By James Sorene

In 1938, my great-grandfather Abraham received a postcard in London from his older brother Chaim in Poland.

Written with paragraphs in Yiddish and Hebrew, the card is a photo of Chaim seated in a chair with his wife Rachel standing by his side.

Chaim was a successful timber salesman, one of my great-grandfather’s 11 brothers and sisters. The postcard is a poignant relic of family tragedy. My great-grandfather never heard from his brothers and sisters in Poland again. The story he handed down to my father and grandfather was short on detail and infused with trauma and guilt. The large family he left behind when he sailed to Britain, aged just 16, were murdered in the Holocaust. Originally from the small village of Jasionowka, the large Zaranski clan had branches in nearby Lomza and Bialystok.

The story of Jasionowka’s Jews is like thousands of similar stories. A tiny dot on the macabre map that depicts the brutality and scale of the murder of 6 million Jews and the destruction of the 3.4 million-strong Jewish community of Poland.

Jews first arrived in Jasionowka in the 17th century and in 1799 half of the population of 700 people were Jewish. By 1931 there were 1300 Jews out of a total population of 1900. The Bialystok region of north east Poland had different rulers over the centuries as Poland was carved up and invaded. It became part of Prussia after the third partition of Poland, was later taken by Russia, occupied by Germany during the First World War, a battleground in the Russian-Polish war, and part of independent Poland between the wars, until it was occupied again by Russia after the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.

The Germans invaded eastern Poland on 22 June 1941 and captured Jasionowka........

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