Leo Adam Biga's My Inside Stories

Leo, I have been enjoying your writings for sometime now, since I found your stories on Ben Nachman, my cousin, who passed away about 2 years ago. As you know , he did a lot of work on holocaust survivor stories for the Spielberg archives. As our family’s amateur genealogist, he travelled to the Ukraine twice to search out records or stories of the family of his mother, Lena Belzer. As far as anyone could tell, all of her generation as well as her mother and father, except one brother, came to Omaha between 1914 and 1920 from Chernovitz, Ukraine. Ben had made 2 trips there looking for documents or stories of our family or the village. This lost brother, Moishe, and his wife Miriam stayed behind and Ben could find no information about them after 1941 when their village of “Little Chernovitz,” was made Judenfrei. We do have a photo of them from the 1930s with 4 children. Other than that, only memories from his siblings , who have now all passed on. Several weeks ago , I was contacted thru the website, “23andme.com,” by someone who had found that he and I were genetically related. He asked if I had a great grandfather who died in a horse and wagon accident in Omaha. Yes I did and it was Moishe’s father. The person who contacted me was Roman Belzer, grandson of Moishe. Thru some some fairly miraculous circumstances, Moishe, Miriam and 5 of their 7 children had survived the holocaust and Stalin’s purges , and his starvation of the Ukraine. Moishe died in 1980 or 1981 and Roman and his wife immigrated to the U.S. in 1980 . Roman’s parents and some siblings immigrated to the U.S. as well. It is sad that Ben Nachman was not here to enjoy this ironic history.

Marc Sorkin sorkderm@earthlink.net

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