“The Lion of Bilin,” revisited

In my April 22, 2021 blog post, I included a story my grandmother had written about her hometown of Bilin (Bilina in Czech), which she entitled The Lion of Bilin, after the mountain that towers over the town. In German the mountain was known as the Borschen and in Czech it is the Bořeň. It was affectionately known as the Lion of Bilin, inspired by a drawing Goethe made of the mountain in the early 19th Century.

As I mentioned in my last post, in May of this year, Czech genealogist Julius Müller took my husband and me to visit Bilina. I had written to the information office the previous year about planning to visit, but received no reply. Upon arriving in Bilina, Julius took us to the Bilina Information Center and mentioned that I was looking for information about my great-grandfather Adolf Löwy, the newspaper publisher. The woman at the desk, Lada Hubáčková, remembered my email and said she had replied but her message had been returned as undeliverable. Lada was very helpful, showering us with information, brochures, and postcards of the town.  

My grandmother’s story begins: “Borschen Mountain is located in a valley between the Erz Mountains – the natural border between the Empires of Saxony and Bohemia – and the Bohemian Uplands.  It is 538 meters above sea level.”

I repeatedly have been amazed by my grandmother’s memory – usually I have been able to corroborate something she wrote by researching in newspapers or vital records. Sometimes I have discovered that she was correct and the record was wrong! At the information center, I found this postcard:

“Aha!,” I thought as I noticed that the postcard said that the mountain is 539 meters high, one meter higher than my grandmother had written. Finally an error - my grandmother’s memory was good but not that good. I mentioned to Lada that my grandmother had recalled learning in school that the mountain was 538 meters high. Lada said that when she was in grade school, she too had learned that it was 538 meters high! Apparently, in recent years the mountain had been measured with modern technology and found to be a meter higher than previously thought.

Yet again, my grandmother’s memory and veracity were flawless!

Julius took us to the cemetery and the spa above the town (a story for another post), where we had a wonderful view of the mountain, which indeed looks a bit like a sleeping lion. I was thrilled to be walking in my grandmother’s footsteps and seeing the places I’d been reading about over the past few years.

My husband and I with the Lion of Bilin in the background.

In the 1980s, my mother and I went to Kauai and saw Nounou Mountain, which is known as The Sleeping Giant. I wonder whether when we saw it my mother recalled stories her mother had told her of the sleeping lion a century and world away?

My mother mimicking the mountain in Kauai

More sifting through history

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Earlier this year, my husband and I took a trip to England. A few weeks before we left, I received an email from the World Jewish Relief Archives in response to a question I had asked about my mother’s first cousins Paul and Robert Zerzawy’s attempts to leave Europe in 1939. Robert was the first in the family to get out, arriving in England in March 1939. Paul soon followed in April, stopping briefly in England before sailing to New York.

I must have made my query through their website and have no record of when or what I asked. The writer, an archives volunteer, apologized for how long the response had taken. She explained that “World Jewish Relief (formerly known as The Central British Fund) opened case files for each person who came to the United Kingdom fleeing Nazi occupied Germany and Austria before the Second World War.” She told me that she found a registration card for my mother’s first cousin Robert Zerzawy and also “registration cards for an uncle by the name of Vitali (Chaim) Cohen and his wife Helene (nee Cohen).” That of course was important information for me since those were my maternal grandparents! If I understand the cards, it looks like the ones for Vitali and Helene were created by Robert after he learned of Helene’s release from Ravensbrück and the prisoner trade that sent her to Istanbul. The Istanbul address is the business address of one of Vitali’s relatives who helped my grandmother ultimately make her way to the U.S. The only thing Robert knew about Vitali in late 1945 or early 1946 was that he had last been heard from when he was imprisoned in Buchenwald.

Robert’s card indicates that the authorities believed he may have gone to the U.S. This corroborates family letters which talk of Robert planning to join his family in San Francisco. Unfortunately, that never came to pass.

Information provided by the World Jewish Relief Archives

I wrote back and asked whether the archives had any information about the Stopford Fund which was created to help Czech refugees get out. I believe that this fund helped Robert and Paul emigrate. The volunteer had not heard of it but kindly did a bit of sleuthing and found that the National Archives at Kew in the outskirts of London had information about the fund. I went on their site and asked some questions through their “chat” feature. Although I ultimately found no information in the Stopford Fund files related to the Zerzawy brothers, the librarian on the chat found Robert’s British naturalization certificate. It hadn’t been digitized, but since I was going to be in London, I could make an appointment to view the document.

It was fun to do something non-touristy while in another country. I took the train to Kew. Unlike other tourists, I headed for the archives instead of the famous gardens. I was given an official library card and requested the file. When the file was ready, I was assigned a specific spot in the reading room where I could look at it. The naturalization certificate told me a bit more about Robert, including his occupation – an expert in hemp and cotton spinning.

While I waited for the file, a librarian helped me search further in the online catalog and we discovered that there were additional documents available related to Robert’s naturalization. I tried to request them, but for some reason these documents had been closed for 100 years until 2069! I knew I couldn’t wait that long and made a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to be allowed to see the files. The request was granted, but not in time for me to go back to see the files in person.

When I received the digitized documents I’d requested, I learned more about Robert’s first years in England – about the company he worked for and some of his early experiences. For example, in 1940, his landlady had said negative things to police authorities about his “moral conduct” with no details or corroboration from others. Later character witnesses for his naturalization said nothing but positive things. It made me wonder whether this was an example of antisemitism or xenophobia. Not long ago, we watched the first episode of “Foyle’s War”. It takes place in 1940 and showed clearly how unwelcome Jewish refugees were to much of the general population in England during the war.  

Also on this trip, I visited a few of the addresses Robert lived in in the 1960s. An apartment building in the Kensington area of London and a small house in Chiswick, a lovely town near London. I didn’t have a house address for the Chiswick, just a name – Pontana. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to find it. However, it exists, and it still has the name rather than a number!

Apartment in Kensington

“Pontana” in Chiswick

It was wonderful to learn more about Robert. I still have questions about why he never joined the family in San Francisco. Hopefully one day I will find the answer. 

A Family Heirloom

As I mentioned in my last post, in 1979, my mother flew to France to join me at the end of my junior year abroad in Montpellier, France. She had not been to Europe since she and her brother had been forced to flee Vienna 40 years earlier.

While in Paris walking around Montmartre, my mother paid a sketch artist to make a charcoal portrait of me. I never felt that the portrait looked much like me, but my mother was happy with the likeness. Perhaps I just didn’t like the way I looked! She was inspired to have the drawing made thanks to a pastel portrait she had of her own mother which had been done in the 1930s in Vienna. My mother and her brother brought the portrait them when they came to the U.S. in 1939.  

Upon arriving back home in San Francisco, my mother framed the sketch and hung it on her bedroom wall, accompanying the one of her mother which already hung there. Although I didn’t like my own portrait, I thought the artist captured my grandmother’s likeness well.

I don’t recall seeing my grandmother’s portrait before 1979, but perhaps it was hanging in our home throughout my childhood.

When my mother moved to the condo I live in now, her mother’s portrait hung prominently in the dining room. I loved seeing her each time I visited, looking out on her family. After my mother’s death, I stored the portrait safely in a closet.

In 2017, when I began going through my family papers, I brought out the portrait again to add it to the digital archive I was making. I then hung it up in our hallway. Looking at a newly digitized photo of my mother’s 16th birthday party from May 1937, I could see clearly something I had not noticed on the small original 2-1/2x3inch photo – my grandmother’s portrait was hanging on the wall in their dining room! I loved that my grandmother was now looking at me every time I walked down the hallway, just as her image had looked on she and her family in their home in Vienna.

Recently, I wondered whether my grandmother’s nephew Robert Zerzawy had made the portrait – he had been an accomplished artist. I was going to ask Sherlock Cohn (a woman who helps identify people and places in old photos) to compare the drawing to others I know he had made. Before doing that, however, it occurred to me to take the portrait (gingerly) out of the frame and see whether it was signed. Indeed it was! As so often has happened on this journey, I discovered that the story I told myself about the object was not true. The portrait was signed and dated by Wilhelm Wachtel in 1937 – so the portrait was quite new when my mother celebrated her birthday. My grandmother’s 50th birthday was in November 1936. Perhaps the portrait was made in honor of that milestone.

There is not much information available on Wilhelm Wachtel. It appears that he was born in Poland in 1875 and died in the US in 1952. He seems to have been prolific and fairly well-known when he was alive. If you do an internet search, you can see many examples of his work.

What an amazing artifact that gets richer each time I look at it!

Top photo: at their home in Vienna on my mother’s 16th birthday in 1937 with the portrait on the wall behind them and a red line pointing to Eva; bottom left photo: at my mother’s home in San Francisco with her brother Harry and her caregiver with the portrait on the wall behind them; bottom right photo: the portrait itself.

Vienna

In a recent session of Barbara Krasner’s Writing Family History group, we wrote about a geographic place that is meaningful to our family. I chose Vienna, Austria:

I am in Vienna: the one I visited in 1978-1979 with a friend over Christmas break during my junior year abroad in France and again the following summer with my mother on her first visit back to Europe since fleeing in 1939; the Vienna of my mother’s youth in the 1920s, and of her own mother’s youth at the turn of the 20th Century.

The music of Strauss fills the air. I am swaying to the strains of the “Blue Danube.” I am in line for standing room only tickets to attend a performance of Die Fledermaus on January 1, 1979, the opera played every new year at the Vienna State Opera. I wasn’t able to attend the New Year’s Eve performance, but I came close! I had one of my first “Twilight Zone” experiences that night as we waited for the streetcar to return to our pension after the performance. Out of the darkness a woman completely enveloped in a huge coat against the bitter cold appeared and said “Hello, Helen Goldsmith.” She was a friend from UC Berkeley who was studying in Edinburgh while I was in Montpellier, France. What a strange and magical experience to have someone from home suddenly appear!

