Manio, Rachela Lea and Zofia Kesten

There were three of them. He — the owner of a film distribution office, a man who brought the best films of France to Polish screens. She — Rachela Lea, his wife, from the same border town and the same family. And Zofia, Manio's sister, living „with her brother." They lived in a modern building at 9 Złota Street. On 6 February 1940 they were struck from the residence register of their apartment with no forwarding address given. All three died in the Warsaw ghetto. Not a single photograph of them has survived.

This account gathers everything that is known about them. Every fact comes from a source: from the residence register, from the commercial register, from advertisements in the film press, from a spa guest list, from official notices, from Pages of Testimony. Where the sources are silent, it is silent too.

I. Podwołoczyska — roots

The story begins far from Warsaw — in Podwołoczyska, a town in the Tarnopol province, situated literally on the border: the little river Zbrucz carried first the Austrian-Russian frontier and, after 1918, the Polish-Soviet one. Manio — properly Menachem Manes — Kesten was born there on 15 June 1895 (the family genealogical tree gives the year 1891), the son of Salomon Kesten (1854–1909) and Chana née Brandiss. The house was full of children: the family tree lists more than a dozen, born between 1878 and 1897. Four died in infancy or childhood — an ordinary fate in the Galician towns of that era. Those who reached adulthood alongside Manio were: Josef Meyer; Schmeril; Schije Gerson, known as Georg, who emigrated to Germany and settled in Mannheim — he died there in an accident in May 1932, as the family tree records, and rests in the Mannheim Jewish cemetery; Etie, married name Ziegenlaub; Sure Złata, known as Zofia; Frida, married name Scharf (who died in 1939 — on the threshold of the war); and the youngest, Moshe, born in 1897, who took his mother's family name — recorded in his documents as Brandriss. The fate of this last one is a separate odyssey of the century: he settled, like his brother Georg, in Mannheim, escaped during the years of Nazi persecution to France, appeared in French documents already as Maurice, and in March 1942 — in the very middle of the war — married in Nice the Poznań-born Lotte Dorothea née Schwarz; he died in September 1981 in New York. He alone of all the siblings survived.

Podwołoczyska did not so much lie by the border as live off the border. From 1871 a railway line reached it from Lwów, and because the broad Russian gauge began on the other side of the Zbrucz, everything — travellers, grain, goods — had to change trains and be transhipped at Podwołoczyska. Around the frontier station grew warehouses, customs agencies, exchange offices and hotels; a considerable part of the inhabitants were Jews, who made their living from trade and from serving the border traffic. And yet it was a town both small and young: the Jewish community was founded only in 1880, municipal rights came a year later — Salomon Kesten, Manio's father, was older than his own town. Around 1900 Podwołoczyska had barely five thousand inhabitants, of whom nearly three quarters, just under four thousand people, were Jews — the whole community from which the Kestens came would have fitted into the auditoriums of a few great cinemas of the era. This was therefore no sleepy, age-old shtetl but a newborn settlement: a boomtown at the meeting point of two empires, living off the border, the tracks and transhipment. Then history twice walked over the town's head: the First World War, whose front stood on the Zbrucz, and the war of 1920. The family paid its own tribute: Manio's uncle Isaak, wounded on the eastern front, died in January 1918 in a military hospital in Lublin — in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian 15th Infantry Regiment, in which the men of the Tarnopol region served. The son of that same Isaak, and thus Manio's first cousin, Hermann Kesten (1900–1996), born in Podwołoczyska, became one of the most celebrated German émigré writers of the century: an editor at Kiepenheuer in Berlin, head of the émigré programme of the Allert de Lange publishing house in Amsterdam, after the war president of the German PEN Club and laureate of the Büchner Prize — the highest honour of German letters. From one clan of a border town came a man of literature and a man of film — the writer was saved by exile. In independent Poland the border — now Polish-Soviet — was sealed tight, the great transit traffic died away, and Manio's generation had to look for a future elsewhere. The boy from the station through which the world once passed chose a profession in which the world comes to people: the cinema.

