he went through the Holocaust in his soul – the story of Zelman Schary of Brest-Litovsk

 

 

Can Google Earth zoom in, backwards to 1941?  

Deliver to me your unknown home, the one I never knew you lived at? 

605 Ocean Parkway.

 

Sitting in her home in Israel, author and attorney Helen Schary Motro, gently adjusts her reading glasses and shares her poem, “My Father on Ocean Parkway” written as an attempt to imagine what her father may have felt in a life scarred by the Shoah.  Zelman Schary was a man who kept his story close, as if protecting a broken heart.  A man of very few words, he never spoke directly to Helen of what he had lived through.  Instead, she internalized fragments of his story, passed on second-hand from her mother, herself a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw.  Her mother heard anecdotes and stories, recreating the life he had lost from her husband as the two of them strolled together on long walks through Central Park and Riverside Park in New York City in the years after the war. For Helen, much of her father’s life before 1941 remains a mystery, one she is still piecing together.  

When Helen Schary Motro speaks about her father, she begins not with dates or places, but with loss. “My father did not go through the Holocaust in his own body. He did not physically live through the camps or ghettos. He did, however, go through the Holocaust in his soul.” His story is one of a man who left home for a brief visit abroad and never saw his family again. This is the story of a life split in two: before 1939 in Brest-Litovsk, and after 1939 as an immigrant in New York who had to begin again from nothing.

life before 1939 in Brest-Litovsk

For generations, Zelman’s family lived in Brest-Litovsk, a city on the Western Bug River that has long sat on the shifting border between Poland and Russia. The town changed hands many times: it was part of Tsarist Russia, then of interwar Poland, later absorbed into the Soviet Union, occupied by Nazi Germany during World War Two, and returned to the Soviet Union afterward. Today it is known as Brest, in independent Belarus.

Zelman was born in Brest-Litovsk on October 15, most likely in 1901, although the exact year is not known, into a religious Jewish family as the youngest son of many brothers and sisters. He moved away from strict observance as a young man and became deeply secular.  In his youth, Zelman was a very good student. As a teenager during the First World War, his schooling was cut short when the Russian authorities expelled the Jews from Brest-Litovsk in 1915.

In his thirties, he joined and later inherited his father’s business, an ironworks and metalworks company. From their strategic location on the border of Poland and Russia, they sold railroad tracks and metal frameworks across the region, supplying infrastructure for bridges, trains and industrial buildings. By the 1930s, Zelman had become a successful and wealthy businessman. He owned a big, beautiful automobile, one of the first Jews in Brest-Litovsk to have a car. 

In his late thirties, Zelman left Brest-Litovsk on what was supposed to be a pleasure trip to visit his brother in New York City during the 1939 World’s Fair. Accompanied by his cousin Abraham Huberman he arrived in New York on August 2, 1939, by passenger ship. Helen shared, “It’s hard to understand now why anyone would travel then, on the eve of war, but he did.” On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and normal travel across the borders quickly became impossible. He had been scheduled to return home in mid-September 1939.  What was meant to be a brief absence became a permanent exile, leaving behind his wife, Esther, his three young daughters, Peshke, Rachel, and Ruth, and his successful business.  

When the Second World War began and Germany swiftly conquered Poland, Brest-Litovsk ceased to be part of Poland and was incorporated into the Soviet Union in accordance with a secret pact between Russia and Germany. Under the new Communist regime, private businesses and property were nationalized, including Zelman’s family business. His family became poor overnight.

605 Ocean Parkway- not home really, more temporary purgatory.  

Trapped by War.  

You stayed in the land of the free…

 

 

 

Scrambling for visas, for hope, for miracles- 

In the blackest days of 1939, 1940, 1941, 

You tried to reach the heart of darkness.

Cable after cable bore your return address as sender:

605 Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn.

No cable returned good news; soon no cable was answered.  

Nobody got a visa; in Europe everyone died.  

 

For a time, there was still contact.

 

trapped by war across the ocean

In those early war years, when Brest-Litovsk fell under Soviet control, Zelman threw himself into efforts to rescue his family. From New York he sent telegrams, letters, appeals to the Red Cross, trying to secure visas for his wife and children to leave their home before the Nazi invasion, while Brest-Litovsk was still under Soviet jurisdiction. But it was all in vain.

About 25 years ago, Helen found a box of letters in the attic of her family’s beach house, proof of the fragile lifeline that had once connected Zelman to his home abroad. There were letters from his employees, dozens of letters from his first wife, Esther, and many heartbreaking letters and drawings from their young children. Peshke, the oldest, born in 1930, was nine when the war broke out. Rachel was seven, and Ruth was three. These were the three children he had left behind.