Now I am in Stadtpark near the statue of Strauss. I imagine my mother and uncle playing on the grass when they were children, with my grandmother delightedly watching them. Despite the fact that everywhere I look are signs prohibiting people from walking on the grass.

Strauss statue in 1979.

I walk to the Hotel Sacher for a cup of coffee mit schlag, and a slice of the famous Sacher Torte, a two-layer chocolate cake with apricot jam between the layers, topped with dark chocolate icing. When I was a child in San Francisco, my mother would sometimes make a Sacher Torte for special occasions. My mouth waters as I imagine licking the spoon after she finishes icing the cake.

Now, I am peering in the window of Café Centrale, around 1906, seeing my 20-year old grandmother, a young shop girl whose social life includes visiting the café most days. She lives in modest quarters and the café is her living room. She reads the latest newspapers from Vienna and around the world and meets her friends for conversation, intellectual arguments, and laughter.

Now it’s 1934, and I am on the Stubenring looking at Libansky & Co, my grandparents’ stationery shop. This is the heyday of my grandfather’s “magic shop.” He stands outside basking in the sun, leaning against the building. He chats up passers-by, once in awhile inviting one of them into the shop for him to read their palms or sell them a mandrake root for their protection.

A postcard of the Stubenring. The arrow points to my grandparents’s shop, Libansky & Co.

Vitali at the shop window with customers in 1934.

Again recalling my visit over Christmas break in 1978-79, I am back at the pension near St. Stephen’s Cathedral. An old widow runs it. She has a small, wheezy, unfriendly dog who roams the halls at night. At breakfast, one of the guests – an employee of the Mexican embassy – says in stilted yet lovely English, “Madam, your dog does not look at me with good eyes.” I couldn’t have said it better.

St. Stephen’s Cathedral and ticket to Die Fledermaus from 1979.

The pension is above a nightclub (perhaps a strip club) called “Casablanca.” When my mother and I stay there the following summer, I ask her to go into the club and get me a poster as a gift for the friend I had visited Vienna with several months earlier. She is too embarrassed to do so, but teaches me the German to go in and ask myself. I am successful and secure two posters, one for my friend and one for me. A few years ago, my husband and I had dinner with friends and reminisced about student travel. It turned out that they had stayed at the very same pension and were thrilled when I gave them the poster.

Final image: it is the summer of 1979. My mother has decided she needs a copy of her birth certificate in case all the other documentation she has about her existence will not be sufficient for her to apply for Social Security benefits in a few years. We go to the Jewish organization that has all of the old books of Jewish records. It is the 4th of July, which seems auspicious! Births were recorded by hand in huge tomes. The less-than-friendly employee unenthusiastically hands my mother the book for 1921, the year of her birth. She is nowhere to be found and my mother is crestfallen. My mother decides that since we are there, she might as well see whether her brother appears in the 1924 book so the visit might be worthwhile. We find him immediately. My mother listlessly continues to turn the pages without much hope and suddenly finds her own birth recorded a few years after she was born. For some reason, her father hadn’t wanted to deal with the bureaucracy to record the information (or considered it an invasion of privacy?) until after his second child, a son, was born. 

Copy of Harry’s birth certificate from 1979.

I smell the coffee and pastry, hear the strains of Strauss waltzes, see the Vienna of my mother’s childhood, and the Vienna my grandmother loved before it became an unfriendly hellscape. What is the real Vienna – the idyllic playground or the antisemitic nightmare? Probably both.  I look forward to visiting again to see whether there is a Vienna that is mine.

Childhood Memories

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been taking workshops with Barbara Krasner. Yesterday, one of the writing prompts was to write about one’s mother’s or grandmother’s kitchen. It was a lot of fun and brought back memories I hadn’t thought of for years. Other writers’ responses brought back additional memories. For example, Barbara wrote of the pull-down lamp in their kitchen which reminded me that we had one too. It never worked very well, pulling down easily, but it usually wouldn’t retract.

What do you recall about the kitchen(s) you spent time in as a child?

My Mother’s Kitchen

My mother’s kitchen at the sleepy western edge of San Francisco was efficient and cozy. It was almost a square room. One door led from the hallway. Walking in on the left was a gas stove and tiled countertop. Above the sink was a window facing the outside staircase that let in natural light.

Along the next wall were counters with storage above and below. Most useful of all was a slide out butcher-block cutting board. Then space for a small kitchen table where my mother, father and I ate most meals.

Along the third wall, a second door led to a small formal dining room. On one side of the doorway was a shallow closet that had a fold-out ironing board – a handy contraption that made ironing less daunting. As new wrinkle-free fabrics became more popular, many people in similar houses took out the board and created a spice cabinet.  

Along the final wall was the refrigerator and more counterspace and cabinets. 

There was no dishwasher. In the 1960s, my mother who worked full time was eager to find labor and time saving solutions to cooking and cleaning. She bought a “portable” dishwasher which was neither very portable nor efficient. It looked like a giant hair dryer with a long hose that attached to the kitchen sink faucet. It took up so much counterspace that it was a short-lived addition to our household.

My mother tried several new-fangled appliances in the late 1960s/early 1970s. One was a rotisserie that was supposed to easily and efficiently roast delicious chicken and meat – at least in our household, it promised a lot more than it delivered. It took up a lot of valuable space so it quickly went the way of the dishwasher.

The one kitchen tool my mother had which I miss to this day was an old-fashioned grinder. The contraption clamped to our cutting-board. It had attachments for grating and grinding things as coarsely or finely as desired. Apparently many people used such a device to make chopped liver, not something my mother did. It was operated by means of a hand crank – no electricity needed. One attachment ground almonds to the perfect fineness for my mother’s and grandmother’s Viennese crescent cookies. I have never been able to recreate that consistency with any of the tools I have in my kitchen.

Every Thanksgiving my mother would use the grinder to make fresh cranberry relish. For some people, it is only Thanksgiving with a can of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce making the satisfying splat into a serving dish. For me, it is my mother’s relish – refreshing, sweet, and tangy. Just cranberries, oranges, and sugar.

My mother soon learned to use a different place to grind the cranberries when she clamped the grinder onto its usual location, the pull-out cutting board. As she ground the berries on the board, the kitchen became awash in cranberry sauce – a sea of red all over the board and floor.

When my cousin Tim sent me a bag of unmilled wheat berries in 2021 after reading letters about my grandmother’s nephew sending the family wheat when he was a soldier in World War I and flour was scarce, I regretted not having my mother’s grinder – that would have been the perfect tool to make the berries into flour!

One kitchen tool I still have from my mother is a jar opener – a simple thing made of metal and wrapped in vinyl. I have never found a better device to open difficult containers and thank my mother each time I use it. [In preparing this post, I discovered that such an opener still exists — it’s called a jar wrench and is used for canning.]

I grew up with Revere Ware pots and pans, made of stainless steel with copper bottoms. They were equal to any task and seemingly indestructible. When I moved out into an apartment of my own, I proudly bought my own set. When my husband and I joined households, we had 2 sets of Revere Ware pots and pans. After both of our mothers, we had 4! I couldn’t bear to get rid of any of them, both for sentimental reasons and because they were all still perfectly useful.

When we remodeled our kitchen several years ago, we installed an induction stovetop because we cannot have a gas stove where we live now. Induction is closer to cooking with gas than a traditional electric stove. Induction uses electromagnetic cooking and the cookware must work like a magnet. Unfortunately, none of our Revere Ware worked! Finally, we no choice but to let those copper-bottomed pieces go to homes that could appreciate them.

In my mother’s kitchen in 1998

December 31, 2022

A few final words about Hilda

Some readers were confused because Hilda, although Jewish, took such delight in Christmas. In her eulogy, Joan Zentner said: “Her Grandfather and her nurse Alma were her favorites. Here was a dichotomy, as Alma was a devout Catholic and Grandfather was a devout Jew. He was not Orthodox and the Pierce Street home observed all the Ritual Holidays. Hilda attended [Jewish] Sunday School, as well as occasionally attending Sunday Mass with her devoted nurse. Her young mind compared and analyzed the two faiths and philosophies. While she thought little of angels and heaven, she adored Christmas…. She loved this holiday so much that she convinced her Grandfather, and Christmas was celebrated to the joy of all at the Pierce Street household.”

Joan typed up “Rainbows and Worms” and this year my posts have come from a copy of it that she had given my mother in 1991. According to Joan’s eulogy, while Hilda was unhappily married and living in Brazil, she passed the time by writing about “her childhood in a book which she called ‘Rainbows and Worms’; it is a detailed account of life in and around Pierce Street, and no doubt drawn from a meticulously kept diary.” At last we have the answer to a question I often asked myself and others have asked me – did an 8-year old really write this diary? If Joan is correct, Hilda edited and probably embellished the diary she’d written as a child. It would have been written in the mid-1950s when Hilda was in her early 50s. (At the very same time, my grandmother would have been typing up her memories of her childhood in Bohemia from 1889-1902!).

Although I have had Hilda’s original copy for a few months, I avoided looking for fear of getting caught up in comparing differences between it and Joan’s version. Here is the first entry from Hilda’s original typed copy:

Hilda’s first paragraph of “Rainbows and Worms”

Over the past few days I’ve posted photos of the gravesites of the people we have read about over the year. My cousin and I visited the Jewish cemeteries in Colma in September so we could see where Hilda is interred. Jacob Levy’s family plot is in Salem Memorial Park. Tillie is buried in her husband Julius Zentner’s plot at Home of Peace Cemetery.

