From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

This afternoon I am going to Aunt Berta Fulda’s house and stay three or four days. She and Uncle Max live way out where there are no sidewalks, only sand all around them. They have a boy named Irving, with red hair. I love to visit there because we can play in the sand all day long, and Aunt Berta never cares how we look or what we eat.

In addition to giving us a picture of childhood in San Francisco in the early 20th Century, every once in awhile Hilda helps to flesh out my family’s story. Irving (or Erwin) was born in 1892 and would visit my grandmother and her children in Vienna in the late 1920s or early 1930s. His name was mentioned in a number of letters as a somewhat daunting figure called “Uncle Fulda.” On the photo below, my mother wrote “1929?” because she was a child when he visited and could not recall the date. My grandmother’s nephew Paul Zerzawy wrote a letter to him affirming that if my grandparents were allowed to come to the U.S. in 1941, they would not be a burden on the state, listing all of the relatives (including Uncle Fulda) who would contribute to their support. This letter must have helped my grandparents procure the resources and documents that allowed them to get tickets on a ship leaving for the U.S. in July 1941. Unfortunately, the paperwork did not align to satisfy German bureaucracy so they never made it to the ship.