Vincent Sprawka

1888 - 1977


When a Jew Rescued a Slavic Pole

My paternal great-uncle, Vincent Sprawka, husband of my paternal grandmother's sister Francis, told of his emigration from the Tsarist Russian province of Poland in 1907.

On his way to the port of embarkation he was arrested.

When he was taken before the judge whom Uncle Vincent identified as a Jew, the judge recognized that no basis existed for Uncle Vincent's arrest, that the local police had arrested a migrant in an attempt to rob him, and the judge dismissed the charges and let Uncle Vincent continue his journey.

Uncle Vincent may have said that his port of embarkation was Hamburg, Germany.

That suggests that this incident occurred in Germany

In the early 20th century, a Slavic Polish migrant would have been vulnerable to being preyed upon by local police in Germany and a Jew may have been more likely to have been serving as a judge in eastern Germany than in the western borderlands of the Tsarist Russian province of Poland. Pre-WWI Germany may have been the time of the greatest freedom and rights for German Jews.

He was naturalized a U.S. citizen in 1924.


INDEX: Cizewski, Lovetere, Musbach, & Robinson Family History

© 2016 Leonard H. Cizewski

Last Major Revision: March 3, 2016
Posted: February 27, 2016
Last Reviewed: 

hosted by ibiblio