In June of 2013, my wife Pearl and I travelled the 70 miles from Kiev in the Ukraine to Tetiev. My mother Libbie Warshawsky was born there in 1900 and emigrated from there to Cleveland in 1910.  She was a niece of Sam and Minnie Klausner and a first cousin of their sons Ben, Nathan and Jake Klausner.

In 1920 the Cossacks took over the village and slaughtered 4,000 of the 6,000 Jews living there and the rest fled. The Cossacks then destroyed the shtetl leaving no records or trace of a Jewish presence except the cemetery. Today that is a hard-to-find weed infested field with a few stones here and there with no distinguishable writing. There would be nothing in modern Tetiev which my mother would have recognized except the landscape. We found it a sobering experience.