Rafal Malec collection

Rafal Malec was born in Grodno (Hrodna, Belarus) in 1914 to Dawid Malec and Liba Jogel Malec. He had one younger brother Abram (b. 1920), who immigrated to the United States in 1933 to live with his maternal uncles Julius, Leo, and Max Jogel. His father worked as a representative of Chevrolet in Grodno. Rafal studied economics in Warsaw and graduated in 1939. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, he fled Warsaw in November and returned Soviet-controlled Grodno. In Grodno Rafal found employment in a Soviet Forestry office where he worked until June 19, 1941. On that date he was sent on a business trip to Sowiejki and on June 22, 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Rafal walked from Sowiejki to Mogilev, Byelorussia (Belarus). From there he was evacuated into the Soviet Union. He was placed in a kolkhoz (collective farm) in Tambov district, where he worked as a weight supervisor. After a few months he was transferred via Tashkent to Uzbekistan to a kolkhoz “Budzionnovo.” He worked there as a bookkeeper, but in the late 1943 Rafal received special permission to leave Uzbekistan and move to Moscow. Rafal worked in Forestry Union as an instructor. In September 1944 he returned to Grodno where he learned that his parents and Aunt Anna Jogel Tennenbaum were all deported to Treblinka in 1943 where they perished. In 1946 he moved to Warsaw, Poland and established a career in the Forestry Department.