Manio's wife also came from Podwołoczyska: Rachela Lea, born — according to the residence register — on 28 June 1898, daughter of Markus and Bluma. In post-war family testimonies she was also recorded as Rosa or, in the Jewish form, Reizel. Family trees now allow her parents to be identified precisely: Markus Kesten was Salomon's own brother, and Bluma came from the Halberstamm family — Manio therefore married his first cousin, as was not uncommon in the Galician shtetls; this is confirmed by the Yad Vashem Page of Testimony, in which the field „wife's maiden name" reads: Kesten. Rachela's father emigrated to Palestine and died in Haifa in August 1940, when his daughter was already trapped in occupied Warsaw; he rests in the old Jewish cemetery in Haifa. The third subject of this story is Zofia (Sure Złata) Kesten, Manio's sister, born on 15 April 1898 — in the residence records entered with the annotation „with her brother."

The family was wider and scattered across Europe — and the Holocaust found it everywhere. In Amsterdam there lived in those same years another Kesten born in Podwołoczyska: Manus (Max), born 1898, recorded in the occupation card index as „director of a film company" — a second man of film bearing that name from a single Galician town. His wife was Anna née Margulies — a name interwoven with the Kesten family: it was a Margulies cousin who would submit a Page of Testimony for Rachela after the war. We know Manus's fate from a single card: on 17 April 1943 he was interned in the Westerbork transit camp, without any „Sperre" protecting him from deportation, and on 20 July 1943 he was deported on the last transport from Westerbork to the Sobibór extermination centre. A post-war Dutch official list tells the rest: Manus, Anna — born in Berlin — twelve-year-old Hermann, born in Duisburg, and five-year-old Bilha, born already in Amsterdam, all four died at Sobibór, with the officially accepted date of 23 July 1943 — the day the transport arrived. The children's places of birth mark the family's road: from Germany, after Hitler came to power, to the Netherlands — which turned out to be a trap.

And one more thing must be seen in these records: the dates. Manio — 1895. Moshe — 1897. Manus — 1898. Rachela — 1898. Hermann — 1900. Five years, one small town, one family under one name, Kesten. They grew up in the same years on the same little streets between the station and the Zbrucz. And then they dispersed across the whole continent: Manio chose Warsaw and the cinema; Manus — Amsterdam and the cinema too; Hermann — Berlin and literature; Moshe — Mannheim, and when Germany became a trap, France and New York. From a border town through which the world merely passed came people who helped to make that world. The war caught each of them somewhere else: Manio in Warsaw, Manus in Amsterdam, Hermann in the exile that saved him, Moshe in the America he reached in time. The two men of the cinema perished — in the Warsaw ghetto and at Sobibór; Hermann, saved by emigration, and Moshe, the youngest of Manio's brothers, survived.

II. Kesten-Film

We do not know exactly when the Kestens moved to the capital. We do know, to the day, when the company was born: on 25 March 1936 the articles of association were signed for the limited liability company „Biuro Handlowo-Filmowe Kesten-Film", subsequently entered in the commercial register under the number B 10.214. The scope of business was defined broadly: „the sale, purchase and hire of films on its own account and on commission"; the share capital was 10,000 złoty, and the sole director was Manio Kesten himself. The registered seat was Aleje Jerozolimskie 39 — at that same address, in apartment number 26, the family lived, and the office had the telephone 985-56. In the residence records Manio's occupation was stated briefly: „owner of a film office."

Within a year the firm had an established position in the trade. „Kesten-Film imports Viennese, French and English films," wrote the Warsaw weekly „Wiem wszystko" in April 1937, adding: „Although »Kesten-Film« has existed for only a year, it has won a well-deserved name in the film trade." In time French cinema became the office's speciality — „of the French films it has chosen the best!", proclaimed one advertisement — and in the autumn of 1937 the firm boasted that its „Robinson Crusoe" was „the biggest box-office film of 1937."

A week after that article came the first great success. „Nitchevo" by Jacques de Baroncelli — an undersea drama with Harry Baur, Marcelle Chantal and the great Ivan Mosjoukine, with music by Arthur Honegger — reached Polish screens as „Krew na morzu" (Blood at Sea). The Warsaw première took place on 28 April 1937 at the Roma cinema; advertisements in the capital's press cried out: „Great love and sacrifice! Dizzying pace of action! A submarine disaster!" — and in a frame beneath was added: „Property and exploitation of Kesten-Film, Jerozolimska 39."

