Prior to the trip, I had arranged via e-mail to be guided through the surrounding area by Thomas Wisniewski, who lives in Bialystok and has extensively studied Polish Jewish history, including the restoration of Jewish cemeteries.
My maternal grandmother, Fanny Shapiro [], left Narewka when she was 17 years old. She took a horse and carriage to the town of Bialystok, a local train to Warsaw, and a larger train to Antwerp, where she embarked for the United States. After a short stay in New York City, she lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, where she met her husband, Samuel Ehrlich, while they were both staying in a rooming house in Hoboken.
Narewka had been described to me by my grandmother, mother, and Aunt Selma as a poor shtetl. My mother, Alice, was 15 and her sister, Selma, was 9 when they visited Narewka. When I arrived with Nancy and Janet in , it seemed a non-descript, very small town. My grandmother's mother, Bella, was listed as being buried in the Jewish Cemetery outside of town. We searched in the cemetery but were unable to find her headstone. We saw a site on the river where my great-grandparents' home and granary stood, although their buildings had been replaced.
There were no longer any Jews living in Narewka Moshe [died ] and Bella Shapiro [died ], my great-grandparents on my mother's side, lived in the town of Narewka, on the Russian-Polish border. They met through a matchmaker and had nine children, eight of whom eventually emigrated to the United States. Moshe had a grain store. He bought grain from the gentile farmers, packaged it, and sold it.
At the time, the town was predominantly Jewish with gentile farmers living on the outskirts. Moshe had a reputation among the farmers as extremely honest. He would through an extra scoopful of grain onto the piles he sold, to make sure they weren't short.
