Home Shtetl Life Holocaust Landsmanshaftn History Photos Videos
Maps Trips Surnames Researchers Links Guest Book Contact

Mosze Szymon Rozenbaum - School Notebook

From the Early 1930's in the Radzilow Public Schools

Radzilow School Notebook

This is the school notebook shared by Mosze Szymon Rozenbaum and his best friend Arczy (Archie) Fajkowski throughout one of the school years during the early 1930's. It measures only 4 x 6 inches and is in extremely fragile condition, but was probably not ever in a much better one even in its original state. The binding is quite poor. The only thing that ever held it together was a bit of glue between the pages, which are folded in half to create the notebook. The tiny piece of cloth fastened to both the front and back was added later, since it covers some of the writing, to prevent further breakage once the boys wrote on the inside pages and pressed down on the binding,

Each page opens up to the top. By flipping a page, you have a clean section with both a top and a bottom. There are 59 such views in the notebook. All of them have been scanned and most of the pages are extremely legible, albeit in Polish. I will get a sample of them translated and add them to this section.


Radzilow School Class,
Early 1930's
Mosze Szymon Rozenbaum
in back row, 3rd from right

Close-up of
Mosze Szymon

Additional Material:
Mosze Szymon's report card from the 1934-35 school year
Helen Rosenbaum's tribute to her father Mosze Szymon, based on his own handwritten memoirs about his life in Radzilow and Australia
Letter from Radzilow Rabbi Yehoshua Zelik Gelgor to Nechemiah Rozenbaum, about his nephew Zundel Rozenbaum (Mosze Szymon's father) and the heartbreaking economic situation he was facing in 1934