Reunion of the Rightous

by Jill Cousins

When she was a little girl living in Poland in the early 1970s, Renata Szyfner vividly remembers how, at bedtime, her father would curl up next to her and tell her stories before she went to sleep. These stories, however, did not come from children’s books; they were no fairy tales or nursery rhymes.

The stories that Eugeniusz Szyfner would tell little Renata were about the time when he was a teenager in the early 1940s and he helped his mother Katarzyna hide Jews behind the family’s home in the town of Mielec during the Holocaust. In 1996, the family received the prestigious Righteous Among the Nations honor at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. The award recognizes non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the war.

“When I was a little girl, my dad put me in bed at night and was always talking about the war,” says Renata, now 52, a Winter Springs resident who moved here from Poland in 1990. “These were my bedtime stories, and they weren’t so cute. But I grew up knowing these names, knowing the situations, and knowing the different things that happened during the war. And all the things he cared about, he passed on to me.”

During World War II, the Szyfners hid a total of nine Jews (at various times) in a henhouse that Eugeniusz built behind a chicken coop on their property. The only Holocaust survivors the family kept in touch with long after the war had ended were David and Matilda Zuckerbrod, who would eventually settle in England.

Renata knew, from her father’s stories, that the Zuckerbrods had a son who was born eight weeks after V-E Day on July 4, 1945. Eugeniusz would briefly reunite with that son, Isidore “Izzy” Zuckerbrod, around 1998 when Izzy – then a doctor living in Israel — traveled to Poland on a trip with some Israeli high-school students. Before he died in 2017 at age 94, Eugeniusz told Renata to “go find Izzy.”

After many often frustrating years of searching and hoping, Renata finally fulfilled her father’s request this past May when she and Izzy shared an emotional reunion at a restaurant in Jerusalem. Renata’s father had given her Izzy’s phone number about 15 years ago, but when Renata tried to call him, the number had been disconnected. Still, she never gave up.

A Search Through Time

“Finding Izzy wasn’t easy,” Renata says. “But every chance I had, every person who could have some sort of connections, I would ask. I was looking high and low.”

A breakthrough came in late 2020 when the world was still in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Renata was participating in an online meeting with the American Society for Yad Vashem, she connected with the moderator, who was interested in her story. He also recognized Zuckerbrod as the last name of an old classmate (who ended up being one of Izzy’s relatives).

“Can you help me find Izzy?” Renata asked the moderator. The next day, he got back to Renata with Izzy’s phone number and email address, but those contacts fell through, as well. She finally decided to search for Izzy on the WhatsApp international messaging application, and that’s when she found him.

“I wrote to him, and I was very emotional,” Renata says. “My biggest fear was that he wouldn’t care. Izzy could’ve said, ‘So? That was a long time ago.’”

Renata’s fears would be unfounded. When she woke up the next morning, she checked her phone, and there it was – a response from Izzy, now 77. He told her about his large family (six children, 30 grandchildren, and 11 great-grandchildren) and the immense gratitude they all felt for Renata’s father and grandmother.

Gaps In History

Izzy didn’t know many details about his parents’ experience during the Holocaust because, like many survivors, it was too painful for them to discuss. Izzy’s family also had to deal with the guilt they carried for the death of their two oldest children, then-11-year-old Meilecna and 7-year-old Regina, who were placed in what the Zuckerbrods thought was a safer location only to be murdered in 1944.

It wasn’t until 1996 that Izzy would find out about the family that saved his parents. He received a letter from Yad Vashem just before the presentation of the Righteous Among the Nations honor. His meeting with Renata’s father Eugeniusz in 1998 was brief and made difficult by their language barriers, but at least Izzy was able to thank him for saving his parents.

“I know it meant a lot to my father,” Renata says. “When my mom called me and told me about it, we both cried. It was very emotional.”

A Journey for the Ages

Izzy would get more closure when he finally met Renata in person. COVID restrictions delayed their in-person reunion for several months, but Renata and Izzy stayed in touch, planning for their big day. Renata was aided by her Israeli friend Ram Yakir, who she met last year in Poland, where he was traveling with a group of Yad Vashem guides. In another crazy twist of fate, Renata discovered that Izzy was Ram’s doctor.

“He planned my whole Israel trip, setting up an itinerary for me to see the whole country,” Renata says of Ram. “I told him the reason I didn’t come to Israel before now is that I didn’t want to come as a tourist. It was a pilgrimage for me. All these years, I thought about this trip and what it would be like to finally meet Izzy. And then it actually happened.”

After a few days of sightseeing with her Israeli friends, Renata was ready for the big reunion. Izzy rented out a private room at the restaurant and invited about 25 of his family members to share the experience. The evening was absolutely magical.

“He was just as excited as I was; that was the best part,” says Renata, who was presented with a poster of the entire Zuckerbrod family tree – a tree that still bears fruit thanks to the courage of Renata’s family. “As soon as I walked in and saw him, we ran up to each other and hugged and started crying.”

It was a night filled with hugs and kisses, singing and laughing. Izzy’s children and grandchildren came up to Renata, hugging her and telling her, “You know you have family in Jerusalem now!”

The next day, Renata and Izzy made a trip to Yad Vashem where they received a private tour of the museum and took a photo together in the Righteous Among the Nations garden. Izzy also searched the museum’s database to find information about his family members who perished in the Holocaust, and when he discovered that his brother Meilecna and sister Regina were not among them, he added their names to the archives.

When it was time for Renata to return to Florida, she and Izzy made plans to meet again, hopefully next year. Izzy plans to make a trip to the United States, and they also intend to meet in Poland and revisit her father’s childhood home – the site where Izzy’s parents hid from the Nazis.

“If I could have imagined the perfect scenario, that was it,” Renata says of her long-awaited trip. “It was like a dream come true. It was fantastic.”