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These photographs, many labeled, some not, are largely of Osnos ancestors. The album turned up in a cache of material from the Beresfordf apartment we had not seen before. Jozef Osnos’ family history is less well documented than the Bychowski family, which are in letters we have and the book, In the Garden of Memory, by Joanna Olcak-Roniker, winner of Poland’s top literary prize. 

At Auschwitz, there are nineteen Osnos names on the scrolls of those killed in World War II. How many are Jozef’s relatives is not known. One of Jozef’s uncles was a Polish officer killed by the Russians at Babi Yar. Another uncle served in the Red Army and was exiled in the late 1940s to Krasnoyark in the far east of Siberia.

Zarka Auer, a nephew, was Jozef’s closest relative in New York.

Other pictures are of Robert and Peter as boys. They were born twelve years apart. Robert’s childhood was marked by the Nazi invasion of Warsaw and the years he spent in a boarding school in India. He always contended that childhood traumas were minimized by his belief in the courage of his parents and his devotion to Jules Verne, among others he read  avidly in those years.

Dear Naomi,

For more than a half-century, our lives and walls have been enhanced by your art, especially collages. Now, through the modern miracle of technology, we can display your creations in perpetuity on the internet for everyone to appreciate.

The drawer will be “Naomi’s Collages and More” and will have a permanent place in the Virtual Attic where so much else in our lives is being preserved.

With love,
Susan and Peter

The first group of what has become the vaunted Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan. Studying Russian.

Hold the Presses!

Carroll Mason Russell, Bon, the OG wrote this letter to us in London in 1982 when we were unable to make it to Lakeside. Bon is the great-great-grandmother of Ben, Pete, Mae, Ollie and Rose.

A gift no amount of money could buy.

This PDF is a collection of stories from Vietnam I wrote in the months around what was called the Peace With Honor treaty. The last American GIs and POWs were gone by March 30, 1973. Two years later the war ended with the North Vietnamese victory. The type is small but should respond to a blowup of 400 percent or so. This all happened fifty years ago.

Died Aug. 29, 1996

A great journalist and a singularly great leader.

Brilliant diplomat. Wonderful family. Excellent company.

Lescaze, my pal. His love story with Lynn, well told and sad.

Jozef Osnos, before his mustache, two brothers, an ancestor and in dapper street attire.

Marta’s father

These are some of our Bychowski cousins in Poland. They are younger members of a family devastated by war and immigration in the 20th century but clearly not destroyed.

On August 1,1975, the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was signed In Helsinki. There were 35 heads of state at the summit. Albert (Bud) W. Sherer was the chief American representative to the CSCE. Here he is with President Gerald Ford. Decades earlier they had shared an office studying for the Michigan bar exam.

The couple and brothers who witness civil vows at justice of the peace.

As a student at European Boys School, Panchani, India 1943

Remarks I made at a family book party in Lakeside.

(Courtesy of the staff)

Moving on