Beresowka, 8 January 1917

 My dear ones!

From week to week, still no news, nothing. Now I doubt that my cards have reached you. Others are already home. I am doing the same as always here, don’t worry. Tomorrow, something is supposed to arrive from the Red Cross — probably from Countess Kinsky. Maybe we will get a loan of a few rubles which will then be paid back by you. I am really waiting anxiously for your letters since I don’t know where you are or how you are doing. A thousand kisses. Your Erich

Like Paul, his younger brother Erich was a soldier during WWI. He was born in 1898. According to the Zerzawy family tree, Erich was captured in Luck (the German name for Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine) in 1916 and died in 1917 – this appears to be a mistake as I have 2 postcards from Erich dated 1918 (back to the importance of not relying on a single source when trying to determine the facts of one’s family). The family tree entry ends with saying that he “was allegedly fleeing to the Chinese border when he was killed”. As a POW, he was imprisoned in Beresowka in Eastern Siberia.

I have 30 postcards from Erich, 29 of them written during his time as a POW. You can see that he is writing to his family in Brüx, Bohemia (now Most, Czech Republic). The only card written before being captured was from July of 1916. The contents of the cards is pretty innocuous, presumably because he knew they were censored (see triangular stamp on card – an Austrian censorship stamp, perhaps the rectangular Russian one is also by a censor).

An interesting detail about Erich’s letters is that he writes in the more modern German script, not in the Sütterlin that Paul was using at that time. Was Paul hoping the censors couldn’t read Sütterlin? Or was it a function of his being a few years older? My grandmother switched from handwritten to typewritten (much easier on the translator!) letters in 1939 because she believed the censors might not have been allowing the letters they couldn’t read to reach their destination.

Something clear from this letter is that thanks to the Red Cross, prisoners of war were able to receive letters, packages, and money to make their lives a bit easier.

Finally, I’ve been thinking about the journey these letters took to make it into my hands (shades of “The Hare with Amber Eyes”). One thing I regret is that as I began to unearth documents I did not keep a record of exactly where I found things and what they were saved together with.

The only evidence of Erich’s brief 20 year existence on this planet is in a typewritten family tree that Paul created (or at least kept) from the 1930s and these 30 postcards. They were considered important enough that they traveled from a small town in Bohemia to Vienna to San Francisco. As I was trying to remember where I found them, I at first thought they were in a box labeled “Paul Z” which included official paperwork, letters and photos from throughout his life. As mentioned in a previous post, I realized that in fact they were in a box of my grandmother’s letters. I am guessing that Paul’s family kept all of his and Erich’s WWI letters which Paul took to the U.S. when he emigrated. I assume that after he died in 1948, my grandmother took possession of them. This was her connection to the little boy she babysat in Bilin before moving to Vienna in 1902, a happier time when all of her family was alive and together.