III. The house on Złota — autumn 1937

Between 1935 and 1937 the Italian insurance company Assicurazioni Generali erected a modern building at 7 Złota Street in Warsaw, designed by Edward Eber — with the Palladium cinema below and apartments above. For a film entrepreneur it would have been hard to find a better address: the block formed by Marszałkowska, Złota, Zielna, Chmielna and Sienna streets was the heartland of the film trade of interwar Warsaw, and in the neighbouring building, at 9 Złota Street, were the offices of film distributors.

In the autumn of 1937 the firm and the family moved to 9 Złota Street (telephone 329-67). In the residence register of the property, apartment card number 8 has survived, dated 27 November 1937. They had the Palladium cinema one floor below; the „first-run" premières of their own films they arranged, among other places, at the great Colosseum cinema.

IV. French cinema on Złota Street

After the move to Złota the catalogue grew from season to season. Alongside „Krew na morzu" it came to include „Ramuntcho" — the 1938 screen version of Pierre Loti's novel; „Captain Benoit" — a French spy film with Jean Murat and Mireille Balin, whose gala première was held at the Europa cinema — and also „Cyclone", „Storm over Bengal", „The Woman Agent", „Two Hours of Life", „Mademoiselle X" with „the superb Danielle Darrieux in the leading role", the spectacular „Chicago", „Dunia" after Pushkin with Harry Baur, „L'Orage" with Charles Boyer, „La Marseillaise" and „Secret Agent" with Sylvia Sidney which — as the advertisement proclaimed — „is breaking records on every screen in Poland."

Manio himself was a well-known figure in the trade: in April 1938 the trade press recorded his election — alongside Franciszek Grynbaum — as a deputy in the governing body of the association of film entrepreneurs. A man from the border town of Podwołoczyska sat in the self-government of Polish cinema. Business was growing: at the beginning of 1939 the firm opened a branch in Lwów at Jagiellońska 70, serving the cinemas of Eastern Małopolska.

V. The shadow of the coming storm

Jewish film entrepreneurs worked through the 1930s in an ever tighter atmosphere — and this was not a Polish phenomenon alone. In Germany, after Hitler came to power in 1933, Jews were removed from the film industry by statute; hundreds of directors, producers and actors went into exile, and German diplomacy intervened in European capitals against films unfavourable to the Reich. In Poland after 1935 the slogan of economic boycott of the Jews entered the mainstream of politics; the nationalist press demanded the „de-Judaisation" of one profession after another, and since film distributors and many cinemas belonged to Jewish entrepreneurs, the film trade became one of the favourite targets of that campaign. The Kestens knew this first pressure not only from the newspapers: Manio's brother Moshe Brandriss lived in Mannheim and had to flee from Germany to France. Both pressures — the German and the domestic — would soon meet in the story of the firm from Złota 9 as well.

The first warning came in the autumn of 1937 — and directly from the Reich's embassy. The trade fortnightly „Prawda o filmie" reported in October that the French spy film „Secret Plan R. 8" from the Kesten-Film catalogue would appear a second time before a specially appointed censorship commission: „the German legation lodged an objection, on the grounds that the figures of German officers are presented in an unfavourable light." Two years before the outbreak of war, German diplomacy was already forcing the censorship in Warsaw of a film distributed by a Jewish entrepreneur from Złota Street.

The real campaign began in the new year. On 16 January 1938 the nationalist paper „Alarm" — „organ of the Polish Union, Warsaw district" — devoted its entire front page to the film trade: „Sidelocked »pioneers« of film. Chanas, Herszes and Fajgas are forming film companies that do business making films." Inside the issue: named lists of Jewish producers and distributors, demands that Jews be removed from the trade's governing bodies and stripped of licences, and the campaign for a „Week without Jewish cinema" — a boycott of cinemas and films behind which Jewish entrepreneurs stood. At the foot of the page a slogan that said everything: „Masters in Poland — Poles!"

The echo spread across Poland. Already on 29 January 1938 the „Dziennik Bydgoski" reprinted the findings of „Alarm" in an article headed „Who »runs« Polish film? Jews feed the masses their »spiritual fare«" — and this time the name was stated outright: „»Kesten-film« is of course a limited company with capital of 10,000 złoty, whose head is Mr Manio, importing almost exclusively films of French production." From then on the owner of the office at Złota 9 was named personally in the press from Warsaw to Pomerania. Kesten-Film nevertheless carried on working: booking dates, printing advertisements, planning the 1939/1940 season.

