I am perhaps eight years old, we are in the family car and have stopped in Albury to get petrol. This is one of our many journeys from Melbourne to visit my grandmother and family in Sydney. We smell the petrol, and mum again repeats her early memory of the smell from a petrol pump near her home in Lublin. This and looking down from a window to a street were her only memories of the town where she was born.
Mum was only three years old when she left Lublin with her mother and three older siblings. They went to join her father who had moved to Sydney (Australia) two years earlier.
My late mum Bell was a storyteller. Most stories were about family in Australia, USA and Israel, who had left Lublin from the early 20th century. These stories made the people feel very real to me. One was about my grandmother’s youngest sister, her husband and son, who lived in Sydney for about a decade (including WW2), then returned to Poland and eventually migrated to Israel. Then there was all the family in New York and later Miami. Mum personally knew them all, because in 1950 she went by boat to the USA and lived with her mother in New York for six months. I have her photos from this time.
Of course, in the times of no internet and expensive short phone calls, the connection was via letter writing, and many were exchanged.
In the 1970s and 80s my parents travelled and visited the family both in the USA and Israel. Also, once we were adults my sister and I also visited the USA and Israel- as some of my Australian cousins have also done. However, growing up in Melbourne we didn’t hear many Lublin stories that others in the family heard from my grandmother and mum’s older siblings.
In 2003, my son started high school and he interviewed mum for his roots project. I drafted my first family tree. Mum passed away less than a year later, so I picked up a pen and wrote of her passing to those she was in contact with. I then entered the online world of family when mum’s youngest first cousin Zvi (who had lived in Australia as a young child) suggested we switch to email. Our exchanges included more of the family story. Our mutual family tree grew. He introduced me to his daughter Anat, my second cousin. Eventually I connected by email and Facebook to other second cousins, mainly from my grandmother’s Kelner side. We now have a fabulous Kelner Koala Cousins network – but that’s a different story.
My Kelner family research continued. With Zvi’s assistance we identified the death, in 1831, of our 4x great grandmother. This gave her estimated age as 82 and uncovered her parents’ names, taking us back to 1756, 200 hundred years before my birth. More interesting discoveries were also to be made. Some of the 19th century records included house numbers and, with online assistance, I was able to locate where my ancestors lived in 1826, 1829 and the early 1830s to the late 1860s. All locations were within a few minutes walk of Grodzka Gate, also known as Jews Gate. Today, one location is a food shop, and another – where my family lived for at least 30 years – is now a hotel. This building was constructed in the early 18thcentury as St Adalbert’s Church and provided medical care and accommodation for travellers. The church closed and the building fell into disrepair, then in the late 1820s it was converted for rental to mainly to low-income Jewish families. My Kelner ancestors became early, and then long-term, residents.
Fast forward to the 20th century and World War 1- by this time the family had moved into the actual Grodzka Gate at 21 Grodzka Street. Family members lived there until the mid-1930s. In 1919, my grandmother Perl Kelner married from this location. She set up home, with her husband Isaac Redelman, in the building next door. Then in 1928, with four young children, she moved back in with her dad and youngest sister staying there until she joined her husband who had migrated to Syndey.
Another fast forward to 2022, and the last of the Lublin generation – mum’s cousin Zvi – passed away. His daughter Anat inherited both Zvi’s and his parents’ papers. While bits of information had been passed down, we had nothing concrete to show exactly where the Kelner family lived in the early 20th century. Anat found confirmation of the exact address. We then looked this up and made a fabulous discovery – our family lived and rented rooms in what is now The Grodzka Gate NT Theatre & Jewish Research Centre. In 2023, Anat represented our Kelner family at the Lublin Reunion. She presented about the family in the actual space where they had lived. She and other family visitors have since looked out the same window as my mum did as a young child.
