Wesley Zineski passed away a few years ago, so I never actually had the pleasure of meeting
him.
I've only gotten to know him through his collection.
I was contacted by a friend of his who happened to be here.
She had inherited his materials.
She had been going through some of the papers in this box that she had inherited and saw
the name "Auschwitz," and she realized, "This is significant, and I should really contact
the Holocaust Museum."
It wasn't until after we received the collection, though, that we realized how significant his
story really was.
My name is Kyra Schuster, and I'm a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The collection I'm talking about today is the Wesley Zineski collection.
The Żyźniewski family was from Lodz, Poland, originally.
Wiesław, who was later known as Wesley, was born in 1924.
He was one of two sons who was born to Zygmunt and Janina, who was also known as Jasia, and
the family lived in Lodz with extended family.
His grandparents lived there as well, and that's where he grew up.
The family were members of the Catholic church.
Wesley actually had two prayer books in his collection that were inscribed with important
dates and important information, that were kept for him during the war years by his grandmother,
so clearly his religion was also very important to him.
Wesley, his mother, and his brother were all active members of the resistance.
Wesley's brother was actually arrested and then executed for being involved with the
resistance.
In 1941, Wesley was arrested and sent to Radogoszcz prison, where he was held for about a week.
He was released, and then again in February 1942, both Wesley and his mother Janina were
both arrested and sent back to Radogoszcz prison as well for being active members of
the resistance.
In the collection we have a set of seven letters written by Janina from Radogoszcz prison,
and the Polish name for these letters is "gryps," and gryps were basically these secret notes
that were written, often on scraps of paper, small note papers, cigarette wrappers, or
pieces of toilet paper, that were then smuggled out from the prison.
They were often encrypted in some way, either by language or written in code.
They didn't have a lot of information, but Janina's seven letters are unique because
they are full-length, full-sized letters with a lot of information about her concerns, her
thoughts, her wishes, and what she was experiencing.
And she writes a lot about her son, Wesley, because she doesn't know where he is at that
point.
They've been separated from each other, and she writes that, "I wish I could give him
my food so that knew he was OK and had something,"which, when she had so little, really shows the mother's
love and concern for her son, that she would give up everything to make sure that he was
all right and he survived.
Wesley had also been imprisoned in Radogoszcz, but in October 1942, he was transferred to
the Auschwitz concentration camp.
We actually have his Auschwitz registration card in the collection, which is unique because
most people did not have these registration cards from the camp.
We see copies of them in the International Tracing Service archives, but it's very rare
that a prisoner would have his actual registration card and keep it all these years.
Janina was also, very soon after, also transferred to Auschwitz, but they were in two different
parts of the camp.
The two of them were able to continue communicating with Janina's mother in Lodz, writing her
letters, but these were very different from the gryps, because were written on official
camp stationery, and they were written in German, and they had to go through the German
censors.
Included in that group of letters is the last letter, as far as we know, that Janina sent
in January, 1943, before she passed away.
Wesley was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp shortly before liberation, and he was
liberated in Buchenwald by the Amerian Army in April 1945.
He eventually became friends with another survivor, who really encouraged Wesley to
immigrate to the United States, and he was able to do that in 1947.
I suggested that we use Wesley's collection for a Curators Corner because of the unique
contents of it.
He was a Polish Catholic Holocaust survivor, and it's an experience that is underrepresented
within our collections.
We're hoping to and working towards expanding that experience representation in our collection,
and his experience was so well documented.
A lot of what we know, if not all of what we know about Wesley and his experience we
have learned through our research, and so it presents, really, a different lens to look
at the experiences of a survivor, but also the experiences of his mother, who did not
survive.