My paternal great-great-grandfather was Max Kornicker, born 11 May 1853 in Posen (now Poznań), in what was then the Kingdom of Prussia. He had several siblings, one of whom was Louis, born 12 September 1855. Louis married Jenny Moos in Berlin in 1888, moved to his new bride's hometown of Erfurt, Thuringia, and founded a factory in the city manufacturing woollen goods. He died in 1919 and it's pres…

Rybna (formally Riebnig) is a small settlement located along the Oder river in Opole Voivodeship, home to 300 or so people, many of whom seem to be involved in farming. There's a school building but no school, and no shops that I'm aware of. At the edge of the village there's a modest stadium where LKS Rybna play their home games (their club crest is a shark, and Rybna translates literally to "Fis…

Today is the third consecutive day I've travelled from Wrocław to Rybna, a small village known as Riebnig when my great-grandparents were interned in a transit camp there between November 1941 and March 1943, prior to their deportation to Auschwitz. The most convenient way to reach Rybna would be by car, but when reading Alfred Konieczny's research on the transit camp, I noted that deportees were…

Kingston is a kind of anglicisation of Kornicker, my grandfather's surname before he changed it when applying to become a naturalised British citizen in 1947. We're not sure why Kingston, but perhaps the choice was prompted by some association with place (more likely Kingston upon Thames than Hull). In retrospect, the choice seems carefully judged: unambiguously English, with deep Anglo-Saxon root…

My very earliest attempts to understand something of the fate of my great-grandparents led me to JewishGen.org and the misconception that they were murdered at Theriesenstadt concentration camp, in modern-day Czechia, having passed through a transit camp at "Riebnig". Documents in the Arolsen Archive relating to my grandfather's search for his parents further muddied the water, with references to…