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Imagine a world with no past. This was the world that Ruth knew for most of her life. As a little girl, there were no pictures of her grandparents on the mantle, nor keepsakes to hold onto while her mother told stories about life as a child. Growing up, Ruth always felt a little empty - she never knew what it was like to have cousins to play with or an uncle who looked a little like her dad. She describes her past as intangible, almost as though it were filled with ghosts.  

Ruth was born in 1946 at a Displaced Persons Camp a year and a half after the liberation of Auschwitz, where her father had been a prisoner for over four years. Her father and mother met at this camp, located in Salzburg, Austria. “I’ve always said that my parents wouldn’t have met had it not been for the war because they came from different ends of Poland,” she said, “so to me, that in itself is a miracle.”  

When she was just a toddler, Ruth’s great uncle brought her and her parents to the United States, where they settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, away from the DP Camp where she had spent the first two and a half years of her life. Her father owned a fruit store where her mother, having a better grasp of the English language, used to work the counter. While both of her parents had been prisoners of the Nazis during World War II, they spoke very little of it, as Ruth put it, “there was never a past, never a past. (With) my parents, it was always forward, and that’s an issue with a lot of survivors.” It wouldn’t be until Ruth was 31 years old with a daughter of her own that her mother finally spoke about the past with her granddaughter as research for a grammar school project.  

Ruth always wondered about her family - who her grandmother had been, what she looked like and whether or not there were people out there, somewhere, that looked like her and shared a similar background. She wouldn’t know the answer to these questions for almost 50 years of her life, despite spending so much of her time searching the internet for the Halisiewicz genealogy or seeking information from organizations dedicated to putting families of survivors back together.  In February of 2005, Ruth was offered the opportunity to escort her friend as an aide to the March of the Living in Auschwitz/Birkanau, Poland.  March of the Living is a program that takes place each year whereby thousands of participants march to honor the lives lost during the Death March of World War II.   The March took place on May 5, 2005 - the 60^th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Ruth was eager to go since her father had been a prisoner there, “(It) was important to make the connection and say ‘I’ve now come to terms with who I am and from where I had come,’” she said. Little did she know this trip would mark a connection with her past that Ruth had waited for her whole life. As she put it, “I learned so much more than I ever could have dreamed of.” There were many moving moments for Ruth in Poland. She remembers exiting the plane after landing in Warsaw and seeing a Rabbi pray, “he actually was praying in Poland,” Ruth began, “and that to me was fascinating, that here Jews were praying where they once could not.” Then there was the ceremony she attended at a crematoria in Birkenau, “I broke down at that point, that really affected me,” Ruth said. “Touching the walls where somebody had scraped them in a sense or just . . . that was kind of tough.” But, it wasn’t until the actual March that Ruth had the most important moment of her journey.  

The day of the March was silent according to Ruth. It was a gray, rainy day, the only source of light came from candles people held as they walked the one mile stretch of railroad that led to Auschwitz. There were 18,000 people in attendance, each one carrying a wooden plaque. On each plaque was written the name and hometown of family members who were lost during the Holocaust.

While walking through the crowd, an old friend of Ruth’s, Rabbi Benjamin, approached her and said something rather peculiar.  “Thank you for picking up my plaque,” he said. The Rabbi assumed it had fallen from his pocket while marching and was grateful she had found it. Ruth looked down at the plaque in her hand, rested atop the handle of her friend’s wheelchair. Then she looked back at him, “What do you mean? This is my plaque,” she replied. There was some brief stammering between them about the names on each plaque, and  within moments it became clear that Ruth’s mother and the Rabbi’s father-in-law may have been first cousins. The rabbi looked at her, stunned. He turned white and then walked away to the head of the crowd. Ruth’s family name, Halisiewicz, is not a common one. She knew that something amazing had just happened. “I think we both understood and I think the people around us understood too what was happening,” Ruth said, “he continued on because I think he had to digest it.” Rabbi Benjamin and Ruth had found a connection. After questioning the Rabbi later and realizing that both her family and his wife’s family had multiple sets of twins in their history, Ruth felt certain the discovery was more than just a fluke. Members of the crowd noticed too and soon they were asking, “did you hear about the cousins who found each other?” Ruth left Poland knowing that her life had been changed forever.

When she returned to the states, Rabbi Benjamin's wife put her in touch with her brother who had been researching the family line for years. After some comparison of the data that both Ruth and the Rabbi's brother-in-law, Jeff, had gathered, it was discovered that their grandfather’s were brothers.  Jeff had been trying to piece together the entire family history for some time, but had been unable to find information on the last brother in their grandfather’s family. “There was one brother that had been missing, there was one line they couldn’t get any info on,” Ruth said, then she lowered her voice a little and pointed at her heart, “that was my line.” During an interview, Ruth was asked what this all meant to her, how it was that her life had been changed. “To find out that there are other people and you’re not alone. It’s a connection,” she replied, “the human race is not just you and your immediate family, but you have a bigger connection, there’s a bigger family out there.”  Since making contact with the Rabbi and his family, Ruth has been able to find photographs of her mother’s family and other people who resemble her mother, who unfortunately passed away before the discovery.

Jeff has provided her with additional information on their family - including a list of birth and death records from her mother’s hometown. She has been able to figure out when her grandmother died and when her mother was born.    “All my life I thought my mother was the last of her family line,” Ruth wrote in a short account of her story, “This trip, with the intersection of our paths, (our) reuniting, gave me back a living family I never knew existed. The Nazis did not wipe out my entire family, and now I have a link from my past to my future.” 

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