Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.
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.