← HomeOur YichusZelig in the tree →

The Gluzy Farm

Zelig Potok's farm at Gluzy, near Działoszyce: the family who lived there, the partnership with his nephews Moses and Yerachmiel Lazerowitz, what happened in 1942, and the survivors' fight to get it back.

The place

“Gluz” in Moses Lazerowitz's memoir is Gluzy, a small village that is today part of Kropidło, in the gmina of Słaboszów, Miechów county, southern Poland. Before the war it belonged to the gmina of Nieszków and the parish of Słaboszów, a few kilometres west of the market town of Działoszyce. In the nineteenth century Gluzy was a village with a manor farm (folwark) on the Dziaduszyce estate; from 1928 the manor was parcelled out and sold to small buyers through the State Agricultural Bank.

1937 WIG map of Gluzy
Gluzy on the Polish Army's 1:25,000 map, sheet Słaboszów (Warsaw, 1937): about twenty houses along one road east of Kropidło Nowe, with a large farmstead at the west end of the street.
1937 map of the Gluzy area
The surrounding area on the same 1937 sheet. WIG sheet Pas 47 Słup 30-F, public domain (Polona).

The family

Zelig Potok, known locally as “Zelig Gluzen” or “Zelig Gluzher”, was a Jewish farmer who owned about 50 morgen of land at Gluzy. He was a son of Kalman Potok and Jenta née Zuchter of Miechów, and a brother of Sarah (Sura) Potok, Moses Lazerowitz's mother. His wife Keila (Kaila) née Ostrowska was born about 1878 in nearby Słaboszów. The Działoszyce memorial book (1973) independently records him: “Zelig Potok, or Zelig Gluzen, was the owner of 50 acres of land in the village of Gluzy. His daughter survived and lives in Israel.”

They had nine children. Moses names them in his memoir, and a family tree kept by Hinda's relatives on Geni lists the same nine:

The partnership, 1931

In 1931 Moses Lazerowitz, then a master tailor with a coat shop on Modrzejowska Street in Sosnowiec, joined his brothers in buying a one-third share of their uncle Zelig's farm. In his own words, Hinda's father “had been a partner with my brother Yerachmiel and me in the farm we owned.” Moses's brother Yerachmiel married Zelig's daughter Rivkah, binding the two families twice over.

The war

In 1942 the Jews of the villages around Działoszyce were driven into the Działoszyce ghetto, and in September most were murdered or deported. Zelig and most of his children were killed. Keila and her daughter Faigel were murdered at Majdanek; Gitel, her husband Baruch Hershkovitz and their sons David and Yosef were murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. Gitel's daughter Rachel survived Ravensbrück and reached Israel in 1949. Yerachmiel and his family hid in the Gluzy fields before fleeing toward Nowo-Radomsko, where they were caught and murdered. Faigel's husband Yosef Lewkowicz died at Auschwitz.

Gitel, Yosef, Baruch and David Hershkovitz
Zelig's eldest daughter Gitel Hershkovitz née Potok (left) with her son Yosef, her husband Baruch and their son David, Sosnowiec, before the war. All four were murdered. Yad Vashem photo 15074270, submitted by Gitel's grandson.

Hinda survived the camps. A Flossenbürg prisoner list records her as prisoner 63897; Moses recalled that she was liberated in the Grünberg labour camp near the Czech border, a Gross-Rosen women's camp whose prisoners were later marched into the Flossenbürg system.

Hinda goes home, 1945

Hinda Herskowicz née Potok
Hinda Herskowicz née Potok (1920–2012). From her Geni profile.

Right after liberation Hinda went alone to Gluzy. A peasant family was living in the house. The farm dog still knew her; the former farmhands fed her and told her she would need a court order. She stayed in Działoszyce, about six kilometres away, until one night Poles attacked the Jews who had come back and killed several of them. She fled to Sosnowiec, where in 1946 she registered with the Central Committee of Polish Jews at Targowa 15, and where her cousin Moses found her.

The courts, 1945–48

Hinda hired a Miechów lawyer, Kerzch, and Moses joined the claim as Zelig's partner. The first hearing was at the Miechów court in the autumn of 1945, the week the Selichot prayers began. The police refused them an escort, so a Jewish Soviet major lent them a soldier with a machine gun. The courtroom was full of former farmhands, who at first denied knowing her and then admitted she was “the youngest daughter of Zelig and Kaila Potok”. The new government had leased the farm to its pre-war workers as a collective, and the farmhouse had become a school for the village children. The judge, afraid of the crowd, gave no ruling and sent the file to Kraków, where a lawyer from the Jewish Committee, Dr. Zweig, warned that the case would drag on for political reasons.

What became of the land

About 1947–48 the final ruling came: because the fields were leased to local peasants and the house was a public school, the family would be given “a property of comparable value” in the former German territories in the west. Moses, by then in Bayreuth, thought it worthless to them. The farm was never returned. Hinda married David Herskowicz and later settled in Israel, where she died on 16 May 2012; she is buried in Hod HaSharon.

Still being searched

The court and land files have never been scanned. In October 2026 these archives were asked for them:

ArchiveWhat was asked for
National Archive in KrakówState Agricultural Bank files on the parcelling of the Gluzy estate (1928–51); the 1947–50 card index of abandoned Jewish farmland in Miechów county
State Archive in KielceMiechów municipal court files, 1945–50 (death declarations, inheritance, restitution); 1950 farm lists for gmina Nieszków; Działoszyce and Miechów civil registers for Zelig and Keila's marriage and Hinda's birth
Jewish Historical Institute, WarsawThe Central Committee's legal-department file on the restitution claim, and the Działoszyce survivor lists
Gmina SłaboszówWhere the post-war school in the Potok house stood, and whether the building survives
Arolsen ArchivesThe survivors' post-war files: Hinda, Kalman Potok, Moses, and others

Sources