Tosia: Chapter 1

Portrait of a Jewish woman as written by her daughter, Felicia Graber.
Updated August 1, 2024.

My name is Tosia Blonder-Fallmann-Lederberger-Bialecki. I have also been called Tonka, Toni, and Taubche. During the war, my Aryan name was Anna Zofia Ślusarczyk. I was born in Tarnów, Poland, on March 6, 1911, the youngest of three children. My sister, Adele, was the oldest; then came my brother, Ignaz, born in 1909.

I always considered myself the shy, little, ugly duckling, since I was frequently told that I was not pretty. I was outshined by my handsome, bright, popular big brother. He was also admired for his talent as a dental practitioner and adored by the three women in our family. He was an extremely good son and devoted to our mother. As soon as he could, he shared his earnings with her to make her life easier. When our mother got very sick with a terminal kidney ailment, he hired round-the-clock nurses to take care of her at home and paid for all the expenses out of his pocket. To his dying days, he carried a picture of our mother in his pocket.

My mother, Feiga Blonder-Fallmann, was born in 1880. She had three sisters, Adele, Ethel and Mala. I believe that my mother was born in Dąbrowa Tarnowska a few miles from Tarnów, but she moved to Tarnów after marrying my father, Simcha Fallmann.

My father’s family was from Muszyna, Poland. The Fallmann family was said to have come from Spain by way of Holland and Germany after being expelled from that country in 1492. Family myths claim that the Fallmanns were related to the famous Rabbinical family of Don Isaac Abarbanel. We could never prove it.

My mother, Feiga or Fanny, was a beautiful, gentle, goodhearted and charitable woman. She always gave to the poor even though she had very little herself. As a young bride, she had her hair shaved as was the custom among Orthodox Jews in Poland and wore a sheitel (wig). Later on, in life however, she decided that a sheitel was not what God had in mind. She would often say, “God does not mean a sheitel when He wants you to be a good Jew. He means for you to be good, forthright, honest, righteous and charitable.” She would remark how many women in the marketplace, who wore all the trappings of religiosity—sheitels, long sleeves, black stockings—would cheat their peasant customers whenever the opportunity arose.

My parents had a small grocery store, which my mother ran most of the time. My father was religious and spent many hours in the study hall of the synagogue. He was very rigid and did not approve of his children’s forays into the “modern” world.

Mother had a very difficult life: my father was a stern, strict and stingy man who held on to the purse strings. Every Friday afternoon he would wait until the last possible moment to give Mother enough money to buy food for Shabbos (Sabbath). The first new dress my mother was able to get was when my brother Ignaz got a job and gave her money to buy material for a new dress. No matter how poor her circumstances were, however, my mother always helped those who had less than she did. Every Friday afternoon, a poor, old Jewish woman would come to our door, and my mother would give her a challah (bread) for Shabbos. Poverty was rampant in Poland. Even though the country was fertile and was called the “breadbasket of Europe,” many people did not have enough money to buy bread.

The vast majority of the Jewish population was very observant and traditional. The Sabbath was strictly observed. No fire or electricity was used from sundown Friday until after sunset on Saturday. In order to have a warm meal for the Sabbath it was customary to bring a pot of cholent (a stew dish) to the baker. Since the baker’s oven were always lit, each family brought their cholent pot to keep hot until the next afternoon after services. As I was the youngest in the family, this weekly responsibility was mine. Every Friday before sundown, I took our cholent to the baker across the street and picked it up every Saturday just before my father was due to return from the synagogue.

Encouraged by my mother, I took my studies very seriously. I wanted to be able to stand on my own two feet and not be supported by anyone.  After graduation, I enrolled in a secretarial school, which would enable me to become independent. This required that I attend classes on Saturday, the Sabbath. Even though I only went to listen to the lectures and would not even think of writing or doing anything prohibited on the Sabbath, my father always greeted me back home with the ironical words “Here comes the Shiksha.”

Like many of my friends, I was also an ardent Zionist, belonged to Hashomer Hatzair (Socialist-Zionist, secular-Jewish youth movement). I dreamed of becoming a pioneer and living on a Kibbutz in Palestine. In 1933, I became very serious about achieving this goal and got involved with people who were encouraging and helping young Jewish Poles to fulfill that dream. Thus, after months of planning and submitting applications, I was accepted to Nachalal, an agricultural school in the Galil (Gallilee) for female pioneers to be. My cousin, Moshe, who lived in Kibbutz Merhavia not too far away in the North, helped me get a scholarship; and in 1934, I was ready to leave.

My mother was very upset by my decision. On the photo she made for me, her eyes betrayed her sadness. All my life I had a guilty conscience that I did her harm by leaving her. I never got over that feeling of betrayal. But at the time I felt I had to follow my destiny.

In Nachalal, I learned Hebrew, worked in the fields, milked cows, cleaned their enclosures as well as the chicken coops. A few weeks after my arrival, Chana Meisel, the school director, asked me. “How are you doing? Are you adapting to your new environment?” I replied proudly in Hebrew, “This is my home. This is where I belong.” 

One of my mother’s cousins, Fanny Wolfson, came to see me and sent Mother an account of my dirty, hard, manual labor. This did not make Mother any happier. But I was home. My cousin Moshe visited me from time to time and sometimes treated me to a trip to Afula, the big city some 17 kilometers away. Life was beautiful. I was to graduate in two years; then Moshe promised to take me to his kibbutz. My life was set; it was going just as I had always dreamed it to be.

To be continued…

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Read more by Felicia Graber.