Remembering When, Part Five

Before I go back to my Czarnecki great-great-grandparents' story, I will quickly jump to the linchpin story that has defined Pop-Pop Czarnecki's in-law maternal family for generations—the story of how we absolutely betrayed relatives during the Holocaust and the explanation for why Grandma Czarnecki was attracted to someone like Pop-Pop in the first place—and given this story, you can say that my grandmother married the male equivalent of her mother.

Numbers 14:18 reads, "18 The LORD is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression,and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the childrenunto the third and fourth generation." If part of that was not Grandma Czarnecki's marriage to Pop-Pop Czarnecki in her case, then nothing was—if God didn't curse Great-Grandma Gaydos by putting her daughter in a chaotic marriage to Jack Czarnecki, I do not know who He has ever cursed. Besides, Pop-Pop would betray his own mother in a similar and smaller-degree way to how Mary Rusnak Gaydos betrayed her cousins.

The story was couched as follows: relatives were just asking for money during the Depression and Great-Grandma Gaydos stopped writing to them when they did that, although she sent them food. The actual story is as follows—and for right now, I am summarizing the story; but I will tell the whole story when I jump back to it later. By the way, I was infuriated when I found Vilmos Rusznak's record on Yad Vashem and figured out what the real story was—I knew that the Rusnaks were Jewish, and I was looking to see if we lost any relatives in the Holocaust; and little did I know that I would find out what Joan Gaydos Czarnecki's sister MaryAnn Gaydos tried to hide, and what their niece Janet Lewandowski Rozzi would try to defend (By the way, Janet, morality does not have a time—and those were different times, alright, and your precious grandma made them worse! How dare you defend her! Also, I will keep naming names; so rest assured, Janet, that you are not alone in being named—neither are the two aforementioned of your mother's sisters.).

Our relatives wrote to ask for financial help, and they knew that we were worse off—given that the Depression hit the U.S. harder than it hit Slovakian Hungary—but they knew that whatever we could give would still help. They knew that even though we were hit harder and poorer, American currency meant a heck of a lot more than Hungarian or Slovakian currency, and we cut them off in their time of need—we stopped writing to them after they asked for help, and we never sent one bit of food.

Meanwhile, they didn't even want to write us—we were the absolute-last resort. We had converted out of Judaism just generations before; they did not, and they were desperately reaching out to whom they considered apostate. In doing what we did, we destroyed our testimony regarding Yeshua and destroyed our cousins' lives.

By the way, Great-Great-Granddad Rusnak paid dearly for his part in betraying his cousins (They wrote to Great-Grandma Gaydos' dad, their cousin Gyorgy "Gyorgy Kvetkovits" Rusznak's grandson, as well.):

Great-Great-Granddad Rusnak died shortly thereafter, on February 9, 1947—and he died of cancer at the age of 69. By the way, whether his brother Stef really survived him (if he even actually existed, since I cannot find a baptism record for him) is unclear—even Anusim and Messianic Jews were murdered in the Shoah, and Great-Great-Granduncle Stef could have even returned to Judaism during his lifetime for all that I know (Again, I cannot find a baptism record for him, but FamilySearch had all of his siblings' baptism records.).

By the way, compare Great-Great-Granddad in 1905 and the 1930s or the 1940s to himself in 1946:









Do you see how God directly visited Great-Great-Granddad's iniquity now?