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Six-Year War Silence Broken
A message of love from Helen Kohan in Stockholm yesterday to her son and daughter, Harry and Eva Lowell of San Francisco, brought the first news of the whereabouts of their Viennese mother since the beginning of the European war in 1939.
The word, received by the United Press here, was sent in care of Julius Zentner, Cathedral Apartments, San Francisco, who forwarded the greeting to Eva Lowell, 2379 27th-av, and Harry Lowell, now serving with the U.S. Army in New Guinea.
Mrs. Kohan’s son and daughter have been living in San Francisco since 1939 when they came to this country with Mr. and Mrs. Zentner. Since then both have become citizens of this country and plan to remain.
Miss Lowell recently was graduated from nurses training at Mt. Zion Hospital here and her brother, a corporal in the Army, has been overseas for a year and a half.
Since the children left their mother in Vienna in 1939 they have had no word of her whereabouts. One message delivered through the Red Cross about a year ago told that Mrs. Kohan was well, but yesterday’s message was the first to let them know their mother was in a neutral country.
I found several newspaper articles in my grandmother’s, mother’s and Harry’s binders, boxes, and envelopes of papers. Fortunately, old editions of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner are online and easily searchable through the public library. In moments, I found dates for the article on hand analyst Josef Ranald and on my grandmother’s win of the Examiner’s social security game.
A citation for today’s article has continued to elude. One problem is that it took me a while to narrow the possible dates for the article and trust my instincts. There are a lot of clues in the article, but some of them lead to incorrect dates. At first, I thought my search window would need to be over the course of a more than a year. At this point, I believe the article must have appeared between March and June of 1945 – March as the earliest when the Swedish ship Drottningholm set sail, and June when she would have been in Istanbul for two months and at least some mail would have reached her children. Helene mentions in at least one letter of talking to reporters.
One problem with getting the facts right was that Helene would have told the Red Cross what little she knew or remembered from before she was sent to Ravensbrück in 1943. She knew her daughter’s last name was Lowell and that she had begun attending nursing school. The confusion of dates and facts in such a brief article does give me pause as I read anything published – it’s so difficult to know what is the truth, especially if the sources aren’t as reliable as one might wish.
Possible clues to determine the date of the article:
6 year silence – 1939 to 1945 works (of course they received more than 100 letters between 1939-1941 so it wasn’t complete silence at the beginning)
Message of love from Stockholm – Helene took the Swedish ship Drottningholm to Istanbul.
Eva Lowell – before January 1945, then Goldsmith
Harry joined the army in 1943, so this is about right
Eva’s address – same as in the Power Of Attorney for Harry naming Eva Goldsmith
Eva became a citizen in January 1945 just before getting married
Eva’s “recent” graduation was 1943
Red Cross message – I have Red Cross letters from Vitali from Vienna from 1942 and 1943, far more than a year earlier. Perhaps there were letters sent from Ravensbrück or Buchenwald that I haven’t seen.
In a neutral country – must be Sweden so it couldn’t have been before spring of 1945
Although I narrowed down the dates, I couldn’t figure out which newspaper published it. I assume it would have been a local San Francisco paper. My online search of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner yielded nothing. Last year I sent an email to the now-retired librarian of the San Francisco Chronicle who said he was sure it wasn’t from his paper. Recently, when the San Francisco Public Library reopened after more than a year, I asked for help from a librarian in the San Francisco History Center at the main library. He replied that the article looked like the typeface from the Call-Bulletin which is on microfilm at the library. I spent several bleary-eyed hours poring over microfilm from March through June 1945 with no luck, although the librarian was correct – the layout of the article looks the same as the Call-Bulletin. I probably need to look again, since I believe I was looking in the right window of time.