Visit of Rotkopf family descendants in Mszana Dolna
Exactly 80 years after the horrific execution of Jews on Pansky, on 19.08.2022 descendants of the only survivor of the Rotkopf Jewish family visited Mszana. We met with them at the renovated monument to the Victims of the massacre to mourn and remember the murdered. The meeting was also attended by the Mayor, Anna Pękała, and Ms. Agnieszka Jozefiak Lewandowska from the City Hall. The Rotkopf family came from Lodz. They were resettled in Mszana along with a large group of Lodz Jews and exterminated here. One of their daughters, Tonia Rotkopf, a young nurse, remained in the Lodz ghetto, working in a day care center. She was the only one who survived. This is how her son, Nicholas, gave us the family story in brief:
My mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair died just this past December at the age of 96 and she had always been our interpreter. We are making this trip to honor her and our family that was murdered on 19.8.42.
My Family was from Lodz Poland. When the ghetto was formed my mother, Toni Rotkopf, born 18.9.1925, although very young, was able to get a job as a nurse in the ghetto hospital. Sometime just before the closing of the Lodz ghetto my mother went back to visit her family, as she was living at the hospital. My grandfather Mendel had studied the inquisition and refused to aid the enemy and refused to move into the ghetto. He and the rest of my mother's family were rounded up and deported, as it turns out, to Mszana Dolna. The family group included: Mendel Rotkopf, my grandfather; Miriam-Gitla, my grandmother; Irena my mother’s older sister; and Salek, my mother’s younger brother. As my mother relates, she received postcards from them saying they were “OK” but she could read the horrors between the lines. The postcards showed a postmark of "Mszana Dolna”. My mother survived the war. She was deported on one of the last trains out of the Lodz Ghetto in late August 1944 and then was selected for work in Freiburg, Germany until April 1945 when she was shipped out to Mauthausen where she was liberated in early May, 1945.
In 1997 we returned to Poland to make a movie about my mother’s life during the war. We visited Mszana Dolna seeking more information about our lost relatives. There we met the mayor Antoni Rog who was very helpful to us and showed us where the Jews were assembled before being marched to their death. Very importantly he was able to produce a list of the approximate 900 Jews who were murdered. On this list we found the names of my grandmother, Miriam-Gitla, my aunt Irena, and my uncle Salek. My grandfather’s name was not on the list. We assume he died earlier as he was then approximately 46 years old. We think he must be in another of the graves in Mszana Dolna.
Here is a link to our movie about my mother called “Our Holocaust Vacation”
. It is free to watch by anyone and was show on television in the United States.
My mother also wrote a book of short stories that were published 2 years ago called “Love at the End of the World”