In Hilda’s eulogy, Joan Zentner wrote of how close Hilda and her nursemaid Alma were: “Her alliance with Alma was bonded by a love and faithfulness throughout life. Alma is buried in our Family Plot in Colma very near Hilda’s mother and father.” We didn’t see Alma’s grave on our initial visit, so after finding Hilda, we went back to Jacob Levy’s family plot, but Alma was nowhere to be seen. As I was writing about Hilda over the past few days, I looked at all of the photos I took at the cemetery in September. On that first visit, I visited the graves of other family relatives who are more part of my mother’s and grandmother’s family story than of Hilda’s. One of those people was Erwin Fulda, who offered to provide financial assistance to help bring over my grandparents in 1939 (as did Aunt Tillie and Hilda and Nathan). He is also the boy who Hilda played with in 1912.

Erwin is buried in the Fulda family plot at the Home of Peace Cemetery. I took photos of his grave as well as others in the plot.

Could Alma R Orack be Hilda’s Alma?!

In preparing for our visit to the cemetery, I did an online search for where to find Hilda. I learned that she had been cremated and that her ashes are in the Hills of Eternity Mausoleum (not far from where Wyatt Earp is buried). My cousin and I found the rest of the family, but Hilda’s crypt eluded us. After wandering around the mausoleum for a long time without success, someone working at the cemetery directed us to the room she was supposed to be in, but we still were unable to find her. We jokingly agreed that Hilda chose to elude us because she wanted us to make a special visit to see her. We called the cemetery after our visit to confirm we had been looking in the right place, and we were assured we had been.

A few weeks ago, we returned to the cemetery, went to the same room, and within less than a minute we found Hilda! This time we realized she shared a space with her beloved Nathan. However, as you can see, Hilda’s name is difficult to read. Apparently etching skills did not improve over 40 years.

Hilda always had hoped to have her diary published. After Joan typed the manuscript (and edited it a bit), she sent it to a publisher. The last item I share with you is a response from Doubleday.

Several readers have asked me if I will look for a publisher. Perhaps the time has come and the world is ready to hear Hilda’s voice. There are differences between Hilda’s original and the one I used this year. If I ever try to get it published, I’ll have to spend some time comparing the two!

For subscribers to my blog, I have an idea about something I might do next year, but plan to write far less often. Please don’t be surprised if you do not hear from me for awhile. Thank you for going on this journey with Hilda and me this year!

December 26, 2022

When I began posting Hilda’s diary in January, I knew only what I had gleaned from a few sources: the names of her parents and grandparents on a family tree, a sense of her personality from a few letters written to her from my grandmother and uncle in the 1940s, her own words in a letter she wrote to my grandmother in 1946, and a handful of photos from the early 1940s that my mother and uncle had saved.

I read about the existence of the diary in a note on the family tree that the husband of a distant relative made in 1997. I was unable to find anyone who could show it to me, but one day I found a copy on my bookshelf! It had been given to my mother in 1991 by Hilda’s first cousin Joan Zentner who was the daughter of Hilda’s Uncle Milton. Although they were first cousins, Hilda was over 20 years older than Joan, more of an aunt than a cousin.

As far as I know, I never met Hilda. Through circumstances that merit a blog of their own, in 2019 I met Joan’s daughter, my third cousin. Although we are the same age, we probably never met until then.

In late spring Joan died and my third cousin came into possession of a trove of Hilda treasures which help us know Hilda more fully. In addition, I searched through the digital archives of the local newspapers and found a lot of articles about Hilda and her family.

From all of the above, I have a much better portrait of Hilda’s life.

Hilda’s childhood

Today’s post will focus on Hilda’s childhood, both before and after 1912.

As we know from her diary, Hilda’s mother died just a few days after she was born. Here is a photo postcard of her parents, Hilda and Sol Goldberg. It includes a note that appears to have been written on their honeymoon.

Hilda was born in Manhattan on January 13, 1904. Because she was born on a Friday, the family celebrated her birthday on January 12th. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she learned her actual birth date. Hilda’s father worked as a buyer for Macy’s notion department in New York City. After his wife’s death, he took a leave of absence and brought Hilda to California to be raised by her maternal grandparents. Hilda’s mother was buried in the family plot at Salem Memorial Park in Colma, California:

Hilda’s father visited as often as he could and took her on trips during the summer (see July 2-16 posts).

I found a number of items about Hilda’s life published in Emanu-El, the weekly publication of Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. In the 1940s, it became the local newspaper for the Jewish Community in San Francisco and is currently called J. The Jewish News of Northern California.

According to the September 1, 1911 issue of Emanu-El, “Among the early fall arrivals at Ancha Vista Hotel, San Anselmo, are:…Mrs. J. Levy [Grandmother] and Miss Hilda Goldberg.” She was in the the congregation’s May 1918 confirmation class (May 10, 1918 issue).

Hilda was very social and attended a lot of parties and events.

From the April 25, 1919 issue: “Probably one of the prettiest affairs of the season, given for the younger set, was the afternoon at which Miss Marion Glaser and her sister, Miss Helen Glaser, presided. In the center of the table was a softly shaded lamp of yellow silk, around which numerous baby roses and ferns were strewn; Dainty place cards and favors marked the places of the guests. Those invited to share the hospitality of the charming hostess were….Hilda Goldberg…”

From the June 13, 1919 issue of Emanu-El:

“Young Folk Enjoy Dancing Party
The members of the school set were delightfully entertained last Saturday night at the home of Miss Helen Harris,…when 20 boys and girls enjoyed an evening devoted to singing and dancing. The guests were:…Hilda Goldberg….”

More photos:

Various photos, unknown dates; Hilda with Brownie in bottom right photo

Class photo, unknown date

Hilda and her father, unknown date

And finally, some of Hilda’s artwork, dates unknown:

One of cross-stitch creations

Self-portrait of a lonely young girl?

December 31

Looking back and going forward

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today we reach the end of 2021 and of my daily blog presenting Helene’s and her family’s letters and papers. My goal this year was to give my grandmother her voice, because throughout her life, she wanted to be heard and read, had a great deal to say, and was incredibly eloquent in saying it. Helene was many things to many people – Eva’s and Harry’s beloved mother; Vitali’s darling wife; the Zerzawy boys’ treasured aunt and their last connection to their mother who died when they were very young; a dear friend to many; and my cousins’ and my own sweet grandmother.

Over the course of this year, I found that other family members also wanted to be heard. We saw papers covering more than a century and spanning much of the globe. Just this last week, for example, we were taken on a rich journey – from a desolate World War I prisoner of war camp in Eastern Siberia, to Christmas in Bohemia, to Vienna during a freezing winter in World War II, to London, Istanbul, San Francisco, and a World War II army training camp.

I now know my family in a much deeper and richer way, and have an appreciation for relatives who always seemed distant and not really part of my immediate family’s story. I am filled with love for people who once were strangers, some of whom died decades before I was born.

If you are interested in (re)visiting the blog from the beginning, click here.

I am grateful to my subscribers who joined me on my journey and provided wonderful feedback.

I am going to miss “seeing” my family every day, but intend to find a way to tell their story in a different way, perhaps in book form.

I will end the year with some family photos:

 Vitali and Helene at a dinner party in Vienna, probably in the 1920s:

Vitali is second from the left in the top row, Helene second from the left in the bottom.

Looking at the above photo, I am reminded of a trip my husband and I took to London and where I met his cousins for the first time. We have a very similar photo taken of all of us in a restaurant with 3 other couples. I wonder if some of the people pictured above were relatives from San Francisco — perhaps including Tillie and Julius Zentner?

One of the few photos we have of the entire family in Vienna - Vitali in shadow, probably taken in around 1930:

Helene and her two children:

Helene in San Francisco, with her son Harry, Eva, and Eva’s husband, probably taken around 1946 or 1947:

My mother, my grandmother, and me:

What’s Next?

Looking to the future, I plan to do something different in 2022.

In the February 13th and November 22nd posts, I wrote about a family tree created in 1996-1997 by the husband of a distant cousin. He included anecdotes and footnotes, including one which mentioned that Hilda Firestone, the daughter of Helene’s cousin, had written a “diary/book about the family”. When I saw the note, I was eager to see the diary, but could not figure out how to find it. Then one day as I was looking for something on a bookcase, I discovered I had a copy that had been given to mother!

Hilda was born in January 1904 and her mother died just a few days later. She was raised in San Francisco by her grandparents and her aunt Tillie. Included in this blog over the past year, we saw one letter written by Hilda and several written to her from Helene and from Harry. From them, we can imagine an intelligent, empathetic, funny, caring, and loving person – another woman with a message

In 1912, Hilda was given a diary in which she wrote nearly every day. In 2022, I will share 8-year-old Hilda’s observations of her life and of San Francisco. She did not write every day, many entries are brief, and I have few related materials, so it will be different from my posts in 2021. If you are a subscriber, please feel free to continue or to unsubscribe, depending on your interest.

Happy New Year!!!

December 24

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today we have a letter from Helene in Istanbul to her nephew Robert Zerzawy in England. Yesterday, we saw a letter from Robert written a day earlier to her children in San Francisco. In it, he recalls their childhood in Vienna. Today, Helene does the same today and remembers happy times she had with Robert and Paul in Bohemia.

“There is no greater sadness than to remember
the happy times amid the misery.” 

Istanbul, 24 December 1945

My dear Robert!

When I received your letter filled with love, the first family letter in my exile, I cried for the first time since I’ve come under the radar. Today is almost predestined to hold my lost Paradise before my eyes. Do I not in spirit tear off a calendar page every day, and every day, every minute, every second, which I spend here without purpose, useless, and unhappy, did I not know that today is the day that I have chosen as the eve of a family week? Outside the sun shines as if it were May, only the sadly short days remind me that we are still deep in winter. The long nights are horrible, I fear them more than the Gestapo, blessed memories.

