Editor: Dr Saul Issroff
Copyright © 2004 Saul Issroff, Mike Getz, SAfrica SIG
and Jewishgen Inc.
URL: http://www.jewishgen.org/SAfrica/family-histories/frank_ij/index.htm
Date: May 2004

Family story as related by the late Solly Frank. Born 1910, Krakenova, Lithuania. Died 1999, Cape Town.
 
Rav Isaac Jacob (Yaacov) Frank, Beila (Rabinowitz) Frank and family, 1915-21.
 
In 1915 when the Germans and Austrians attacked the shtetls and towns of Lithuania and Bylorussia, the Frank family fled burning Krakenova to southern Russia, Bachmut, near Rostov-on–Don, near Crimea to bobba Beila Rabinowitz's family who fled some years earlier, and established a tobacco business. My father Solly Frank lost his elder brother Saul and sister Taibele in the flu epidemic. Conditions were difficult as it was forbidden for his father to trade, Rav Yaacov Frank was trading on the black market. The family decided to return to Lithuania.
 
They were caught up in the Russian Revolution when the Bolsheviks were fighting the Old Whites of the Czar and landed up in Konotop, a city 120 kilometers north-east of Kiev. (Little did they know that Rav Yaacov Frank's first cousin Aron Frank was teaching Torah subjects in Kiev and was put in charge of refugee children from Nova-Poltova (Kharson) and assumed the role of legal administrator for refugees under the auspices of the Committee of Refugees of Nicholov from 1916 to 1919.
 
They remained in Konotop for approximately a year or two, 1918-1920, living in one of the front entrance rooms of a synagogue together with another family; The Rabbi, his wife, a son and two daughters – all in one room. Our zaida Rav Jacob Frank became a supervisor in a polony factory next to the shul. The family starved, Rav Frank forbade the family from eating non-kosher meat of the factory. My father attempted to sell cigarettes for roubles, the Cossack soldiers asked where his father was, Dad threw the tray in a soldier’s face and fled.
 
Nathan Frank was born in Konotop hospital, 1920, in the passageway as there were no beds. My father and his brother Issy went to collect potatoes on a sleigh in the snow, they were rewarded with 2 biscuits from a rich community member. The biscuits they brought home as present to their mother as food for the baby brother Nathan.
 
My father describes the pogrom. "I will never forget when the house of the Rabbi next to the shul was set on fire, we could hear the screams of women being raped. My mother went to hide in a bush in a lane near the shul. I saw my father kneeling and begging mercy from a Cossack on a horse brandishing a sword ready to strike! Before running out of the shul a man came running into our room begging his mother Beila to cut off his hanging fingers after being shot at. The family in the adjacent room of the shul were butchered.
 
To avoid the "priziv" military conscription in Kanotop my father inhaled poison gas and arrived in South Africa spitting blood!
 
We left Kanotop about mid-1920 to return on goods trucks like sheep to Shidlowa (Sidluva or Siluva). One of the trucks caught fire.
 
My grandfather Bertchik Frank {Reb Dov Ber Frank) lived with his daughter Chassia and Shlomo Miller in Shidlowa.
 
Luck. In Shidlowa a letter arrived in the post from an uncle Krieger (Rabinowitz family) inviting the family to Cape Town with sufficient money for the journey. They lived in a Jewish shelter in Whitechapel, London, preparing for the final leg of the trip to Cape Town. One day his brother Issy went missing. The London police found him sleeping on a bench.
 
They starved and lived on a meager diet of toast, fish & potatoes, again refusing to eat non-kosher food offered by the gentiles on the ship to Cape Town arriving as immigrants in 1921. Nirvana. My zaida Rav Isaac Jacob (Yaacov) Frank was offered a job as a shochat {kosher meat slaughterer) in Gouda, inland.