Mortka (Mordechai) Mendel Bialystock was born on 2 May 1872 in Wyszkow (Poland), the son of Moshe Leib Bialystock and his wife Freida Nekhama Bialystock. After attending the Volks- und Mittelschule he completed a textile school and became a textile buyer. As a merchant in the textile wholesale trade, he set up his own business in his home town.
In 1890 he married Malka Kahan, who was born in Chorzele (Poland) on 1st June 1867. From the marriage, seven children were born: Dora Feigel (born 1891), Heinrich Chaim (born 1891), Chaja Esther (born 1894), Jankiel (born 1897), Isaak (born 1898), Bertha (b. 1903) and Isidor (born 1907).
In 1911 the family Bialystock moved to Germany, and Mortka Mendel Bialystock founded a textile business in Kiel. On 4 August 1914 the family moved to Bremen. Mortka Mendel Bialystock opened a menswear shop at Brautstraße 3/4. Soon he moved this business into the house Faulenstraße 48, which – like other houses – was his property. This was where the family lived.
On 1 December 1932, the family moved to the Netherlands (with the exception of Heinrich Chaim, who stayed with his family in Bremen), and settled in The Hague. Mortka Mendel Bialystock returned (1936) to the bar mitzva of his grandson Martin von den Haag to Bremen. From 30 Aug. until 3 Sept. 1936 he was reported at the Bahnhofsplatz 16 in Bremen’s only pension, which still accommodated Jewish guests.
Even before the German attack on the Netherlands, which began on 10 May 1940, Mortka Mendel and Malka Bialystock arrived in Nice on March 13, 1940, where they were sure to believe. After the surrender of France, Nice fell under the rule of the Vichy government, but was occupied by Italian troops since the end of 1942, which led to a strong influx of Jewish refugees into the region around Nice. The Italian civil and military authorities initially opposed the arrest of Jews, but ultimately failed to assert themselves against the Vichy government and the Gestapo. Mortka Mendel Bialystock was arrested in 1943 for the treason of a French family and was presumably deported to an extermination camp where he was murdered.
At the end of April 1945, Mortka Mendels and Malka’s grandson Martin Bialystock, who had joined the British troops in Palestine in 1940 – at the age of 17 – and had fought in North Africa and Italy, received a letter from his aunt Chaja Esther Pajgin from Surinam (Dutch Guiana). She told him the desperate situation of his grandmother in Nice. He then went with a jeep from Bologna to Nice, and sought out the synagogue there to find out where the grandmother lived. The denouncer, who had betrayed his grandfather, handed over to the military police.
Malka Bialystock returned to the Netherlands. She died on 7 July 1955 in The Hague.
Author: Michael Cochu (2013)
1872 - 1943 (70 years)
. Dora Feigel BIALYSTOCK, b. 1 May 1891, Wyszków, Poland 
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