The last chord of that work survives in the trade press of 1 August 1939: „We hereby announce that we have purchased the greatest hit of the 1939–40 season" — declared the Kesten-Film Film Office, announcing „Hungarian Rhapsody" with „the participation of Europe's greatest stars" and an autumn première of the „monumental" „La Marseillaise" „in one of the capital's most popular cinemas." „Book your dates!" cinema owners were urged. Weeks remained until the announced première; until the outbreak of war — thirty-one days.

VI. War. 6 February 1940

On 1 September 1939 war broke out; on 28 September Warsaw capitulated. For a film entrepreneur this meant an immediate end: the cinemas were taken over by the German administration, the distribution market ceased to exist. For a Jewish family it was only the beginning: from 1 December 1939 all Jews in the General Government over the age of twelve had to wear armbands with the Star of David; further decrees took from them their businesses, their bank accounts, the right to practise their professions.

On 6 February 1940 Manio, Rachela Lea and Zofia were struck from the residence register of the apartment at 9 Złota Street. In the column „struck off to" the clerk entered no address. That is the family's last certain trace in the registers. Half a year later only the tax office was still looking for them: in the notice of the Municipal Board of 23 July 1940, publishing a list of persons on whom „payment orders for income tax for the years 1938 and 1939 could not be served owing to the impossibility of establishing their place of residence", there stand side by side „»Kestenfilm« Ltd" and „Kesten Manio" — both with the former address: Złota 9. In September 1940 the company appeared for the last time in the official list of changes of company addresses. Then the sources fall silent.

On 2 October 1940 the governor of the Warsaw district, Ludwig Fischer, signed the order creating a „Jewish residential district." It was announced on 12 October — on the festival of Yom Kippur. Within six weeks about 138,000 Jews had to abandon their apartments throughout the city and move beyond the designated line. On 16 November 1940 the ghetto was closed: behind a wall three metres high and eighteen kilometres long, some 400,000 people — a third of the inhabitants of Warsaw — were crowded into an area of barely three per cent of the city. Złota 7/9 remained on the „Aryan" side. The home and the office, built up over years, found themselves on the other side — within arm's reach and forever out of reach.

VII. The ghetto

Life in the ghetto was dying by instalments. The official food ration for a Jew in 1941 amounted to about 184 calories a day — less than a tenth of an adult's needs. Typhus spread. In 1941 alone some 43,000 people died in the ghetto — chiefly of hunger and disease; the bodies of the dead, covered with paper, lay on the pavements in the mornings until the funeral carts took them away.

Among the victims of this first, „quiet" stage of the Holocaust were Manio, Rachela Lea and Zofia, Manio's sister.

Pages of Testimony were submitted for them after the war at Yad Vashem by the family.

On 22 July 1942 the Germans began the „great deportation action" in the Warsaw ghetto. Every day freight trains left the ramp on Stawki Street — the Umschlagplatz — officially „to the East, to work." In reality they travelled eighty kilometres to the north-east, to the immediate extermination centre of Treblinka II, where those who arrived were murdered in gas chambers within two or three hours of arrival. By 21 September 1942 — the action was ended symbolically on Yom Kippur, exactly two years after the announcement of the ghetto's creation — some 254,000 to 300,000 Warsaw Jews had been deported and murdered.

VIII. Memory

The building on Złota Street survived. Of the Kesten-Film company there remain advertisements in yellowed volumes of the film press, an entry in the Monitor Polski, and posters for the films it sent out to the cinemas — today collectors' and museum objects. The memory of the people was saved by the Pages of Testimony at Yad Vashem, filled in after the war by their relatives.

And the family's history did not end in the ghetto. Georg's four children — Manio's nephews and nieces — managed to get out of Germany before the war and created a whole branch of the family. Abraham Adolf, born in Mannheim, arrived in Palestine in 1937 and fell on 11 June 1948 defending Mishmar HaYarden in Israel's war of independence; he rests in the Nahalat Yitzhak military cemetery, and on his headstone are carved the names of his parents — Gershon and Etti. Alexander settled in the kibbutz circle of Givat Haim. Hilda, who in 1933, aged sixteen, travelled alone to England and in May 1938 reached Eretz Israel, became a pupil of Gertrud Kraus and passed into history as one of the pioneers of Israeli artistic dance. Salli made his life in London. Their descendants live today in Israel and Great Britain — among them people of the Israeli stage and arts.

