Shedding light on Cardiff family histories
MICHAEL CAPLAN knew little about the history of his Polish Jewish family, unsure even of the town from which they originated.
Now a team of volunteers from around the world have uncovered their story, shedding light on what became of them.
“We’re making sure these people’s stories are being told,” explained Laura Henley Harrison, the oral history officer of the Jewish Historical Association of South Wales (JHASW), which is researching the lives of the 102 names on the Holocaust memorial board at Cardiff Reform Synagogue.
“It’s not just the stories of how they died; it’s the stories of how they lived.”
It was some 20 years ago that Mr Caplan, a Cardiff Reform member, had asked for the name of his great-grandfather, Jacob Kotlan, to be added to the shul’s Shoah remembrance board.
He was unsure if his relative had died during or before the Holocaust. “I just knew some sketchy things.”
Jacob’s son, Abraham Caplan, had moved to Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, anglicised his name, and lost touch with his Polish relations.
After the war, “it was considered that they had all died”, Michael Caplan told the JC. “I’m sure he made some inquiries along the way but with no good news, was reluctant to talk about it.”
Now after six months’ research, the
JHASW has uncovered the family’s history.
Abraham Caplan’s immigration records led to his birthplace, Ozorków — a town on the outskirts of Lodz — and from there to birth and marriage records.
A Canadian volunteer translated documents from Russian. A Polish genealogist compiled the family tree “as a mitzvah”, Ms Henley Harrison reported.
They revealed that the Kotlans had been forced into a ghetto by 1940, with the town’s synagogue burnt to the ground and residents forced to work in Nazi-run workshops.
Mass deportations began in 1942 but the Kotlans stayed because of their status as master tailors.
“It was that skill that kept them alive for so long in the ghetto because they were producing clothing for the army and German civilians.”
There is no record of what happened to Jacob Kotlan. But his wife, Sura, and two of their children died of tuberculosis in a ghetto hospital.
Their youngest son, Dawid, was left alone at 13-years-old. While his ultimate fate is unclear, it seems he was deported to his death in 1944.
“You know it’s going to be a sad story,” Mr Caplan said. “I held out hope that some of them would survive, that they would be living in another part of the world happily. But the story shows that the Nazis were quite efficient.”
News of the family’s tailoring history was of particular interest as the Caplans had been in the trade down the generations in Britain.
“Researching these names is almost a defiance because Hitler wanted these people erased,” Ms Henley Harrison said.
For their living relatives, the findings were “not a sense of closure but a sense of knowledge”.
Funding for the project has been provided by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Jewish Historical Society of England, the Jewish Memorial Council and Cardiff University.