Paula Shaw’s Story
I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw, Poland.
My father was born Mojzesz Szacki in 1922 in Bialystok; he had an older brother, Izrael.
My grandfather, Wolf Szacki, ran a transport business and had business in Bialystok and Warsaw.
In 1937 the family moved to Zlota Street in Warsaw - in August 2026 a plaque was put on the building naming the families who lived there between 1937 and 1940, with a QR code which let people know the stories of these families. The Szacki story is being finalised and I link with a wonderful person in Warsaw to get as much information as possible,
I was so thrilled to see the existence of my grandparents recognised by this event as there is no clarity how they died. We know they were in the Warsaw Ghetto, but whether they were murdered there or in Treblinka or Auschwitz or Majdanek we do not know.
My cousins in Canada and Israel agreed with me to apply for stolpersteine (stumbling stones) for our grandparents in 2027.
My father came to stay with his Aunt Mercha and Uncle Alex in Liverpool in 1938 and his older brother went to Palestine.
My Great Aunt Mercha was like a grandmother to me. She had no children and was a little stern, but she cared about inequality and injustice and she passed that on to me. When she died in 1979, I was given all her photos. These included family photos from Poland which had been sent to her after she came to the UK in 1926.
Later I was able to share the photos with my cousins and they had never seen their father as a child or their grandparents.
My father was an intelligent man, but more importantly he never judged people and never showed aggression. He did not talk about his parents or Poland and he refused to ever go there (he told me he had only had permission to visit the UK for 1 year). He took me to Liverpool (where Aunt Mercha lived) when I was a child to join the Sabbath and other events, but he did not practise any part of Jewish faith.
Later people assumed his accent was Dutch as he worked for Dutch State Mines and he never corrected them. He travelled to many countries with his work and we often had guests staying from many different cultures which helped me, as a child, to accept everyone.
In 2000 I was a Councillor in Croydon and I was able to plan the first Holocaust Memorial Day. I was asked to share the details of my father's history and this reminded me how little I knew.
In 2010 I joined WILPF UK (the UK Section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) as I read the notes from Aunt Mercha when she attended the Peace Congress in 1963 in Moscow as the delegate. She was a member of WILPF UK in the 1950s and 1960s. I have carried on with trying to stop war and militarism!
After being made redundant in 2012 I was able to start more research on my family history.
My daughters and I visited Poland in 2014 (after I had researched with JewishGen, National Archives and archives from Bialystok). It felt wonderful to walk the streets that my father had walked on. I managed to get a copy of my father's birth certificate which was the first time I had seen an official birth name. This helped me understand what he went through.
In 2015 I reconnected with my cousins and discovered a second cousin. We met in London and now we keep in touch. I visited Israel in 2016 and 2019 and stayed with my youngest cousin (he worked as a legal person for trade unions) and I was proud to stand with Women in Black in Tel Aviv.
I visited Poland again in 2017 (with my eldest daughter) and we managed to find the grave of my great-grandfather in Okopowa Cemetery in Warsaw; he had died in 1925 so he had a resting place. There had been no family visitors to look after the grave since the 1940s.
Since moving to Hackney in 2013, I have had the opportunity to join Jewish secular groups, such as Jewish Socialists’ Group and Jewish Voice for Liberation and I am proud to have Jewish heritage. I have been active in many campaigns through WILPF UK and I also attend a weekly vigil with Women in Black.
“Equal Rights for All” is my baseline. The ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank are crimes against humanity. The UK arms trade is a disgrace! The hypocrisy of leaders in the UK and US makes me so angry as they claim to aim for peace, but still provide arms and components which have killed over 74,000 Palestinians and still it goes on.
