Gary M. Pomerantz

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A Story of Family: In search of Grandpa's world

A visit to the old neighborhood ...

... mirrors the
journey of a lifetime

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
February 1, 1998

By Gary M. Pomerantz
Staff writer

On a bright autumn morning, we set out by car from Kiev. We saw farmers working in the countryside, old men riding bicycles, a donkey pulling a cart filled with vegetables. By the roadside, a few old women, hunched over on stools, hoped to sell baskets of eggs.

Kremenchuk is a river port and manufacturing center in the Poltava region. It 's filled with brick apartment buildings and more than 200 factories producing chemicals, cars, trucks and cigarettes. It's a gray place with the feel of Pittsburgh.

In Kremenchuk, you can still feel the rumble of the Nazi war machine. The city is 427 years old, yet there's hardly a building older than 50 years. The Nazis, upon ending their occupation, destroyed 97 percent of the town. They carpet-bombed it. Even the old graveyards are no more.

(Once I tried to explain to Ross the full extent of what Adolf Hitler did to Jewish people. Six million dead bodies is hard for a small boy to comprehend. So, driving in Atlanta, I told him to imagine Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium filled with 50,000 people. "Hitler killed enough Jewish people to fill more than 100 of those stadiums," I said. My then 5-year-old son looked down, sadly, thought for a few moments, and then asked, "Did he kill the players, too?" I almost drove into a tree. I would let a few years pass before explaining it again.)

We arranged to visit Kremenchuk's deputy mayor, I.I. Malyarenko. His office is adjacent to Victory Square, where there looms a tall granite monument to Lenin, in his trench coat. Malyarenko, a serious man with four gold teeth and blue eyes, opened a bottle of champagne. He toasted, "To you, Kremenchuk natives, and your continued health!"

Three times, he told us, "We welcome Americans and would like business relationships." Chain-smoking, he explained that 19,000 Kremenchuk workers are unemployed and that the number grows each day. "There is no communism and no capitalism. Just a big mess," Malyarenko says. "Nobody knows what to do."

But Malyarenko terms these "temporary difficulties." He says, "We hope to accomplish things little by little. In near future it will be different. We need new technology and business. We have people willing to work."

A day later, we meet Malyarenko's boss, Kremenchuk Mayor Ivan Ponomarenko, a
short, bulbous man who immediately is smitten with our interpreter, Angela Lipnitskaya. An energetic, 24-year-old Ukrainian Jew whose family emigrated to Atlanta in 1990, she is a student at Georgia State University.

The mayor invites us to lunch. Borscht is served, and never before have I seen anyone assault borscht quite like Mayor Ivan Ponomarenko, his face so low to the bowl it seems as though he's searching for a coin. He is lapping up the borscht, chewing it, and as he does, he suddenly throws an arm around Angela's neck and says, "I love Jewish women! All Jewish women are beautiful!"

Ponomarenko offers to help us look for our relatives through official Ukrainian records. He puts in a call to Poltava. But when Angela gets on the line with the archivist there, she hears,"Philip Pomerantz? Sounds like he was Jewish. Was he born Jewish?"

Angela confirms he was. "Unfortunately all Jewish books and archives were destroyed in the war," the archivist says. "We cannot find any Jewish names."

“Nothing?" Angela asks. "Nothing," the woman replies.

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