Robert, when I was ordered by the Command in Ravensbrück, along with 31 other respectable women on the 28th of February, to go to Turkey, none of us thought nor believed that we had been given freedom. I dared to ask what will happen with our men in Buchenwald and the “Political Superintendent” replied that he could give me no precise answer to this, but that he believed that we might meet them in Lübeck or in Sweden.

Our group waited five days for Turkish students living in various German university cities. On the fifth day came transport with about 150 persons, consisting of women, men, and children, Spanish Jews who lived all over the world, but who had been housed en famille in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. My courage and hope to be reunited with Vitali grew. We were transported via Flensburg-Copenhagen to Elsinore, from there to Sweden and Helsingborg where a reporter from a Stockholm newspaper promised to notify Eva. Through him it became known that I was in Sweden. From Helsingborg we were taken to Gothenborg, where we waited for diplomatic transport.

The general consuls of Vienna, Berlin, and Hamburg comforted me by saying that those form Buchenwald took another route and perhaps would be taken to Turkey via Marseille. My courage began to sink. Via Skagerak and Kattegat we went to Norway, then the Faroe Islands where we picked up internees from  England, and from there to Liverpool (how close I was to you), Lisbon, Gibraltar, along the north African coast to Port Said then via the Dodekanese through the Dardenelles to Istanbul.

Vitali’s sisters, who had read my name in the newspaper immediately looked me up and overwhelmed me with questions. “Where is Vitali?” Why didn’t you bring him with you?” “How could you go away without him?” It was not meant as badly as it sounded. The people had, and have, no idea about what and how it was in Europe. When I finally managed to convince them that I was not responsible for world affairs they became nice and friendly with me. A feeling of friendship (hostility?) towards them, and also they towards me, has not been overcome. It is strange that I seem to not only have more rapport with the younger generation, but that I understand them better. 

The difference between East and West is too enormous. Yesterday I received an answer to my inquiry to: Foreign Relations Department, British Red Cross & Order of St. John, Wimborne House Arlington 35 London SW 1. A MmeY. St. Martin Watts requested still more data that should help to make the finding of Vitali easier. For two months my completed and signed papers have been ready at the consulate; in the meantime, two ships have left without me; because of fatal circumstances my departure was prevented. Perhaps it is better so, perhaps before the departure of my ship I’ll hear some news of Vitali and I can answer the unspoken question: “Helen, where is Vitali? – Read: Cain, where is your brother Abel?” – I can give a joyful answer: He lives!

Robert, my dear dear boy, I have read your letter so often, and again, or more correctly, I’ve discovered a kind of “dislocation” of the heart and mind. You ask yourself, how all of you, who did not have to go through my suffering, can understand this through my eyes? I am so happy that each of you was spared this.

Love is a kind of Hydra, that for every head that you cut off grows nine new ones. Had I ten children and fifty nephews, my supply of love would not diminish, on the contrary it would overflow. (Pardon my pathetic style it is not intentional. I am no longer accustomed to writing letters and when I go from one extreme to another, I beg for your complete pardon.)

Robert, everything in this world has its price. I have paid the highest price for my good fortune. When I built a nice home for my children it was not just my thought, as it is with all mothers, that her children would have a better life than she herself had, but a vow that I made when I came back from “relaxing vacation” in Brüx. It took weeks before I recovered from my recuperation trip. To see you freeze, I mean mentally, in the comfortable warm rooms, always cuts into my heart. Paul’s moody nature and your caring disposition are the results of an apparently brilliant, but joyless and loveless youth.

Your little mother did what and how she could. Robert how often have I longed in the last two years for that love, which, when I was still young and immature I scorned, because I believed I was being crushed by love. I also yearn for Vitali’s care, tutelage, and his desire to think of me.

Robert, perhaps it seems to you that I see my past life through rose-colored glasses. No Robert, believe me I was lucky that I could build myself up and that I did not fall into depression but was always mentally fully conscious. Paul can verify this for you; I talked with him about it once. I did not lead a Polykrates existence which an Egyptian king would have envied. On the contrary, I always said that I lived the purest life of the treasure seeker: “daily work, evening guests, unhappy times, joyful celebrations.”  The joyful celebration is what I lived for: celebrations of all beliefs, birthdays, all were celebrated joyfully; my children should see only happy faces around them, enjoy music and happiness, eat well and much, “My fiery writing on the wall: Brüx.”

Robert, dear, as you have written me this dear and sweet letter, I believe that you were thinking of the same outing that Paul, you and I made from Brüx up to the Sauerbrunnen. As we passed a particular part of the marvelous row of chestnut trees, where a construction site was for sale at the time, one of us thought that we should build our family castle in the air at this place. We spun our wishful daydream further, until we came to the coffee house and lying there on a nice birch bench, we imagined everything down to the smallest detail. I remember this as clearly as if it were yesterday, and that an oncoming freight train brought us out of our day dream and forced us to think about our return trip. I glanced once more to the right to my beloved Borschen, one of them straight ahead at the church tower, whose song, “Enene, Enene” still rings in my ears today. When I take the next boat, I’ll be at the Aja Sofia in about 30 minutes and will think of the simple village church of Bilin and hear the bells chiming like the music of the spheres. Just as Wagner’s gods dreamed of their Walhalla, I dream with you of our home. The price that Vitali and I have paid does not seem too high to me. When the children left home, I did away with all birthdays and holidays, that is, I postponed them and said inwardly that we will celebrate them later. There are now so many to catch up on and with the new ones that must be celebrated, then our reunion will be one joyful celebration after another, as the magic word, my magic word rings.

I have apologized for my jumping around, but I’m not quite as crazy as I seem after this letter, but it is impossible to keep one’s thoughts straight when one shares a single room with 8 strangers and one sleeps in the same room with them, and each of the 8 receives visitors and they converse in a motley of strange languages. 

Do you know that I only found out by pure chance that Eva is married and that only just now after months at the consulate I was told the name of my son-in-law? Everl wrote a short letter to her cousin Lisette De Sevillja in May in which announced that she married on the 13th of January (Harry’s birthday), that she thinks I’m in Sweden and that Harry is still in the South Pacific. Robert that is all I know about my children. Wasn’t old Galotti right when he said, “He who does not lose his sanity in these circumstances has nothing to lose.” In my whole life I have never heard so much talking as here, and have spoken so little myself. I find it merciful to live in this Babel. I’m in the greatest company. A young Greek woman was reading her Shakespeare, a fine Oxford edition, next to her Glossary. At night I give myself concerts, I hum my Beethoven, my Mozart, my Schubert. I only here learned to understand the Wanderer Symphony: where you are not, there is happiness. Beethoven never let his audience go home in a gloomy mood; therefore, let us both sing with a different note: joy, beautiful spark of the gods -- or is it still too early. Since I’ve been here, I’ve heard no word more often than “patience,” I live with it. Robert, perhaps we will see each other before this letter reaches you.

Please greet and thank Otto and Kamillo for me, I myself kiss you with unbroken love.

Helen 

Helene begins her letter with a quotation from Dante’s Inferno, which prepares us for the sad and nostalgic tone that follows. Robert is the most emotional of her relatives, and, along with his brother Paul, they are the only people left with a connection to and memory of their childhood in Bohemia – she and her nephews’ mother grew up in Bilin, and the boys grew up in Brüx (now Most), about 8 miles away. Here, she writes of a day she spent with her nephews in Bilin, where they saw the Sauerbrunn – the mineral spring, and the Borschen – the mountain looming over the town which we read about in the April 22nd post. She hears the church bells calling her childhood nickname, Enene. However, when Helene wrote about her childhood memories in the 1950s, she had very little nostalgia for Bilin – she made it clear that she was thrilled to leave it far behind when she moved to Vienna in 1902.

We hear echoes from letters of written years ago: Helene invokes the legend of Polycrates which she wrote about in a letter to her children in 1939 – see December 14th post. Eva and Helene both wrote of “castles in the air” — see April 27th and September 24th posts. She recalls the things that we have seen bring her the most comfort – poetry (Goethe and Heine - see links above) and music – perhaps the same things that helped her survive the past few years.

Although the vast majority of Helene’s and the Zerzawy brothers’ correspondence was in Harry’s possession, my mother Eva had all of the letters their mother sent from Istanbul in 1945-1946. In 2006, a friend translated this letter for me. He had trouble with some of the references and I couldn’t make sense of them either. After being immersed in my grandmother’s words and life for the past few years, her stories and references now all have meaning.

Despite the sorrow and loss of the past 6 years, Helene tries to shake off her mood and end on a lighter note to lift her and Robert’s spirits, quoting Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

December 23

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Today we have a letter from Helene’s nephew Robert Zerzawy in England to his cousins Eva and Harry in San Francisco. At this point, Helene has been in Istanbul for over six months after having been released from Ravensbrück.

23 December 1945                  Green Pastures, Bridport

Dear Eva and Harry,

I have to thank you for sending me copies of your mother’s letters from March. I hoped to have a reply from Mr. Joseph de Sevilya but so far there is no response. So I can only hope that you will have heard from Istanbul in the meantime, and that the cryptic behavior of your Turkish relations will have found a quite trivial explanation.

Hilda has somehow acquired the role of an information center on our family affairs. Through. Her I know in outlines about you, for instance that you, Eva, are married and you, Harry, had a victorious return home from the South Pacific with no bad effects other than a tendency to scratching your skin or something like that which by now, I hope, has ceased to trouble you. Speaking of scratching: I guess, our mutual relationship will have to be built up again from scratch too. All you remember of me is, I assume, my little car which doesn’t exist any longer. (Or one should reasonably think it died ignominiously somewhere in the Ukraine or in the Balkans. I was informed from Prague that by force of Government decree I am again the lawful owner of the vehicle provided I can trace and provided it is in a usable state.)

