Biographical History

Blimka (Blanche) Seidel Lustgarten Pavony (1926-2017) was born 28 April 1926. She lived her early years in Poznan, western Poland. Her immediate family consisted of her father, mother and two brothers. There was also a large extended family in Poznan and Kalish. Until 1939 her family led a comfrotable upper-middle class Jewish life. There was also an early connection to Israel/ Palestine as two of her uncles and one aunt were sent there before World War II to settle and to assess emigration possibilities. In December 1939, she and many of her extended family were relocated to Miedzyrzec (Mezritch in Yiddish), Podlaski, eastern Poland. In 1942, most of her family were transported to and killed in Treblinka. Soon thereafter, a family friend gave her the birth certificate of a deceased Polish Catholic girl. With blond hair and blue eyes, good spoken Polish and German, Blimka spent most of the War using that identity and working as a maid for a nazi officer family in Stettin.

After the war she returned to Poland to find that she was alone: her parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles who were not in Israel were dead. While she searched for them she met Izak Lustgarten who was originally from Mezritch. He had escaped from the same concentration camp that her father had been in. Thereafter he fought with Russian partisans dynamiting for several years.

They married and moved to Germany, both wanting to leave Poland. They lived in and near an American Displaced Persons camp in Zeilsheim, Germany and had a daughter in 1946. They moved to New York City in 1949 where the donor was born a few years afterwards. After Izak Lustgarten died, she remarried Jack Pavony, also a Holocaust survivor. They divorced in 2007. Blanche Seidel Lustgarten Pavony passed away on March 16, 2017.

Information provided by the donor, Blimka’s daughter.

Scope/Content

The collection comprises family correspondence, family photographs.