While the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR) Roadshow was at Brooklyn College, Thomas Allen Harris had the opportunity to explore a family history that lived through the Holocaust of World War II. The DDFR team conducted a stimulating, thought provoking and emotional interview with Professor Micha Tomkiewicz regarding his family’s experience in the Warsaw Ghetto uprise in 1943, the subsequent burning of the city by the Germans and the eventual liberation by the Russian and American armed forces in 1945.
- Micha Tomkiewicz and his wife, Louise Hainline, hold up books written by his mother, Mina Tomkiewicz
Dr. Tomkiewicz, professor of Environmental Studies and Physics at Brooklyn College, assisted by his wife, Louise Hainline, Dean of Research & Graduate Studies and Psychology Professor at Brooklyn College, shared his multimedia family photo story that covers his childhood through the age of 6, beginning in Germany and going to Palestine in 1945. While the story reflects a short period of his life, it is a memory seared into his consciousness and that of the world; a living testimony to the atrocities of Nazi occupation and the death camps that live through him and other living witnesses but which will become history when they are no longer able to testify. It is this fact which drives him to share his memories and family’s photographs: “We are the last generation that actually live this period of time. Right now, it’s life experience. Very shortly, it will be history.”
- Micha Tomkiewicz holds photograph of himself when he was liberated by the American army, taken by an American soldier
Professor Tomkiewicz begins this photo journey with the emotional challenges and decisions his family made between 1939 and 1945. We witness his family’s experiences through the photos he unveils, the memories of his iron merchant grandfather and his father’s position as a policeman in the Jewish ghetto – a position he was forced to hold. His memories and photos also provide the viewer with a sense of life during this time in world history. His mother, Mina Tomkiewicz, wrote books to document the story of their survival and experiences, and completed the story in a way Professor Tomkiewicz could not do. The stories he recollects and those of his mother, which she wrote immediately after they were liberated and settled in Palestine, help all of us gain an appreciation and understanding of the Warsaw experience.
Micha’s story informs the viewer in a powerful way how important storytelling, sharing family history and preserving photographs is to the family and the public at large. Thomas Allen Harris and the DDFR team extend their sincere thanks to the Brooklyn College Community Partnership, the faculty, students and community for sharing in this new and important event held at Brooklyn College in October 2012.
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