And what I recollect of you apart from table hockey with spoons and stencil paper balls after lunch or cacophonistic duets are Harry’s illustrated weeklies which I hope he kept up in the jungles so giving documentary evidence of their superior lawfulness as compared with the nice mess in Europe or elsewhere in so-called civilized regions.

So it may be quite entertaining to renew our acquaintance and perhaps we like each other. I for my part am looking forward to it and with this pleasant prospect I am sending you my warmest wishes for the New Year and that with Helen with us we shall be a happy family.

Robert 

After discovering all of my family letters and papers that Harry stashed away, I spent several years organizing, archiving and translating everything. Since this was a perfectly legible letter in English, somehow I never read it until I was preparing today’s post! What a treasure it is.

Robert was born in 1899. His mother – Helene’s sister Ida – died when he was just 2-1/2 years old. His step-mother/aunt died when he was 11. His aunt Helene was the nearest thing he had to a maternal figure throughout his life.

I believe Joseph de Sevilya was married to one of Vitali’s sisters. As we learned from Helene’s letters from Istanbul, during the first part of her time there Vitali’s family often visited. However, most of them had little ability to help financially and the agency supporting the prisoners kept moving them to save money on housing, making it difficult for the family to even know how to find her.

At this point, Helene and Hilda have never met – nor have Robert and Hilda. Yet, they maintained a warm correspondence. The three of them were the most emotional and sensitive members of the family, and found kindred spirits in one another.

Unlike his brother Paul, Robert hadn’t spent much time with his young cousins. He never lived in Vienna, so they only knew each other from brief visits and letters. Paul and Robert often traveled together and would reconnect on these trips. In a few lines, Robert paints a vivid picture of the noise, fun, and laughter of the Cohen household in Vienna – they knew how to make their own fun even though they had little money – making music, improvising games and entertaining each other. Sadly, only one of Harry’s illustrated weeklies survived.

In Paul’s vacation photos, he included two photos from a May 1931 trip with captions that read “Breakdown #1” and “Breakdown #2”.

I wonder if this was Robert’s car? They went to Herceg Novi and Lovcen National Park in Montenegro. I found a Youtube video of someone driving what was probably a similar route through the park.

As we saw in later letters, Robert remained in England and only saw his family in person again once or twice again in his life.. I share with him the wish that they had been able to be a happy family again.

December 17

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Today we have the letter Helene’s nephew soldier Paul Zerzawy wrote to his family in Brüx, Bohemia which he promised in the October 15th post.

#10

Fieldpost 211, 14. December 1917 (finished 17. December 1917)

My dear ones!

The good news from our front here, which you must have heard with joy, has probably also reassured you that the pause in my letter writing did not signify anything bad. As I told you already by postcard, I was once again very busy and didn’t have much time or space to write. That is still true, as you can see from what I am going to describe to you.

Therefore, it is very convenient for me that when this letter arrives in Brüx, it will find all of you together, my dear ones. This way it will be easier for me to do justice to your wishes for more detail.

I will be so badly behaved and start talking about myself right away – it’s more convenient for me.

Since the 30th I have more or less told you the most important thing: that I have been ordered to join the machine gun company. I was not very happy about that. I had the most beautiful life imaginable. The Russians have almost never fired guns, the Romanians very rarely, and even before the armistice, total calm was almost a matter of course. Until then, the outpost position was the only somewhat dangerous place because of artillery and mines, but now it was used for recreation. One had good food, warm shelter, little duty, saw some interesting things; whereas in Keseren one had to build all roads and positions, often in the middle of the night.

The Russians on the other side of the Seretz came very freely down to the riverside, and heard speeches and conversations which unfortunately we could not understand. During one such episode, someone (an officer candidate) shot at a neighboring outpost. He was dragged to the river bank and they beat him black and blue in front of our eyes. Discipline must be maintained!

During the night of the 30th, we saw that the people across the river firing an enormous amount of lightning ammunition: they celebrated the truce with fireworks and music. We didn’t hear about it until the next day and it only applied partially to our location. I would have loved to have spent the next few days in position with the company, but then came my orders.

I already wrote that in Keseren, I had a nice shack (which we had to fix up first) with electric light and almost entire windows and doors, as well as officers’ food, privileges, and my own orderly.

Anyway, I already knew about the announcement of the armistice here in B., positioned about an hour and a half behind the first line.

In six weeks, I am supposed to learn perfectly about a new weapon, in all its details, starting from the service of the lowest soldier up to the leadership of the machine gun company. Accordingly, my hours of duty are 6:30- 11; 2-5, 6-7. Partly lessons, partly the equipment, partly shooting. In all weather. For example, now there is bitter cold. Our winter equipment is spotless. Until the day before yesterday I had a bad room – especially because of a lack of light and wood for heating. The last is a very bad thing on our otherwise ideal front. Here there are no forests, the trees in the widely disbursed villages have to be left standing because they offer the only natural hiding places in this lowland, which is covered with grass and flat as a table. The only means of acquiring wood is euphemistically called “comandeering.” Since the day before yesterday, I have been living with 4 other officer candidates, which is a little better.

Hauptman Hladik is an active commander — not evil, but unrelenting.

Especially we who are platoon commanders-to-be are being challenged and must work very hard. Strict discipline, like in peacetime. My inspector is a deputy officer, a nice person. The food is – despite poor conditions and compared to the food with the Landsturm -- plentiful.

In the above, I gave a truthful description, but I don’t mean to say that I am badly off. I have settled in quickly, am healthy, and quite content.

Because: first of all, later I have the prospect of becoming a platoon commander in a machine gun formation, and to enjoy all the benefits granted to this kind of weapon.

Second, there is the need to study (we have also text books and specialist magazines here, even technical literature!) and the shaking up of my brain, which comes with that studying has been good for my brainbox which has been idling for too long. (By the way, a very interesting course of study)

Third, I have good comrades with whom to socialize. We 5 cadets that I already mentioned (1 Neuner – [perhaps also from Landsturm #9], 1 Viennese, 2 Trieste, and myself) are all of the same age, musically inclined, similar interests – we couldn’t have done better.

It’s a shame that it only lasts 4-5 weeks, because in the former Landsturm environment, despite its coziness and lack of adventure, in general people were too old for me. Now we have fun and we amuse ourselves with the civilian population (here there are some, but poor and downtrodden). If we have enough time, sometimes we have a few bottles of wine brought to us -- it is pretty good and cheap here -- and we have the gypsies play something. It is real carefree camp life!

At Christmas I must stay here! So, I cannot fulfill the wishes you have often voiced to be at home with all of you! My time will come in 4, 5, or 6 months. As much as I can, I will spend the holidays (we will not have much free time anyway) with the comrades who all complain that nowadays they are not receiving the same kind of shipments from their homeland as in former years, when it was a better situation back home.

As you may know, Romania is a fairytale land from which you can easily send packages, flour and all other kinds of groceries to Austria. In the past, as a company the field troops were sent directly flour, peas, etc. Now these rations have been so much diminished that I cannot count on being given anything in the near future. A second way is the buying of military central food supplies for officers. I have already gone there and spoken in our central food depot (Landsturm #9) and with a lot of effort I have been promised a little bit of flour and peas. But unfortunately, I was called away before.

The third way: shopping with civilians. Here there is not much to be had. I want to see if I can bargain for a few things, when the direct purchasing and appropriation officers go further into the interior. It is also difficult to get boxes and flour sacks. Then also (hopefully only temporary) the barring of “packages to home.” I’m deliberately not asking for money for this purpose, because there I don’t want to take on a promise which I can’t keep. If I am really hard up, I can always borrow something. My own needs until now have been met with my pay. Of the money that I took with me from Leitmeritz, there remains for me after equipment, buying gloves, lightning articles, a small amount which most likely will be spent for our Christmas celebration.

This is all that I have to say about myself. Therefore, I will now answer each of your letters and cards:

Dear Papa!

The letter of the 28th of November, which was forwarded to me from Landsturm #9, made me especially happy because of the news of Erich’s promotion [?]. Hopefully, he will soon move into officer’s quarters and the days of his suffering soon will be over, should he still be in Russia.

I just don’t wish him to have to stick his nose in another time!

It also could happen to me on another front. Well, I expect everything with calm and confidence – in the end, the war will be over! The lack of newspapers, especially local ones, is really noticeable here – I learn about the news of the day too late. As far as money is concerned, I would be very grateful if you would send me a small money reserve. It is not necessary because I do not require more than I get paid, but I had many expenses in Morganda and on the trip, so that most of the money I received in August from Robert, meaning from you, has been used up. I am very happy to hear that you are doing well as far as your service is concerned. Spend the vacation -- which according to others’ letters you will probably get – pleasantly, and please send me a few lines from there!

—-

Dear Robert!

One after another of your letters has arrived. Also, the one address addressed to FP 211 with a card from Erich, the last from December 8th. Many thanks for your detailed report!

Please give my greetings to all friends who ask about me. For example, Lido (is his address still FP 461/1?), Robert Ullman. I also ask you to write to Erich for me – I cannot write to him directly. I will soon send a letter to you to be passed on to him, thus far I haven’t been able to. If you want to send me something in a Fieldpost package, I ask for (depending on availability) candles, cigarettes (better in a letter), a (yellow) cadet collar rosette, stationery (the same quality as this). Of course, it doesn’t have to be. Do you have new photos or drawings which you could send me? How about your law and language studies? Write always what you are doing and how things are going. I enjoy every letter and am only sorry that I can’t answer as often as I would like.

—-

To my dear Käthe: I thank you for your many cards, you will find all your questions answered in the first part of this letter. I expect from your conversation with Papa, the final resolution of the difficult question, Srachatitz [?] or not? Unfortunately, I cannot picture how it has been going for you since that first unpleasant time, because the first detailed letters were missing and the cards were silent concerning the most important issue. Maybe we will catch up?

