Trying to come to America; A mystery solved!!!!
By January 1946, Helene had been in Istanbul for 9 months. She had only recently been receiving letters from her family and had been having a rough time of it alone in a new place, essentially still a prisoner. I believe Yomtov Kohen was a relative of Vitali’s, perhaps a cousin? I have a packet of his correspondence working to help my grandmother join her children in America.
Dear Sir,
Referring to your letter of the 10th, I inform you that on the 9th I sent a telegram to the daughter of Mrs Helene Cohen which said:
“EVA GOLDSMITH, 2379 29th Avenue, San Francisco
PLEASE PAY IN MY PASSAGE TO HIAS 425 LAFAYETTE ST NEW YORK WHO SHOULD INFORM REPRESENTATIVE ISTANBUL
HELENE COHEN”
I hope that Mrs Eva Goldsmith will be able to arrange with the Jewish-American emigration office “HIAS” who will send us the necessary instructions to pay for Mrs Cohen’s passage. As soon as these instructions arrive, we will look for a place on a boat for America.
Please accept, sir, my best regards.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Simon Brod (1893-1962) was “a Jewish businessman from Istanbul, who during World War II helped to rescue an untold number of Jewish refugees who reached Turkey. Brod ran a successful textile importing firm in Istanbul together with his brother Max. During World War II he was employed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency for Palestine to assist in the rescue of European Jewish refugees who, in one way or another, had been able to reach Turkey.”
HIAS is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
Despite all the hardships and cruelty my grandmother experienced, it is heartening to find how many distant relatives and complete strangers worked hard to help my grandmother reach her children.
As I was preparing this post, I decided to look in the JDC archives again for letters from Simon Brod related to my grandmother’s situation. I know I’d seen his name in earlier searches. Although I didn’t find anything today, I stumbled on a section of the archive related to the passengers on the SS Drottingholm who arrived in Istanbul in April 1945. Over the past year or so I have spent dozens of hours poring through this archive because things aren’t easily searchable. It definitely has the feeling at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie – the treasure exists and is safe, but good luck to you to ever find it!
One of the reasons I felt I was going down a useless rabbit hole today is that the 148 documents in this particular file were all dated 2/24/1945, well before Helene set foot on the ship or arrived in Istanbul. And yet, there it was! The 5th document entitled “Untitled Typewritten Document” on the 11th page of 15 pages. I do not have permission from JDC to publish the contents of the document but here is a screenshot of my “discovery”.
Screenshot of location in the JDC Archives
The declaration has answers to 18 questions, some of them Yes-No. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the original questionnaire (yet? more searching to be done!). For the past six months, I have been trying to figure out when Helene’s parents had died. I had a few clues and made some assumptions, but had nothing definite. As I mentioned in the January 6 post, finding an earlier date for the end of publication for the Biela-Zeitung implied that Adolf died in or before 1904. Today’s document, despite misspellings and typos of names (Helene Koehn for example), tells us that her father died in 1903 and her mother in 1922. I had looked through Jewish burial records and come up empty-handed for Adolf. I found several possible dates for people with Helene’s mother’s name, but not enough other information to identify the plot as the correct one. Here in an obscure document that probably hasn’t been seen by anyone in decades, I have my answer. From my grandmother’s stories, I had the sense that her father had died soon after 1902, but I had no documentation. I didn’t know about her mother either. I have letters from Paul Z to his grandmother in 1918 so I knew she was still alive at that time, but my mother had no memory of her and thought she had died sometime between 1920-1922. She was right!
As you can see, even across the decades it is possible to discover clues and answers to questions. After my mother and Harry died, I regretted all the family knowledge and lore that had been lost. Yet, through official documentation and my grandmother’s words, every day I have a richer sense of their lives, joys, and struggles.