The Klinger Family's Journey to Piotrkow
Maurice (Moshe Elie) Klinger is a native son of France, but his roots lie in the birthplace of his father Jacob, born in 1900 in Piotrkow Trybunalski. Jacob left Poland as a young man, traveling first to Germany, then France, where he married and had a family before World War II. Jacob became a French partisan during the war and survived with his family intact. He died in France in 1960.
Forty years later, in August 2000, Maurice set out on a journey to discover his Polish roots, with wife Alice and son Laurent. Earlier that year, Maurice had discovered two second cousins, one in the U.S. and the other living in Israel, who helped fill in some missing pieces of his family's history. The Klingers arrived in Piotrkow Trybunalski via Warsaw, spending several days exploring both cities. The highlight of their journey was successfully locating the Klinger family's ancestral home, as well as the grave of Maurice's grandmother, Dwojra Landau Klinger (b. 1873) in the Piotrkow Trybunalski Jewish cemetery.
