Sima (Sophie) Fossaner
Sima Fossaner (later known as Sophie) was born in Stawiski, a town in northeastern Poland, in 1908. Sima was the oldest child of Chaya Gitel and Elchanan Jeleniewicz. She had four younger sisters--Elka (Elsie), Shoshana (Shoshi), Bracha, and Sara, and a brother, Leibel Zeev. Elchanan had rabbinical ordination but worked as a tanner to support his family.
In the spring of 1928, Sima and Elka sailed aboard the Lituania from Danzig, Poland, to Canada. Elka was accompanying Sima, who was to meet her future husband, Max Fossaner, there. He was born in Romania in 1902 and had immigrated to Canada with his family as a young child. Sima and Elka arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax on May 18. Strangers in a strange land, and knowing almost no English, they traveled thousands of miles by train to Saskatchewan, where Max owned and operated a small farm. (In Canada, the sisters took on the names Sophie and Elsie.) In 1941, Sima and Max had a daughter, Sheila, followed by a son, Sheldon, in 1943.
They sold the farm in 1946 and moved to Winnipeg. To support his family, Max worked as a laborer for a roofing company until 1949, when he and Sima rented a small grocery store, which they later purchased. The store had three rooms in the back where they lived modestly with their two children. The store was open seven days a week from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. until Max got sick in 1960. He died of heart disease in 1968, when he was 66 years old. Sima died of a stroke in 1994 at the age of 86.
Sima and Elka were the only members of their nuclear family to survive the Holocaust. Following the Invasion of Poland in September 1939, Stawiski was occupied by Germany for several weeks during which the Nazis, sometimes with the assistance of Poles, began systematic attacks on the town’s Jews. Stawiski was subsequently ruled over by Russian forces until the Germans returned in June 1941 during Operation Barbarossa. This initiated a series of pogroms against the Jews in the region. Several hundred Jews were murdered in July and hundreds more were executed in August, mostly in a ditch in the nearby village of Mątwica and in the Plaszczatka Forest.
The remaining Jews, numbering approximately 60, were professionals whose services were needed by the Germans: a doctor, shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, smiths and such. They were moved to a ghetto, initially situated near the Great Synagogue, which was built in the middle of the 18th century and destroyed by the Nazis. The ghetto was later relocated behind the Jeleniewicz home.
On November 2, 1942, the ghetto was liquidated. Its occupants were transferred to a transit camp in Bogusze. On December 15, 1942, they were deported from there to Auschwitz and Treblinka. Some 50 Jews managed to evade deportation but most of them were subsequently found and executed.
Before the Holocaust, roughly half of Stawiski’s population--approximately 2,000 people--was Jewish. Very few survived. Although the precise fate of Sima and Elka's parents and siblings is not known, they were most likely among these victims.
