A check of available records in Konin, the Polish ancestral home of Barry Goldwater’s family, indicates that any relatives of the Senator’s family probably were slaughtered by the Nazis, it was reported here today from Warsaw.
The Senator’s nomination spurred interest in those records in the Polish river town, a hamlet 115 miles west of Warsaw. The grandfather of the nominee was a Jewish peddler named Michael Goldwasser, who emigrated to the United States in 1849 when Konin was under Russian rule.
Mayor Zdzislaw Szklarkowski of Konin said that if any of the 3,000 Jews of the hamlet before the war were Goldwassers, they were dead now. He said the Nazis had organized a concentration camp in Konin and that there were no Goldwassers among the few survivors. He added that the Nazis had destroyed all Jewish records and that an examination of Konin archives had not produced any traces of a Goldwasser family, which the Mayor said he understood had been a large one.
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