Roza Krzesiwo photographs

Roza Krzesiwo was born in 1915 in Darabani, Romania to baker Lejba Stoleru and his wife Sara Kohn Stoleru. She relocated to Lipkany in Bessarabia (Lipcani, Moldova) in July 1940. She left in June 1941 and made her way to an agricultural cooperative called “Kolkhoz Dzierzynski” in the Fergana region of Uzbekistan. After about a year at the kolkhoz, she moved to Shurab in the Isfara district of Tajikistan where she met her future husband, Zucher Ber Krzesiwo. The couple repatriated to Bytom, Poland in May 1946. Her father was killed in Transnistria in 1941, her mother was shot in Darabani, Romania, and her sister, Pesia Stoleru Moscowitz (b. 1910), perished with her husband and children. Her brothers, Moshe (b. 1901), Meir (b. 1905), Filip (b.1907), and Izak (b.1917), survived labor camps in Transnistria. The Roza Krzesiwo photographs consist of six images depicting Roza’s brothers Izak, Meir, and Filip Stoleru in Bucharest in 1944; her husband (Zucher Ber Krzesiwo) in the “Progres” Jewish tailoring cooperative in 1946 and at a Communist Party event in 1950 in Bytom (Poland); his uncle Eli Krzesiwo in 1938 in Działoszyce (Poland) and his friend Josef Szlam in 1945 in Poland; and a Bund youth demonstration in 1946 in Katowice (Poland).