The Osnos Family

A building known as the Lieb Osnos tenement in downtown Warsaw was the only building inside the territory of the ghetto which survived World War ll. It has been designated a national monument but it is in serious disrepair with no plans to restore it except this one: An AI enhanced reminaging which turned up in of all places X, where it has received 5,800 views.

Read A creepy building or a piece of art? – Abandoned building in the center of Warsaw — In December 2025, Gwyn Osnos found this trove of material about the Lieb Osnos Tenement in downtown Warsaw, for the first time uncovering it as a place where there were stores, offices and spacious apartments, another glimpse of the life for the family before World War II and the almost total obliteration of a way of life.

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.

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.

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

The last one was in 1998.