The fact that dear Grandmother insists on writing long letters to me is proof that she thinks and worries about me more than I deserve.  I have confirmed your letter to Morganda, haven’t I? Did the answer not arrive?

 —-

Dear Helen!

You too will be in Brüx when these lines arrive and I hope you will find everyone healthy. I thought that you had fallen ill when you moved, but then came your letter of the 10th and two packages with 4 [lottery tickets? Treats?] The gloves have not yet arrived. My dearest gratitude for these things! Only after I sent you my requests did I realize how difficult it is to get these things. This comes about because of the ignorance which is common in the field about the difficult conditions back home! We just say: send it! I hope that at least the money got there?!

—-

I wish all of you a happy vacation and holidays. I don’t have to tell you how much I would love to be there.

During this time, think of me, Your son, brother, etc.

Paul

This is the longest letter I have from Paul. It is the only one on which he numbered the pages, which was very helpful as we tried to figure out the order of other letters that had not been kept in proper order. The writing convention at the time was to start with a single sheet of paper, fold it in half, begin writing on the right-hand side, turn the page over and write on each half, and then return to the front page and finish writing on the left-hand side, for a total of 4 “pages”. That was easy enough to decipher if the letter was a single sheet, but when the letter went on to several sheets of paper and was in old German script, it was impossible for my archivist and I to determine the order of the pages when we were first organizing the letters. In the case of today’s letter, Paul completed 4 sheets of paper as described, and finished writing on a smaller, lined piece of paper front and back:

Paul corroborates the information I’ve read about the Landsturm regiments – that they generally consisted of older men and were less likely to see action. For some reason, Paul spent most of the war in such a unit. The timing of Paul’s reassignment to a machine gun regiment was fortuitous. This Wikipedia entry describes the ceasefires and subsequent armistice between Russia and the Central Powers (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, Germany, Ottoman Empire).

Although I don’t quite understand what Paul said about his brother Erich, who is at this point in a Russian POW camp in Siberia, he certainly hopes that Erich’s life might now be easier that with the armistice, and perhaps he will be released. The fear remains that upon returning home, Erich could be sent to serve a different unit.

Paul is already thinking about how to provide flour for his family – as we saw in earlier posts, in Fall 1918, he will send many kilos home to provide them with sustenance in the lean times to come. 

It is interesting to read this letter the day after we saw a letter from Paul’s cousin Harry more than 25 years later – they both talk about studying technical material and how it helps to keep their minds sharp in the midst of what is often a boring existence.

We saw this 1921 self-portrait by Robert in the June 30th post:

There is so much more to say about this letter, yet it speaks for itself. I love thinking about my grandmother and the rest of the family passing Paul’s letter from person to person and reveling in every detail – almost as if he is there with them.

December 5

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Today we have another early letter from Helene in Vienna, at a time when she and Vitali were confident that they would soon be following their children to San Francisco.

Vienna 5 December 1939

My dear children! An eventful week has just passed for me. We got mail 2 days in a row, but unfortunately not from you. Olga N acknowledged my card which I wrote on November 23, yesterday. It of course reached her late as seems obligatory. She told me that she sent a message to you immediately upon receiving it on the 30th of November. The second letter was from Mila and Nervi [?] and we found out that Robert is Ayrshire. He is feeling well and glad to hear the same about you and Paul. I am happy at least to receive good news from all of you in indirectly. And as an unkillable optimist, I believe that one or the other of the letters written will reach you.

Otherwise, it is fairly quiet in Seidlgasse. Yesterday it was a very lovely springlike day. Papa called to invite me to take an evening walk. We walked first through the dark streets and then we came to the Red Tower movie house. There was a shoot ‘em up film being shown and since it was about the construction of the Pacific-Railway, we went in. Harry would be very surprised because we don’t like things about shooting anymore. But at the end, when the train in its current form rushed across the movie screen, my heart stopped for just a few seconds at the thought that my children were just recently sitting in such a monster of steel and iron. Really, a lot of what has happened to you is so problematic for me and my imagination is certainly quite different from what it was.

The truth is that I feel old as the hills and I feel like a hen would feel if she were hatching duck eggs and I am clucking. When the young ones go to the water and happily swim away from her for the first time, she probably can’t believe her eyes in that situation. But I’m an intelligent hen, and even if I do cluck sometimes, I am happy to know that you are with people who are good and noble.

Please kids, be detailed in your reports, write me about each and every thing, and you may imagine that your letters will reach me someday and that I will be informed by letter about everything. I know it’s a lot to ask in such a completely different environment from where you’ve been before, but I think it’s justified.

After 9 in the morning, the whole day is pretty uninteresting to me. There are just so many minutes until the next time I get mail and a lot of what has happened is really not that essential to me.

What I also want to tell you is please don’t get mad if I mention something that is kind of obvious -- don’t forget to write to Olga. First, it is possible for me to get news and besides it is as somebody once said that you only recognize the value of a person except on the worst days. Olga invited me to spend some time with her before we say good-bye to Seidlgasse forever.  I wasn’t wrong about Hedy either. She arrived at my birthday with a piece of butter which her parents had given her so she’d have something to eat on her trip. Touching, isn’t it? In these days, we are doubly thankful for proof that humanity still exists.

For statistical reasons, I am mentioning that this is the 3rd Clipper letter which I have sent. The others don’t count.

To all the dear ones, many, many greetings and to each one of you, thank you very much.

Many, many kisses
Mutti

After just a few weeks’ separation, Helene realizes that mail is unreliable and asks Eva and Harry to write to friends and relatives in the hope that news about her children will reach her through their letters. Helene mentioned her friend Olga in several Vienna letters, including one in which we learned that her last name was Nussbaum. I did a quick search on Ancestry and found a physician named Olga Nussbaum who was born in Vienna and was a year younger than Helene. She was living in England by 1941, moved to Los Angeles in 1948, and returned to Vienna a few years later. She may be the correct Olga, but who knows?  

Cecil B. DeMille directed a movie that came out in 1939 entitled Union Pacific — perhaps that is the film that Helene and Vitali saw. The trailer would strike terror in anyone considering a cross-country train trip, such as the one Helene’s children had taken just six weeks earlier.

Piecing together my family’s story has not been altogether straightforward. My mother had some letters and papers, her brother had others, and some were originally in their cousin Paul Zerzawy’s possession and ultimately were kept and organized separately. In 2006, I discovered the 1945-1946 letters written by Helene from Istanbul. I could read the few that were in English, and from those I learned more detail about my grandmother’s wartime experience. I made copies for Harry, thinking he’d like to see old letters from his mother, having no idea about the hundreds of letters he had stashed away. After Harry’s death in 2017, I didn’t know which of the letters were worth translating, so my translator friend Roslyn and I began with the typed letters, which were easier to decipher. Thus, Roslyn didn’t translate the first letters Helene wrote by hand to her children until after she had translated most of the later Vienna letters.  

November 22

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Today we have a letter to Helene’s daughter Eva from Jon Eidelson, the husband of a distant relative on my grandmother’s side.

November 22, 1996

Dear Eva,

As you know, I have been helping my father-in-law, David Levy, piece together a family tree for his mother’s side of the family. David’s mother was Elsie, the daughter of Bernhard Fulda (from Hitdorf, Germany) and Bertha Levy (from Litomerice in Bohemia, now the northern part of Czechoslovakia).

I am including a copy of the portion of this family tree that relates to your family. Hopefully you will find it interesting. I would greatly appreciate any corrections, additional information, or comments, and any photocopies of old documents you may have, and have included an envelope for your reply.

Thanks again for all your help.

Fall 1996 was the early days of email and Google did not yet exist. Research was done in libraries and by traveling to small towns in Europe to look for vital records.

In later correspondence, Jon asked some specific questions, most of which my mother couldn’t answer. I can answer many of the questions now, 25 years later, and the names and locations mean something. For example, in the November 18th post, Paul Zerzawy’s first postcard as a soldier was sent from Litomerice. 

After finding Harry’s papers, I contacted the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society and joined JewishGen, an invaluable online resource. One of the first things I looked for on JewishGen was information on the Zerzawy family. By that time, I had found the Zerzawy family tree dating back to 1740 and the World War I letters from the Zerzawy brothers. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I didn’t think this branch of the family was important to the family story I wanted to tell, so I was hoping to find Zerzawy descendants who would find these papers interesting and useful. On JewishGen, I only found one link, and it was to the family tree made by Jon! I do not know whether there are descendants left from that family

We learned about both family trees in the February 13th post. Helene wrote about “Uncle Fulda” in a few letters although I haven’t deciphered the exact connection. As Helene and Vitali were trying to leave Vienna, she wrote to her children asking them to only ask him for financial assistance if it became absolutely necessary. I believe this is a photo of Erwin or his father Bernhard Fulda and Helene during a visit to Vienna in 1929:

This letter highlights a recurring challenge when doing genealogical research – the repetition of names, both first and last. In today’s letter, Jon talks about his father-in-law David Levy, which would lead one to believe that David was a blood relative of my grandmother Helene, whose maiden name was Löwy, which relatives changed to Levy when they came to the United States. However, Jon explains that David was related to the family on his mother’s side – David’s mother’s maiden name was Fulda; his grandmother’s maiden name was Levy.

Earlier this year, I hired a genealogist in Prague to find information about my grandmother’s parents and grandparents. According to his research, Helene’s father Adolf’s parents were both born with the surname Löwy, and in fact, both his maternal and paternal grandfathers were named Jakob Löwy!

In addition to answering Jon’s questions, my mother shared memories of the stories Helene had told her as a child. For example, she explained that her grandfather Adolf had tutored Goethe’s girlfriend. However, as we saw in the September 4th post, according to Helene, the possible Goethe connection was with Adolf’s mother-in-law who had been Ulrike von Levetzow’s milliner. As people steeped in genealogy advise, it’s always important to validate even information that seems incontrovertible by finding for additional references and evidence. As I’ve gone through my grandmother’s papers over the past few years, I have come to trust what she says and recalls. I can almost always find a newspaper article or other reference that corroborates the story she tells.