On 21 August 2026 at 9:00 a.m. Stones of Remembrance will be set in the pavement in front of the house at Złota 7/9; three of them bear the names of Manio, Rachela Lea and Zofia Kesten. Brass cubes in the pavement, before the threshold they crossed every day for not quite three years, will restore their names to the place from which they were erased.

Timeline

A Note on Sources

This account rests exclusively on sources: apartment card no. 8 of the residence register of the property at Złota 7 (entries 27 November 1937 – 6 February 1940); the registration notices of company B 10.214 — the original one (articles of association of 25 March 1936, seat Jerozolimska 39) and the entry recording the change of premises to Złota 9 of 10 November 1938, published in Monitor Polski of 3 April 1939; advertisements and press reports from 1936–1939: „Wiadomości Filmowe", „Kino dla Wszystkich i Teatr", „Wiem wszystko" (18 April 1937), „Dobry Wieczór! Kurjer Czerwony" (28 April 1937 — advertisement for the première at the Roma cinema), „Prawda o filmie" (25 October 1937 — the note „A second commission"); the list of spa guests at Karlsbad of 28 August 1936; the notice of the Municipal Board of 23 July 1940 and the list of changes of company addresses of September 1940 (Journal of Notices of the City of Warsaw); the press of the anti-Jewish campaign: „Alarm" (16 January 1938) and „Dziennik Bydgoski" (29 January 1938); the Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony (ID 3642818 and 1483942); the family genealogical tree (MyHeritage) and correspondence with the Israeli branch of the family (2024–2026). Dates of birth are given after the residence register, compiled during the family's lifetime from the documents they presented; differing years from the family genealogical tree (Manio: 1891, Rachela: 1891, Zofia: 1892) are noted in the text. The death of uncle Isaak in 1918 — after the Austro-Hungarian casualty lists of the First World War (list no. 669 of 24 April 1918) and the biographical literature on his son, the writer Hermann Kesten (1900–1996), whose kinship with Manio was established through the agreement of the genealogical tree with published biographical entries on the writer. Rachela's parentage (daughter of Markus, Salomon's brother, and Bluma née Halberstamm) — after the residence register cross-checked against the record for Markus Kesten in the Geni World Family Tree (d. 16 August 1940, Haifa; burial: Old Jewish Cemetery). The life dates of the siblings — after the family genealogical trees (MyHeritage and Geni; Georg: profile with the dates 24 January 1885 – 25 May 1932, Mannheim, burial at the Jüdischer Friedhof Mannheim); Moshe Brandriss's stay in Mannheim and his emigration to France — after the database „Victims of the Holocaust and Jewish residents of Germany 1939–1945" (censuses of the Jewish population in the Reich) and the record „Moses Brandriss-Kesten" in the Geni World Family Tree (marriage: Nice 1942; death: New York, September 1981); the fate of Manus (Max) Kesten of Amsterdam — after the card index of the Jewish Council / Westerbork camp and the Dutch official list of deaths no. 3438 of 1959 (copies in the project's collection); the degree of his kinship with Manio remains the subject of research. The formulations concerning the deaths of Manio, Rachela Lea and Zofia are given in wording consistent with the inscriptions of the Stones of Remembrance dedicated to them; divergent yearly records in secondary sources are discussed in the project's working documentation and deliberately left unresolved here. The historical context of Podwołoczyska, the pre-war film trade, the Warsaw ghetto and Treblinka — after the findings of Holocaust historiography (among others the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Population figures for Podwołoczyska — after Jewish encyclopaedias (among others Brockhaus–Efron: 1880 — 1,004 Jews, 53.6% of the total; 1900 — 3,779, 73%; 1910 — 3,836, 68.1%); the dates of the community's founding (30 December 1880) and the granting of municipal rights (1881) — after the regional literature. Research continues: the family's address after 6 February 1940, the registration files of B 10.214, the fate of Zofia, family photographs.

Opracowanie w ramach projektu upamiętnienia mieszkańców kamienicy przy ul. Złotej 7 i 9 w Warszawie — prepared as part of the project commemorating the residents of the house at 7 and 9 Złota Street in Warsaw · www.zlota7-9.com