Memorabilia - mainly photographs but also, e.g., a draft of a letter describing a journey - of two young people who emigrated from Poland to Palestine in the mid-1930s. The photographs show family members, friends and colleagues - including the pupils from the children and youth welfare home in Warsaw, also from their life later on (before the Holocaust).
Mania (Marjem, Miriam) Żelazna was the daughter of Rywka (née Engel) and Benjamin Żelazo born in Warsaw on 10 May 1912 (this is only a probable date - deduced from the fact that, based on her own words, she was born on 10 May, on the day of Shavuot - a holiday in 1912; there are different years in the documents that have survived until today: mainly 1914, probably amended in the period after the arrival in Palestine as there is a record of the year 1912 in the immigration documentation, as mentioned below).
Her family was not religious. Her father died in 1919. The following ten years, which were difficult for the family, Mania Żelazna spent in the Jewish boarding school of the Main Shelter Home at 18 Wolska Street in Warsaw - from 1920 to 1930. She emigrated to Palestine in 1935. Her mother and siblings with their families remained in Poland. Her mother lived in Warsaw, probably also during the first period of the war. She died in the Holocaust: probably not in Warsaw (Żelazna's son, Joseph Paz, remembered that his mother had sent a letter to Warsaw, but it was returned to Palestine as undelivered) but in a smaller place (the name is unknown) along with other residents; her two daughters and their children died with her. Rywka Engel's sister, Bella, survived in the Soviet Union and moved to Israel in 1949.
Mania Żelazna and her husband, Hilel (Hillel) Pozner (Posner), met in Palestine, in Nahariya.
Pozner was born in 1911, in Golina near Konin (there is a copy of his Russian-language birth certificate in the collection).
He had two sisters and six brothers, whose details are known thanks to the documents preserved in the files in Konin and in the family collection, as well as - in the last case - from the inscription on a photograph from the collection (MPOLIN-A48.1.65): Salomon (1898), Jechiel Majer (1903), Manus (1904), Abram (1905), Eljasz (1918) and Fiszel (probably of a similar age to Salomon).
Their grandfather, Mendel Wolf Pozner, lived in Gostynin, and emigrated to London around 1895. The eleven children stayed in Poland with one of the sons - Hilel's father, Józef Zelig Pozner, who married Hana (Chana) Hinda (Chinda) in 1895; he moved to Gdańsk later on, where he managed a grocery shop. He had six sons and two daughters. According to family accounts, some brothers of Hilel Pozner served in the Polish Legions; part of the family emigrated via Spain and Portugal (where the family members stayed) to South America in the 1920s. Hillel, who attended a yeshiva in Gdańsk and joined Beitar, left Gdańsk and emigrated to Palestine after a German officer stopped him and ordered him to get off his bicycle when the Germans were marching through the city in 1935 (by the way, he got permission to leave as a minor - because he did not have the appropriate certificate).
His two sisters remained in Gdańsk. One of them, Mania (Maryla), worked in the cosmetics industry. Just before the war, she travelled to the Iberian Peninsula with some of her belongings; she entrusted the money to her uncles who lived there and returned to Poland to close the business; unfortunately, the sky was closed and the war began. When the Germans ordered the Jews to move to the General Government, she moved - as Hilel Pozner believed - to Warsaw. She died, just like her sister, her family and the rest of her remaining relatives in Poland.
The last message from Hana Hinda née Kleczewska was a photograph from Zagórów near Konin sent to her sons who had emigrated to Portugal. She probably stayed in the ghetto there.
Hilel Pozner died in Israel in 1998. Marjem Pozner died in 1992.
Their biographies and family accounts - based on information from their son, Joseph Paz, the donor of the collection. He also donated some of his mother's memorabilia to the Korczakianum, a branch of the Museum of Warsaw.
Przemysław Kaniecki