From the letters and from history, Helen learned that life for them was extremely difficult- shortages, fear, loneliness. His wife constantly wrote about how lonely and desperate she felt, begging him to send food, canned goods, dried meats. Miraculously he was able to send some packages. Helen even found a receipt from Macy’s from 1940 for sweaters and warm hats he bought for his wife and daughters. There’s a photograph of them wearing these clothes, the ones he sent from New York.

Letters continued to arrive from his family until April 1941. In June 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, a surprise attack on the Soviet Union and quickly seized Brest-Litovsk. From that point on, there was only silence. Zelman never received another word from his wife and daughters again.

 

destruction of a community

Before the war, tens of thousands of Jews lived in Brest-Litovsk, making up over forty percent of the town’s population. After the German invasion in 1941, the occupiers quickly rounded up and shot about 5,000 Jewish men and boys, many of them community leaders and professionals. The remaining Jews were forced into the Brest Ghetto, where hunger, disease, and forced labor took a heavy toll. On October 15, 1942, ironically Zelman’s own birthday, the ghetto was liquidated. Many were brutally murdered locally. The remainder were horded into railroad cars and taken by train roughly 80 kilometers northeast to the forest of Bronna Góra where they were shot into mass pits. Almost everyone who had survived in the ghetto was killed in those actions. There was only one known living survivor.

None of this Zelman knew in real time. For him there was only silence. Before the war, Brest-Litovsk’s Jewish population had numbered in the tens of thousands; by the time the Red Army liberated the city in 1944, fewer than twenty Jews from Brest were still alive. In effect, an entire community had been annihilated.  From New York, Zelman could not know the details as they unfolded. What he experienced was a void: a silence that lasted for the rest of his life, never knowing the fate of his family but assuming the worst.

He had lost his wife, his three daughters, his siblings, his mother, his business, his home, his status, and his country. In a matter of years, his entire world was gone. Tragically, the brother whom Zelman joined in New York sacrificed his only child to the war: Jerome Schary served in the U.S. army and was killed while on active duty in Europe.

 

 

 

beginning again in New York

 

You stayed in the land of the free, went to night school…

Grew fat on the fat of the land…

 

Helen shared, “My father had left behind a wife and three children, his entire extended family, his business, his sisters, his brothers, his mother- everyone. He was never able to go back. He was never able to get anyone out. He lost everybody –  his whole family and all his acquaintances. He lost his money, his business, his nationality, his language. He had to start again from zero.”

At almost forty years old, Zelman had to join a new country and build a new life. It was very brave and took tremendous strength and fortitude. In that sense, he was a success in his new life. Once it became clear that his visit had turned permanent Zelman adopted the Americanization of his name: Schary. In Brest it had been Charo. He joined his brother’s business; he remarried to Ola Schary (nee Rotzach) in 1947, a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw, who had made her own path to safety and together they had a daughter: Helen.

But he paid a price. He paid in his health and in his soul. It was not without scars. Helen  grew up with a father who had gone through this trauma, even though on the outside he had “rejuvenated” his life. The price of survival was paid inwardly.  Zelman almost never spoke to Helen about his past. The life that had come before- the first marriage, the daughters, the parents and siblings, the car, the ironworks, the prosperous Jewish town of Brest-Litovsk– was almost entirely absent from his conversations with his child, Helen.  

And yet it was there.

Helen’s mother absorbed these stories from her husband and, in turn, passed fragments of them on to her daughter. But memories fade, and no one wrote them down. By the time Helen was ready to ask deeper questions, her father’s health was failing. Her window to hear the story directly from him was short.

Her time for asking questions and hoping he might open up was cut short when he died while Helen was still a teenager, leaving much of his life before 1941 an unresolved mystery for his only surviving child.

 

discovery of names 

For many years, that was where the story rested: a father whose inner life had been marked by unspeakable loss, and a daughter who knew only the outline.

Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, new material began to surface.

Brest-Litovsk is unique in one respect. A few months after the Germans conquered the town, in November 1941, the occupation authorities ordered a full registration of the Jews. All Jews aged fourteen and over in the Brest Ghetto had to report to the municipal offices, have their details recorded, supply a photograph, and receive internal identity papers, the documents researchers now refer to as the “Brest Ghetto passports.” Local clerks, working in Polish, registered every person and family. The entire file survived the war in the municipal archives, which were taken over by the Soviet authorities in 1944. For decades, these records remained buried in state archives and were inaccessible to outside researchers.

Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did newly opened archives make it possible for survivors and scholars to locate this material in Brest. Copies were eventually made for institutions such as Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the collection became known as the Brest Ghetto Passport Archive.

At that time, Helen knew nothing about any of this. In the 1990s, she began trying to find people from Brest-Litovsk in Israel (where she lives after making aliyah from New York) – survivors, or those whose roots were there. It was difficult work in the days before easy online search. She called Yad Vashem and other organizations, following one lead after another. Eventually she found her way to an elderly couple in a suburb of Tel Aviv who had come from Brest-Litovsk. When she mentioned her father’s name, the woman’s eyes widened in recognition: “The Schary family? From the metals? The ironworks?” They knew of her father’s family business. Through this couple, Helen learned about the annual memorial gathering in Tel Aviv for the Jews of Brest. She also learned about the wartime passport registration and that the archive had been digitalized by Yad Vashem and made available online.

Searching the database, she found the registration record for her father’s first wife, Esther. She then wrote a letter to Yad Vashem requesting a copy. A few weeks later a large brown envelope arrived in the mail. Inside was the registration form Esther had filled out on November 26, 1941. It listed the family’s address and the names and birthdates of their three daughters. It bore Esther’s photograph, her signature, her fingerprint, and the clerk’s signature. More than twenty years later, Helen still gets goosebumps when she looks at that document. It remains one of the few surviving official traces of her father’s first family.

 

a father’s legacy

When Helen reflects on her father’s legacy, she returns again and again to the question of what remains when everything material has been stripped away. From Zelman’s story, she says, we learn how quickly a life can be emptied. “Everything you have can disappear in a moment,” she reflects. “Your money, your work, your home, even your family. What are we left with then?” In his case, he lost his parents, his first wife, his three little girls, his business, his savings.”  “His everything,” as Helen puts it. “What was left of him? Maybe only his honor. His will to act well in this world. That’s what really counts: trying to act justly, and with love.”

Building a new life in New York took enormous courage. Helen sees her father as a deeply brave man, quiet, guarded, but courageous. “He didn’t talk,” she says. “He was a very quiet man, very silent. He paid a great price for what he had lived through. He paid in his health and in his heart- literally and figuratively.”

For Helen, telling his story is also a way to remember the family who did not survive. She thinks especially of the three daughters from his first marriage, Peshka, Rachel, and Ruth, whose letters and drawings she found decades later. “It’s amazing that they should just vanish,” she says. “They wrote those letters; I know their names. It doesn’t feel right that their memories should be erased. So I’m making this small contribution toward their memory.”

Helen herself became the mother of three daughters. At times she wondered if, in some deep way, they were “replacement children” for the three half-sisters she never met, but she never felt like a replacement child herself. Instead, she wove her father’s first family into her own. In a cardboard box of old family photographs that her father brought over to the United States in 1939, Helen found a black-and-white image of young Rachel in Brest-Litovsk dressed in a traditional Chinese costume for Purim. Years later, while visiting  Hong Kong, Helen bought silk outfits for her own girls and dressed them in these for Purim. Only years later did she consciously realize the connection. She made a collage that placed those modern colour images alongside the old photograph of Rachel, linking the three murdered sisters to Zelman’s three living granddaughters who would carry their family forward.

She also chose to honour her father directly in her children’s names: her oldest daughter bears the name Shari in his memory and her youngest daughter’s middle name is Ruth. In these gestures – names, collages, stories spoken aloud, Helen has bound her family to Zelman Schary and to the heritage he carried with such courage and such silence.

 

You can learn more about Helen Schary Motro’s literary work on her website at Helen Schary Motro – Biography.   Her latest book, The Right to Happiness: After All They Went Through, is a collection of innovative short stories that explore the echoes of the Holocaust on survivors and their children, and the lessons of post-trauma for the 21st century. You can order the book here.  

 The Together Plan led a twelve year campaign to build a  memorial at the site of the Brest-Litovsk Jewish cemetery with 1250 salvaged remnant gravestones that once stood in the cemetery. The memorial construction began in October 2024 and the memorial was officially opened on July 28th 2025. You can find out more here and watch the film here. To access the catalogue of the gravestones that were found click here.

To support the work of The Together Plan you can do so  by clicking here or if you are in the USA you can support us through our sister non-profit Jewish Tapestry Project by clicking here.