After her liberation from a German labor camp in May 1945, 23-year-old Rachaela Lisner made her way home to Lask, Poland. She had promised her family she’d return to the tiny town after the war; together they would resume the life they once shared.
She found almost no one.
What’s more, Lask’s Jewish community, which numbered 3,500 before the war, was now virtually nonexistent, save for the few shell-shocked stragglers who, like Lisner, had stumbled home in search of the loved ones they left behind.
Among the returnees was Tauba Piotrkowski, a feisty woman several years Lisner’s junior.
Lisner had known Piotrkowski only by sight before the war. But Lisner’s future husband Emanuel Gelbart had survived a string of concentration camps with Piotrkowski’s spouse-to-be, Morris Weiss.
It was thus the two young women became acquainted.
Recently, Rachaela Gelbart sat in Tauba Weiss’ sunny San Francisco dining room and recalled attending the Weiss wedding in July 1945. That celebration in a tiny Lask living room marked the start of a friendship between the women that would span decades and continents, witness the birth of businesses and children and the loss of beloved husbands.
“What binds us together is we are from the same time,” says Gelbart, a straightforward woman with dark, expressive eyes.
Sit the two survivors down together over coffee and faded photographs and that time comes to life with somber poignancy.
They reminisce about Lask being turned into a ghetto. They recall the way the Nazis, upon liquidating the ghetto, crammed the city’s Jews into a small church for four days before deporting some to the Lodz Ghetto and others to Chelmno, a concentration camp on Poland’s Nir River.
“We have a lot in common from the camps,” Weiss says of her relationship with Gelbart. “We talk about home.”
Agreeing on some points, quibbling over others — “we love each other but we argue,” Weiss says — the pair switches to Yiddish frequently.
“Excuse us for talking in Yiddish,” Gelbart says. “You know why we do it? We don’t want that Hitler should have succeeded with everything.”
They also recollect immigrating to the Sonoma County town of Cotati, first the Weisses, then the Gelbarts.
Those were days of chicken farming and daily visits between the families. Both lived on Hessel Road, and their children — three Weiss sons and two Gelbart daughters — played together.
Gelbart, in fact, is godmother to the Weisses’ youngest son, Allen.
The two women talk about when they moved to San Francisco — the Weisses in search of a more extended Jewish community, the Gelbarts seeking economic opportunity.
Nearly broke from unprofitable chicken farming, the Gelbarts borrowed money from friends and bought a laundromat, then a grocery store, then a downtown deli on Stockton Street near Macy’s.
The Weisses, meanwhile, opened a shoe business and later sold goods at flea markets.
But most of all, the women talk about their husbands and the close relationship the two men shared.
“They were like two brothers,” says Weiss, a robust, outgoing woman with brightly polished nails and hair smoothed into a neat bun. “One would cut off an arm for the other.”
When Morris Weiss fell ill with liver and colon cancer in 1984, Emanuel Gelbart visited him daily, even when his friend could no longer speak or keep his eyes open. Weiss died in August of that year.
Until Gelbart’s own death of a heart attack in 1992, “he went once a month to Morris’ grave,” his widow says.
One would be hard-pressed to find wives who lavish respect on their husbands quite like Weiss and Gelbart do.
“It’s because you can’t find such husbands in the world anymore,” Gelbart says.
She remembers her husband handing out free food to anyone who came into his deli and asked. And he never passed a beggar in the street without offering change.
“He was very generous,” she says. “Once in a lifetime, you can meet such a person.”
For her part, Weiss speaks proudly of her husband’s role in a protest that helped close a Nazi bookstore in San Francisco in 1977.
After police arrested the Weisses’ youngest son Allen for ransacking the store, they placed him in a car with a Nazi leader; Morris Weiss was arrested for kicking the Nazi leader with his boot.
Tauba Weiss, a grandmother of six, has a fiery streak of her own. In the ’60s, when American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell came to San Francisco for a demonstration, she pulled him out of his truck and slammed him to the street.
“Take no prisoners…that’s just the way my mom and dad were,” Allen Weiss says.
Gelbart expresses herself in her own quiet way. She doesn’t talk about her contributions to the community; it is only through her daughter, Ruth Mainzer, that those come to light.
“She’s loving and kind and generous,” Mainzer says of her mother. “What this woman gives…people have no idea, because she doesn’t like to take credit.”
Mainzer remembers how her mother used to go to San Francisco’s Jewish Home for the Aged several times a week to visit the mother of a friend she met in a German displaced persons camp. Often she took her two granddaughters to the home, encouraging them to visit with residents.
“My girls learned at a very young age that you don’t have to give money,” says Mainzer, a Menlo Park resident. “If you have time and love, it’s just as good for a lot of people.”
Like other local survivors, Gelbart sometimes tells her story in local schools. But these days she’s doing it less often. To tell her story is to relive it, and reliving takes a greater and greater toll as she ages.
“It’s the loneliness, the lack of family, the feeling you are left alone in the world,” Gelbart says of the Holocaust’s most potent lingering effects. “It will never heal.”
Time has worn on Weiss as well. Often unable to sleep, she takes out old photos in the middle of the night and stares at the lost faces of the past. “Sometimes it piles up too much,” Weiss says. “It hurts.”
The hurt has made it harder for Weiss to speak publicly about her life, something she has done for years. Still, “I will continue,” she says. “I owe this to my family.”