November 12

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

The Value of a Translator

I found the letters we see today in the same box where Harry kept his memorabilia from his and Eva’s trip to America on the Rex (see October 9 post) in October 1939. Not knowing German, I tried to understand why a woman (a baroness, no less!) had sent an outline of her hand to Harry or Eva. I assumed she was someone they had met on the ship. We learned earlier that their relatives in Istanbul had decided that Eva needed to learn a trade that would be useful for someone emigrating to the U.S. – she learned to make silk flowers (see May 30th post). In the 1990s, my mother made outlines of everyone in the family’s hand shape with the intention of making each of us a pair of leather gloves (unfortunately, she never got around to making them). When I saw the drawing on today’s letter, I assumed the baroness was commissioning my mother to make her a pair of gloves because they had discussed it on the ship. How wrong I was!!

After Harry died in January 2017, I began going through many boxes of papers, photos, and letters. There was no organization, so each box or envelope contained a surprise. By April 2017, I was overwhelmed by the number of letters and documents I had in German. I had no idea what most of them said or whether they were important. I needed a translator and was at a loss to find one. The final straw was finding a box of letters that I thought was filled with Helene’s correspondence – I was so happy to think I had been given a window into my grandmother’s world. Imagine my disappointment when half the box was filled with a smaller box containing the Zerzawy brothers’ World War I correspondence! At that point, I still thought of them as distant and unimportant relatives.

As I went to sleep that night, my brain was churning with how to move forward. In the middle of the night, I woke up recalling that I had gone to college with a woman who completed a PhD in German. Roslyn and I had connected a few times over the decades, but not recently. The last time we had been in touch, she was a faculty member at a local university. I hit a dead end searching the college directory because she had retired. Not being on Facebook, I asked my husband to search for her through his account. Happily, he found her and we reconnected. That middle-of-the-night aha moment led to almost four years of our working together and to my getting to know my family in a way I could never have imagined.

When we met for the first time in a café in June 2017, I showed Roslyn a few documents to give her a sense of the kinds of things that needed translating. This was months before I found the envelope that was stuffed with almost 100 of the letters Helene wrote from Vienna in 1939-1941. I brought the letter with the drawing on it since it was short and looked easy to read. What a surprise when I discovered its actual contents! 

Mandrake Collector

As you may remember, you have my hand in one of your books.  I now live in America and am slowly making a name for myself as a graphologist, and I am now getting to a place socially where it would be advantageous to use my connections to achieve something positive. I think that in my position as Baroness Hasenauer and graphologist, I could work well with mandrake root if I get enough articles into the newspapers.  Couldn’t we work together? And should we sell them for an expensive price, or “lend” them?  Where could I get mandrake roots to satisfy requests I may get? Maybe you could provide part of your collection. If you need references, maybe the German Consulate here?  May I hope to hear from you soon?

Best Wishes,
Elvira Hasenauer

12 November

Madame.

I have received your letter with the original topography [of the hand]. Unfortunately, I was not able to find your handprints in my collection, which consists of 2997 pairs of hands.  Unless you could tell me in your next letter when you had come to see me.

Regarding your request about mandrake root and our possible collaboration, I would be glad to pursue this suggestion as soon as I arrive in the USA, which has been my plan for some time. I have already submitted [application] to the American Consulate; I would be very grateful if you could use your connections to ensure quick immigration for me and my wife. I would then bring over my mandrake collection, my handprint collection and all related works.  It is an interesting field that would be suitable for both parties.

Included is a brochure containing some of the expert appraisals I have received.  If you wish, I can send you an English translation of this which I am working on.

Sincerely,

There is little easy-to-find information on the Baroness. In a newspaper search, I found an article taken from marriage records about her marriage in the December 8, 1938 edition of Baltimore Evening Sun, and announcements in the Reno Gazette of her subsequent divorce proceedings the following summer. The former stated that she married a 28-year old New York composer named Carlos Muller. She was 33-years old and “identified herself as a countess of Holland, divorced in Austria in 1937. She stated she was a graphologist.”

The Baroness’s letter is undated and the copy of Vitali’s reply does not have a year. I assume the letters were written in 1939, when Vitali got his testimonials translated (see May 22nd post) and was working to get papers so he and Helene could join their children in San Francisco.

Vitali’s handprint and mandrake collections are described in the 1934 newspaper article that we saw in the June 29th post. The Baroness had great confidence in Vitali’s abilities, thinking that the outline of her hand would be sufficient for Vitali to recall their meeting! Below is a photo of Vitali making a handprint in one of his books:

Archived with these letters was a newspaper clipping about an odd-shaped branch (not mandrake). Given that the Baroness mentions newspaper articles, it’s quite possible that she included this with her letter. In preparing today’s post, I did a quick search for “mandrake” in the New York Times, and found very few mentions, most of them before 1930.

October 9

Voyage to America – young and carefree



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I spent most of my life thinking that my 18-year old mother and her 15-year old brother were wrenched by the separation from their parents as took the train in Vienna to Genoa to board the ship headed for New York. After reading Helene’s letters, I realize that although being apart must have been a challenge, the entire family was confident in October 1939 that they would be reunited within a few months. They had no idea they would never see their father again and would not see their mother until 1946 after she had been through hell.

Thus, Eva and Harry could look forward to their voyage and future with enthusiasm and optimism. My mother always spoke fondly of the ocean voyage. For a brief period in her life, she was carefree – no responsibilities, no expectations, and the promise of America before her. Rather than being a foreigner in a new land and school, she was surrounded by others making the same voyage with the same hopes, who were not judging her accent, clothes, or manner. She loved every moment and as soon as she could afford it, she took cruises all over the world. I imagine none of them lived up to her first experience of traveling 3rd class on the “Rex”.

Growing up, my mother had a small album of photos from Europe, which included these 2 photos of her on board the ship:

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 On back of the photo with Eva in a bathing suit, with the date 10/10/1939:

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When I was going through Harry’s boxes of documents and letters after he died in 2017, I found a roll of negatives labeled 1939. I held them up to the light and only one photo seemed familiar – the one with Eva on deck with a scarf. Since the photo of her in the bathing suit is not on the roll, I assume that Luis Antonio Martinez sent her that photo.

I realized that the roll of film included images from their voyage and first moments in San Francisco and got the negatives digitized. Imagine my delight at seeing their voyage and new world through Eva and Harry’s eyes.

Harry documented much of the trip, presumably in order to send photos back to their parents in Vienna, which I imagine is why we had no hard copies of the photos. Below, we see a grainy photo of an Italian town, presumably Genoa. From the ship, we see a vendor selling rugs to a crowd of people below, other ships in the harbor, the deck of the Rex, and even the “view” from their porthole.

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Here is a photo of Harry on board the ship:

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Harry saved a menu from the ship – I don’t know whether they had menus for each meal, or just for October 12 in honor of Columbus Day – which must have been quite the celebration since the ship departed from Genoa, the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. Apparently even the 3rd class passengers were invited to participate in the dancing or watching the featured film La Mia Canzone al Vento of the evening which featured Giuseppe Lugo, a famous Italian tenor. Harry used the menu as a sort of autograph book – someone wrote a nice note and a few people included their addresses.

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Harry kept in touch with at least one of the people, Elsy Howard, who sent him a card the following year from the New York World’s Fair, on which she wrote around the edges: "Many thanks for letter, which I will answer later. Hope you like Amerika now. Best regards, also to Maria, Elsy Howald."

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After nine fun-filled days at sea, Eva and Harry arrived in New York. In one of my first forays into searching through Ancestry at the public library in 2017, I found the ship’s manifest page of arriving passengers on the Rex that showed Eva Marie Kohen and Harry Kohen’s departure from Genoa on October 6 and arrival in New York on October 15, 1939. They are listed as students, Turkish citizens who could speak English , born in Vienna, Germany (Austria had been annexed), planning to live permanently in the US. They had visas issues July 31, 1939 from their last permanent residence of Istambul, Turkey. Amazing what you can learn from a line from a ship’s manifest!

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In August, I attended a Jewish genealogy conference, and at one session the speaker mentioned that manifests covered two-pages. I went back to Ancestry and found page 2:

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We learn that their father was named Simeon (presumably a mishearing of Haim Seneor) who lived in Vienna, Germany; that their final destination was San Francisco; that they paid their own way; that they had $8 in their possession provided by HIAS; that they were planning to reside at 200 Washington St. in San Francisco (I’m not sure whose address that was); that they did not plan to return to their home country and intended to become U.S. citizens; that they were never in prison, were not polygamists, anarchists, did not believe in overthrowing the government; they did not have a promise of employment; had never been arrested and deported; that they were in good mental and physical health and had no deformities; their height, complexion, hair and eye color, and had no other identification marks.

A new piece of information was that they had received $8 from HIAS – worth over $150 in today’s dollars, – although probably not enough money for the journey from New York to San Francisco.

I spent most of my life having a vague idea of Eva’s and Harry’s voyage. I had only seen the first two photos above. After discovering Harry’s trove of saved objects and photos and doing some research, I now feel like I have a sense of what it was like. A wonderful window onto the beginning of their new life.

October 6

Other voices from the past

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

As I was getting ready to prepare today’s post, I realized that the letter I had planned to write about wasn’t completely translated. It was one of several that my original translator had trouble reading. I had ascribed the problem to difficult handwriting, but now understand that it was written in the old German script. We will see the letter at a later date.

