ACH ANNETTE

By Fern Smiley

I bolted upright from dreamy sleep last night at 2:45 am with the realization that I never sent my uncle Phillip an invitation to read my new weblog. Then, slowly, the panic morphed into the dull and sore realization of his recent death. It finally dispersed and I relented to go back sleep but with a determination to write about him when I awoke.

Phillip, my mother’s only brother (he is on the right of the picture), was modern in spirit, charismatic with unbounded joie de vivre. He had a cosmopolitan view, was a man of great humour, intellect, and a life long learner. He was a ‘far away’ uncle and he brought a youthful, refreshing wind of hedonism whenever he visited us in Toronto.

He visited for special occasions as he lived with his family on a remote, tropical island. It was really unique to have family on an exotic Caribbean Island in the 50’s and 60’s, as Curacao was unfamiliar to everyone - except for the fancy liqueur of the same name.

Phillip Polosieci was able to recover from the war with my mother and as adolescents, in 1948, they came to Canada. Sponsored by relatives in Toronto who were able to help resettle them, they came as the orphaned remnants of a common ancestor, Yechiel Mechel (Moshe) Greenwald. They were their European family relations many of whom had been decimated in Poland during the Holocaust.

His death, January 31, 2007 was sadly unexpected and premature. It came within two months of Annette, his sister, my mother.

Certainly, his early life and the fearful years of war, work camps, and starvation affected his development as he was just a child of seven when the Germans attacked Poland and his life changed forever. But he overcame the past assaults and lived the rest of his life with genuine love for all people, chasidut and generosity beyond belief towards my mother.

Although he was schooled and cared for by cousins Toronto’s Harry and Dora Green, a warm and loving couple, in the mid-fifties destiny took him south. While on a winter holiday visit to a surviving step- aunt who emigrated to Curacao, he met a very young, beautiful Jewish girl. In the twenties, her parents had emigrated from Russia to South America and business interests brought them to settle in Curacao. He stayed.

So his business flourished, his children were born, educated and raised there and I enjoyed our wonderful connection with him, his wife and his children. My mother was his confidant and he her safety net in a sibling relationship that distance never shook.

So this Post comes as a reminder of him.

Curacao was the last place about which I thought records would surface when I was in Washington researching in the National Archives regarding Holocaust Era looted art. Curacao was oceans away from the brutality occurring during the Nazi oppression - albeit still connected to Europe by being a Dutch colony.

Even as late as 2000, the Dutch government hadn’t really done the historical review of its own WWII record of collaboration. Especially with respect to the devastating results of that collaboration in enabling the destruction of most of Holland’s Jewish population, up to 90% who perished in some cities. Anne Frank’s diary’s spin still steered away from the unpleasant truth that she was given up to the Nazis in the end by the Dutch collaboration. Rather for decades, it offered up mythic story of saviors in Holland as a norm of resistance behavior common to all Dutchmen.

I stopped to read the Curacao notes in the archives although the British records were my primary interest. The declassified records were from the US wartime Roberts Commission and I can say that it is… of concern. It implicates three brothers, one in Switzerland, one in New York, and one in Curacao. They are sadly all Jewish. But The Curacaolanians would be relieved to know that they were not homegrown members of the Portuguese Sepahrdic community of Curacao.

The document reports on the intercepted mail of three co-responders as they discuss the delivery, prices and names of nine important paintings. It refers to a letter listing their paintings on hand in the US which are 'blocked'. One subject recommends his brother in Curacao avoid too much publicity and receive people at home rather than to arrange an exhibition. It also describes the alteration of the plaques on frames and re-certification of a Rembrandt to a Bols. And it elaborates on the further movement of several to Caracas where dealers awaited.

I have the hard copy if you wish to review the document. Please leave me a Comment on this blog.

Comments

[Mitch Morgenstern]

Please call me at 847-745-3426. I am trying to locate the ancestors of Yechiel Moshe Greenwald. I am a distant cousin

[Benjamin Arbel]

Hello Mitch
My name is Binyamin.
My late Grandfather was Izak Greenwald of Adamow who was the grandson of
Yechiel Moshe.
My phone no 00-972-522561911