharmacist.

After the war, she returned to her family who was then in Pinsk, which is where she met and married Michael. Together, they tried to build a life under Soviet rule, enduring ongoing antisemitic persecution, KGB interrogations, and economic hardship. In 1947, their first daughter Franny (Fannie) was born followed by Irene (Irena) in 1951. Life was very hard, and Michael dreamed of emigrating from Pinsk. Yet, this dream was repeatedly deferred by family duty and bureaucracy. However, in 1958, they finally received permission to leave, first for Poland and then, in 1961, for the United States.

In Brooklyn, Michael and Jenny learned English while building their lives in America. Again, tailoring offered an opportunity for Michael, and Jenny took a business course and then began working. They both became active in Jewish and Zionist organisations and in 1985, they finally visited Israel, which had been Michael’s lifelong dream. Jenny was overwhelmed with emotion at the Western Wall, and at first, couldn’t identify why she was crying. Then, she recognised the feeling as a profound sense of homecoming; an emotional connection to the Jewish homeland that had lived within her for decades.

As adults, Franny and Irene have each found ways to honour and extend the legacy of their parents’ survival. For Franny, this has meant a deep dive into genealogical research, the preservation of Holocaust history, and a commitment to stand against antisemitism. For the past twenty years, she has been involved in projects with JewishGen, an online platform for Jewish ancestry research. Yet, even dealing with past records, this research can still be intense, and at times emotionally devastating. After finding records of her father’s family who had all perished in the Pinsk Ghetto, she needed to step back for some time. The discovery brought up difficult existential thoughts: If the war hadn’t come, his first family would have lived. I would not be here. The weight of such knowledge haunted her for a long time until she arrived at a quiet resolve: just live the best life you can for them.

Through these projects, Franny manages to keep her family’s story alive. She has passed down these stories to her own children and grandchildren, even writing a personal memoir-style narrative called Nana’s Life in Pinsk, to ensure that memory continues across the generations. For Franny, it is an act of resilience. And when asked why preserving these stories is important to her, she responds: “The commitment to antisemitism must remain. We must keep at it. We must teach. We must be relentless in pushing it forward. It just has to happen.”  

Irene has carried the legacy through tradition and community. Since becoming a grandmother, she has taken on the role of hosting Purim and Hanukkah gatherings. These moments of ritual and connection uphold their family heritage. She has studied Torah both in groups and one-on-one, learning the aleph-bet and collecting a personal library of Jewish texts. “We’re looking forward, and making sure we fight antisemitism. And the other part of this is to keep all the stories of the past,” explains Irene. “I think the point of the story is to keep the past together and travel forward with it. And that’s called history, or rather, her-story.”

Franny and Irene’s stories reflect the persistent work of memory: how we hold the past and carry it forward. When their parents decided to document their stories, they did so with an awareness of the importance of passing them on to the next generation. Franny and Irene continue that legacy, not only by remembering but also through their curiosity and desire to share.

The Goldberg family story reminds us that memory is not fixed. Even sisters raised in the same home remember the past differently. Irene noted: it’s a difference between experience and memory. Their story is a reminder of how personal memory and collective history intertwine, reflecting The Together Plan’s mission: preserving the past for a better tomorrow. Franny and Irene show us that remembering isn’t just about what’s preserved in archives, it’s also about what’s passed from person to person, across kitchen tables across generations. So ask. Listen. Tell. Every conversation is a step toward preserving the stories that shape who we are, and who we become together.