When I began trying to make sense of my many documents, I contacted the US Holocaust Memorial Museum when I was trying to find contact information for historian Corry Guttstadt because she had done a fellowship there. From that contact, I learned a great deal about my grandmother and my family and I made a new friend. I requested information about my father’s parents and they sent me documents from the International Tracing Service. They had been deported from Frankfurt on September 1, 1942 to Theresienstadt. According to one of the documents, my grandmother Rosa Adler Goldschmidt says she was transported to Maly Trostinec. Although there was no proof of death, the letter said that fewer than 10% of prisoners returned after the war.

My father was born in 1907 in Gelnhausen, a town in Germany not far from Frankfurt am Main. He came to the U.S. in 1934. At that time, his parents were living in Frankfurt. He had a brother who also came to the U.S. and lived in San Francisco for a few years, but I never met him and do not know where or when he died. He never spoke about his family.

In 2007, I began going through the papers my mother had saved. These included: her mother’s letters sent from Istanbul in 1945-1946; the letters Harry sent her when he was a G.I. in 1943-1945; Paul Zerzawy’s photo albums, school records, bank records from 1939, and his death certificate. She also had about 2 dozen letters from my father’s family.

When I first began looking through those papers, I asked for help from a few German speakers. Although they were able to read Helene’s letters, none of them could decipher the letters written by my father’s parents. When Amei Papitto started translating Paul Zerzawy’s letters written in the old German handwriting, I asked her to look at them and she couldn’t read them either. I had resigned myself to never knowing what the letters said.

When I contacted Michael Simonson at the Leo Baeck Institute a few months ago to ask for some advice, I mentioned my father’s letters. He asked me to send a few examples and he would see whether one of the LBI volunteers might be able to read them. Incredibly, he could!

In early August, Michael sent me the translation of the undated letter below. Imagine my delight at hearing my paternal grandmother’s “voice” for the first time. Given my grandparents’ tragic end, I’m glad that they were not silenced forever.

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My dear children!

We were very happy with your dear letter, particularly since you sound so satisfied. Have you gotten properly settled in your apartment? Now let me give you the recipe for a potato soup. You start some water boiling, cut small cubes of potatoes, some celery, leeks, carrots, everything cut small, and also some cauliflower, place it in the water and let it cook until it is soft, then put some fat in a little pan, some onions, cut small, brown two spoons of flour in it, stir in a little water until it’s smooth, then pour into the potato soup, bring to a boil and add 1 small sausage per person. Now the recipe for wafer cuts. Mix ¼ pound butter, 30g grated chocolate, 2 whole eggs, 2 heaping spoons of crushed sugar cubes, allow this to dry on a sheet smeared with wafers, allow the mass and the wafers to dry alternately when everything is ready. Finally, cut.

If you would like another recipe, write to me I will gladly send it to you. If you make the potato soup, dear Tane <?> should also eat with you. You must also put 1 or 2 small sausages in it. Aside from that I know of nothing to write for today. Sending warmest greetings and kisses. Your faithful

                                                                     Mother

I was charmed that the first thing I “received” from my grandmother was recipes for my father’s favorite foods! It took me a while to figure out what a “wafer cut” cookie is. I tried reverse translation and came up with “Waffelschnitte”. They are the layered wafer cookies known to us as Neapolitin wafers.

Below is the only family photo I have that I believe shows my father’s family - I assume the baby is my father and the people in the photo are his parents and three of his grandparents.

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September 29

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Today we see the second part of the letter we saw on September 16 from soldier Paul Zerzawy to his family. As with so many things on my journey, mysteries and missing links have a way of being solved. Pretty amazing after over 100 years.

Upon transcribing the translation for a letter we will see in October, I discovered that it solved the puzzle of the earlier letter. That letter is dated October 3, 1918 and is written to his brother Robert, but included part of a different letter to his family – the missing pages of the September 16 letter!

Since the letters were written in old German script, it was impossible for my archivist and me to determine the order and content of letters. Our only clues were dates and signatures. Letters were organized in a way that would have made sense to their reader, but not to those of us unused to writing letters or worrying about saving on postage. Letters often were written on rectangular paper (7”x10” or so) that had been folded in half. When unfolded, a four-page letter would have the first page on the right side of the front and the last page on the left side of the front, and pages 2 and 3 on the other side. It seems that the writer started a letter with the intent of it being a single page and if they discovered that they wanted to say more, they’d start a new page with the same order. However, they rarely numbered the pages. It was only after finding one long letter where Paul had numbered the pages that we got the hang of it. Today’s letter was doubly confusing, because the last two pages were written on a the same size paper but in the way we would normally write a letter!

The first part of this letter began with a check in about himself and family members, followed by detailed information about the boxes of flour that would be coming their way. It continues here:

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…On top of this, there is postage for which 1 kg is about 3kr. On the black market, it probably costs 8-10 times as much. Do you have the opportunity to get the wheat ground or to exchange it for something else? Please write to me about this right away (see my last letter from September 5).

Please write me everything concerning the beginnings of your university studies. -- What is the situation with my war bond insurance? – Has my good shirt already sent out to be turned inside out and when? – I ask Robert to take charge of the work for Couleur news as soon as possible.

Lido writes to me that he probably will go off on his leave in the middle of the month, so you can get advice and help from him.

I do not know if I have already written about it, that here there are 2 color brothers [Farben Brüder] with whom I am in regular contact. They are A.H. Pfiff (medical officer, 62nd Feldpost) and Griff (c/o medical lieutenant Julius Gutfreund, Feldpost 645).

Please send them your questionnaire immediately.

Finally, dear Robert, I still have to write to the following soldiers who are on leave in Brüx; please greet them for me. Please give me the following addresses:  [list of names]

Metzel’s address: Oscar Metzel Feldpost 405
Pepp’s Address: Chief doctor Dr Josef Weiss, FP 638, Field hospital 303
I will send other addresses for CB.

When you reply, please answer the questions so that I do not have to ask everything twice. Especially since the exchange of news by Feldpost is already slow enough.

Kisses to all of you,
Your Paul

We learn about another money-saving measure – rather than buying a new shirt, he asks whether his good shirt has been sent out to be altered, presumably to be refashioned/recycled by turning it inside out to hide any stains or blemishes to the material. Like food, I would imagine new clothes were difficult to come by, so even if he had plenty of money, he might not have been able to purchase anything.

It appears that Paul refers to his college fraternity brothers and the clothes they wore: per Wikipedia, “Visually, the most discerning characteristic of many Studentenverbindungen is the so-called Couleur, which can consist of anything from a small part of ribbon worn over the belt, to elaborate uniforms with riding boots, sabers, and colorful cavalry jackets, depending on circumstances and tradition.”  

In the letter, he asks for information about and provides addresses for a number of his friends. Paul’s photo album included many photos of groups of men in various uniforms. Paul had numbered the people in some photos which led me to the realization that he had written something on the back of many pictures. This led me to the discovery of the card we saw in yesterday’s post.

I assume that the photo below from April 8, 1915 is of his fraternity brothers. I don’t think he was in the army yet, so the uniforms they are wearing are consistent with the Wikipedia description above. On the back of the photo, Paul lists the names with at least two of the people mentioned in this letter: Griff and Pepp. In his absence, Paul relies on his friends to help his family and give his younger brother advice.

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September 28

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This photo was pasted in one of Paul Zerzawy’s photo albums:

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Earlier this year, I realized that on the back of some of his photos, Paul had listed the names of people in the photo. When I removed this photo, I received a wonderful surprise. It turned out to be a photo postcard addressed to his young cousins, Eva and Harry Cohen in Vienna, probably in 1934. It is the only piece of mail I have that is addressed to my mother when she was a child in Vienna.

The postcard shows Paul and his brother Robert walking on a street in Marienbad in Czechoslovakia with their father and his third wife Elise (see February 10 post). The postmark shows that it was sent on the 28th of an unknown month in 1934. Both Paul and Robert signed it and Robert included a “self-portrait” to let his cousins know that he had a lot less hair than it may have appeared in the photo (reminiscent of some of Harry’s drawings in his letters!).

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In pen: Father, Mother, and two children. Greetings.
Paul

In pencil: On the picture I am flattered, in reality I look different, kind of like this: drawing.
Robert

In pen: Everything is okay.

September 22

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My mother Eva received her nursing degree from Mt. Zion Hospital School of Nursing in San Francisco in late September 1943 when she was 22 years old.

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I wrote about Eva’s career in the July 7 post. In Vienna, she dreamed of becoming a doctor, but the lack of financial and emotional resources, as well as insecurity about being a non-native English speaker, prevented her from pursuing that goal in the United States. Instead, she took the more traditional route for a woman and became a nurse.

In the last few posts, we read about how Eva and her brother Harry worked summer jobs during and after high school, sending their meager earnings to help their parents in Vienna. After coming to San Francisco in late 1939, they had to grow up immediately. Eva completed her final year of high school and then enrolled at Mt. Zion. Harry finished high school a year later and joined the army. They supported themselves and asked little of their relatives who emphasized that they could not be relied on for further financial assistance than what was given to them to help them come to San Francisco. They saved as much money as they could in the hope and expectation that they would help their parents once they made it to the US. They had to be practical and could not pursue unprofitable dreams. My mother, already a serious sort, threw herself into school and work. 

In the 1980s, when I worked at San Francisco State University, I taught a course designed to help undergraduates do well in college. I asked my students to identify an issue or skill that was preventing them from academic success and to create a plan to develop the skills to improve. One semester, one of my students was a Baha’i who had come to the US to escape religious persecution in Iran. He was appalled by the complaints of his American classmates – to him, they had everything, their complaints were insignificant, they took their education for granted and did not care about learning. For him, education was the key to survival and there was no time to waste. He had no choice but to succeed. His story resonated with me – my mother had escaped similar circumstances and felt much the same as he did about her high school experience. While her classmates were worried about prom, she was worried about her parents’ survival. Education was the key to her being able to support herself and, hopefully one day, her parents. Such a heavy burden on young shoulders.