Borensteins - owners of a mill

A mill in Kosciuszko Alley – a two-story, with a high ground floor and attic – the inhabitants of Lukow recognise it very well. It towers over neighbouring buildings. A bakery has been operating there for many recent years. Few, however, wonder what the story behind this building is. And this is one of the few surviving traces of the Jewish community which in pre-war Lukow constituted half of the town’s population.

In the “Address Book of Poland for Trade, Industry, Crafts and Agriculture” published in 1929, we can find information that the mill in Kosciuszko Alley was motor-operated. We don’t know what energy was used by this engine, but rather not electric, because the first power plant in Lukow was launched in 1925, and its power only allowed lighting of buildings and streets. Thus, the mill had steam, gas or, most likely, combustion engines. It was one of two mills in the town. The second mill was located at Radzynska Street and belonged to a man called Naturman, after whom it was bought by Leib Keselbrener from Kock. Today, there is no trace of it, while the mill in Kosciuszko Alley is still standing and is associated with flour processing.

The address book mentioned above indicates that the owner of the mill in Kosciuszko Alley was B. Borenstein. Nothing more. Only the initial and the last name. What was his given name? Who were his loved ones? What happened to him? These questions would remain unanswered, were it not for the lucky case that from Israel I received the copies of documents that shed light on the story of the family to which the mill belonged.

The owner of the mill in Kosciuszko Alley was Berek Borenstein. His name in Yiddish also spelled Ber, and in Hebrew Dow, which means “bear”. In about 1919 Margula Raisa Rotenberg from the nearby town of Miedzyrzec became his wife. In the middle of 1920 their son Salomon was born, and two years later their daughter Sarah Ela. They lived not far from the mill, at the number 23 at that time.

A wealthy miller from Lukow was strongly involved in the Zionist movement, which aimed to promote Jewish settlement in Palestine, first Ottoman and after the end of World War I under British rule. In the future, the Zionists intended to build a Jewish state in the land purchased from the Arabs, which came true in 1948. The preserved documents show that Berek Borenstein actively supported the Zionist organizations, for which he carried out fundraising in Lukow and himself gave them ample donations. In one of the letters, Menachem Usyshkin, leader of the Zionist movement, in 1923-1941 president of the Jewish National Fund, thanked him for his activity.

Berek Borenstein didn’t live up to fulfill the dream of a state for Jews. About 1933 he died in his mill. While repairing a device, he was electrocuted (probably it was caused by a generator which was powered by the engine). However, the miller’s dreams saved his son, then a student of the Kosciuszko State High School in Lukow. When in 1937 Salomon Borenstein graduated from this school and received a maturity certificate, his mother decided to send him to study engineering at the Technical Institute in Haifa. This university (Technion) exists today and is one of the best technical schools in the world. Salomon Borenstein started it before the outbreak of war, already as Shlomo Borenstein. Later he got married and settled in Tel Aviv. He lived to an old age – he died at the age of about 90.

Among the documents that Salomon Borenstein took with him from Poland is a beautiful calligraphic “Souvenir of the maturity exam 1937”. On the title page there is a photo of the former Bernardine monastery, which housed the Kosciuszko High School. I look at it with sentiment because I learned in the same eighteenth-century building as the son of the miller from Kosciuszko Alley. On the next card there are two seals, longitudinal and round, with the inscription “A Friendship Circle of the Kosciuszko High School Graduates” and the date “June 16, 1937”. Next to them was the following text:

“Friends!
Let the memory of the school bench join us in all our further life activities.
Let the memory of family and school be a signpost in private and public ethics.
Let our future work be directed to the good and the benefit of the society that has brought us up and educated us.
The first friendly reunion in Lukow in September 1942.
The second friendly reunion in Lukow in September 1947.
Yes, we want it!”.

Over twenty people signed the document underneath, including S. Cukierman, B. Goldstein, P. Finkielstein, N. Kleinman, M. Rosenbaum and of course S. Borenstein. Among them were also graduates of Polish nationality but we think about the Jewish graduates first when we read that they planned to meet in September 1942. And then in 1947. That’s what they wanted! How could they know that railway cars would be prepared in September 1942 and they would transport several thousand Jews to the gas chambers in Treblinka at the beginning of October? They could not think that at that time their loved ones would die massively, also in their homes and in the streets, and that the entire Jewish community of Lukow would be finally liquidated in May 1943. In 1947, when the graduates of the Kosciuszko High School in Lukow planned to meet for the second time, there was no Jewish life in Lukow anymore, and individual survivors were gathering to leave, unable to bear the sorrowful emptiness and still raging anti-Semitism. Before they disappeared, they gathered scattered matzevot and built a monument of them in the cemetery that reminds us of the murdered Jewish neighbours.

Among the victims of the Holocaust were also Margula Raisa, mother of Salomon, and his sister Sarah Ela. The Zionist dream of miller Berek Borenstein haven’t saved them. Maybe if he hadn’t died in an accident, he would have taken his whole family to the Land of Israel before the outbreak of the war. But it hadn’t happened and only his son survived there...

Photographs from the collection of Becky Borenstein, wife of Shlomo, courtesy of Michal Laist. The mill – photo by Krzysztof Czubaszek