A Forgotten Stetl

My latest project has been to recreate the town Antos, (Antosia), Poland, where my mother, Rose, was taken by the Russians to Siberia in 1939. It has been all but forgotten, along with its townfolk.

My mother's maiden name was Czyzyk (Sparrow). When she was fifteen years old she married Stanislas Pienonzek. I recently found out that a Piotr Pienonzek is one of the last of that family line to still live in Antosia, which is now considered part of the Ukraine in the Brodsky Oblast.

I have been visiting my mother on many nights to ask her about the town--dilligently working on a street map of it. I have had my mother recall all the townspeople's names and where they lived. Sometimes the conversations of lost neighbors and childhood memories have made us laugh and at other times It's been quite painful. I believe that my hard-copy of the street map is sodden with my mother's tears. I'm posting it for the benefit of other people of my generation who have family from Antosia. Some may be looking for Kolonia Antos, the name the Poles gave it.

In its heyday, Antos was a verdant and fecund place agriculturally with the land given to men who had fought during World War I. It was the way the Polish government thanked its returning soldiers. Unfortunately my grandfather came back with a bullet lodged in his skull and my grandmother worked the land on her own. How hard it must have been seeing as she was pregnant with my mother...


My grandfather died before my mother was born and is buried in Leszniow on the grounds of a Polish chapel that is being reconsecrated this June 2008. I'd like to put flowers on his grave and feel a huge desire to see and know where my people come from. It's not really desire but a yearning. In Polish we have a word for it. It describes a bittersweet feeling of sorrow. It is called "Zal".