In 2006, a message submitted to the Wysokie Litewskie Yahoo Group mailing list told of a Yakov Kessler, born in Wysokie in about 1919 and still living in Israel. An unnamed intermediary was in touch with Mr. Kessler.
The only substantial information about Wysokie recieved from him was about electrical power in interwar period:
The windmill produced electricity until midnight. At 05:00-06:00 AM, Kessler thinks, the windmill started producing electricity again. Anyway, the windmill itself worked incessantly/non-stop for 24 hours a day. Kessler assumes that electricity started being used by the windmill in about 1935. He does not know when the windmill was built (just after his reply, the interviewer mentioned the year 1905 as Morris Tenenbaum wrote in his Memoirs). Kessler mentioned that he knows that once the windmill was enlarged, but he does not remember further details.
Through the intermediary, Mr. Kessler also cast strong doubt on the map of ~1906 Wysokie drawn by Morris Tenenbaum: the course of the Pulva River was misrepresented, he said, and there were no “swimming holes” at all along the river.
Problems with the Tenenbaum map were already noted by Roslyn Bresnick-Perry, née Kolner, who left Wysokie as a child in 1929.
In 2009, Hannah Kadmon searched for another Wysoker in Israel, 90 year-old Hayim Barg, a veteran of the Red Army. (Apparently being away in the Army was his escape from the Holocaust in Wysokie.) Mr. Barg's daughter told Hannah of his old, close friend, Yakov (Yankl) Kessler, who had died only a few months earlier. But she did not know how to contact his family.
Hannah began the hunt for Mr. Kessler's descendants, in the hope that one of them might have information or documentation of Wysokie.
In 2009, Hannah reported she had heard from Yakov (Yankel) Kessler's daughter. How? Hannah submitted the name to an Israeli radio program called Searching for Relatives. When Ziva Kessler heard her father's name on the program she was very touched; she contacted Hannah straightaway.
About that time a twenty-year-old letter turned up: A letter of thanks dated 1990 from New Jersey landsmen (T. L. and his brother G. L.)
to Yaakov Kessler, Abraham Rabinovitz, Henya Gutman and Shmuel Hadari. Apparently all six had met up and the brothers had a chance to learn valuable information about their ancestral town. For example:
•
They were told that all wooden houses were burnt down during the war and the buildings in the photos are mostly new. Some of the bigger stone buildings are still there, especially in the center of town on Pishtova/Fistova Street and around the central square.
The Tzelkeva church is still there and next to it the school that changed into a movie house. The village is quiet, nice, no Jews, mostly provincial Russians. Many people lead old style life – with no electricity and there are almost no cars around.
• They tried to get some documents about the family in the Municipality but they were told that documents of the Polish era are kept in regional offices in Brest. They could not make it there.
• They met Shlomo Kanterovitz, a Jew from W-L who was in the red army during the war and thus survived. He lives in Kamenetz Litovsk and works in the regional government. He asked their help to erect a memorial for the W-L in the village.
• They tried to take pictures of the village in general and the places especially dear to the four recipients. They found it difficult to identify where these places were, because most streets changed their name. Many of the old buildings are still standing around the central square but the square itself, where the shops used to be, was turned into a park, grass with a memorial in memory of the Russians who died in battle. The hotel Fux is still there but is not used anymore as a hotel.
| Notes: Searching for Relatives is no longer on the air. Pishtova/Fistova Street: Almost certainly Ul. Pocztowa, Post (Office) Street. Shlomo Kanterovitz, possibly the last surviving Jewish person in the Wysokie--Kamenets area, has since died. He was unsuccessful in erecting a monument to murdered Jews in either town. In 2007, the only significant data about Wysokie that could be located in the Brest Archive was the 1928 Voters' List. |
