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.

November 22, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Miss Cashen said today we would go to England but first had any of us remembered to find out about Rembrandt? None of us had and she said that we were very. Lazy children and she was disappointed because she wanted to hear about him. I wanted to say that if she wanted to hear about him why didn’t she find out about him herself, but I am trying to be good so I didn’t say anything. Then she said that she thought that maybe she would find a book about him down in the library and if we would excuse her for a minute she might find it. She did find one…

It was a story called “Night Watch” and that is the name of Rembrandt’s most famous painting. Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam. It was a very beautiful and rich city and full of beautiful things to paint but Rembrandt didn’t like to paint beautiful things, he liked to paint ordinary ones that nobody else looked at and tried to avoid, like poor people in ugly torn clothes and once he even painted a horrid bloody piece of meat hanging in a butcher shop. Of course he didn’t sell many paintings because no one wants pictures of poor people or bloody meat. But one day some very rich men came to see him. They wanted their portraits painted, but not singly, they wanted a group picture because they thought it would be cheaper that way. Rembrandt said that he would do it. They thought it would be nice if he would paint them sitting around a beautiful dinner table or all in a row on a marble bench in the park with tulips around them. But Rembrandt said that he wanted to paint them at their work when it was their turn to stay up all night and see to it that the fires in the city were controlled and that it was kept safe from burning. There were no fire engines in those days. So they said all right and every day for a long time they came and posed for him. He worked hard on the picture and he was very pleased and told them it was going to be a fine one but he wouldn’t let them see it until it was finished because he wanted it to be a surprise. Well one day it was finished. He thought he would give a party and he invited all of them to his house. There was a big curtain hanging in front of the picture, just like at the Orpheum, I guess. Rembrandt gave them all front seats. Then he pulled the curtain aside. He thought they would all jump up and clap their hands and hug his shoulders and tell him just how much they all liked the picture and their special portraits but they didn’t. They just sat there and made faces at it. They were really as mad as hornets and they began to make noises. The picture was very dark, just as dark as it really is at night. There was a light in just one tiny part of it so some of the men’s faces were clear and shiny but the others were sort of brownish and shadowy and some of them couldn’t even find themselves. They began to fight with each other because the ones in the dark part of the picture thought they shouldn’t pay as much as the ones in the light part. And all of them were furious at Rembrandt for not painting them the way they had told him to do it in the first place. Then Rembrandt lost his temper. He screamed and shouted and he shook his fist in their faces and he called them pigs and idiots and all kinds of other things and he threw them out of his house and told them never to come back. So they didn’t but Rembrandt became famous without them.

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You can take a “tour” of the Night Watch painting at this link to the Rijksmuseum.

October 5, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

This is Saturday. Grandfather says that school work comes before dancing school, so I must stay home today and write my composition. I started to write about an hour glass. That is a thing made of two glasses with a teeny weeny hole between them. You pour sand in one of the glasses, turn it upside down, and then it runs just a few grains at a time into the other glass. When the other glass is full, you know that it is an hour and you turn that filled one upside down and start it all over again. But then I began to wonder what would happen if you weren’t in the room and you came back and found the glass all filled and didn’t know how much time went by before you discovered it. You would always have to have the hour glass with you, and I don’t think it would be a good way to tell time if you had to catch a train, and you could never take your eyes off of it. So then because I didn’t think it was a good thing to rely on I couldn’t write a composition about it. I couldn’t think of anything to say about the mummies either, because they are just dead Egyptians all wrapped up in strips of cloth. I kept wondering if one of them was Cleopatra, but then Miss Cashen said she didn’t think so. Cleopatra was a beautiful Egyptian queen who was killed by an asp or a wasp. I am not sure what an asp is and I’ll try to remember to ask someone. The suits of armor made me think of the Tin Woodsman in “The Wizard of ‘Oz’” but I think Miss Cashen wouldn’t want me to say that. At last I decided to write about the pens we saw because it said that they were just like the ones that George Washington wrote with. They were made with goose quills. There were no blotters in those days, so people had to dry the ink on their letters with sand and they kept the sand in salt shakers and sprinkled it on the paper. I shall hand in my paper Monday morning and I hope Miss Cashen will like it.

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Hilda’s entry today confirms that she read the Oz books. In her September 6th entry she recalled the story of a yellow hen whose name she thought was Belinda, but was probably Billina.

October 4, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Miss Cashen didn’t like my composition. She said that when she asked us to write about something in the museum, she meant one of the exhibits. She said the little old man was not an exhibit. So at home, over the weekend I must write another composition about a mummy or a suit of armor or a stone bowl that the Indians used to eat their mush in, or an hour glass. Something important.

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Unfortunately, Hilda’s creativity was not rewarded this time around.

The photos below may be some of what Hilda saw at the museum:

Photo courtesy of SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY, possibly from 1894

Photo courtesy of SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY, possibly from 1894

October 2, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Today instead of going to school, we went to a museum with Miss Cashen. The museum is in Golden Gate Park. Everything outside it was very beautiful. Everything inside was just old.

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Photo courtesy OpenSFHistory

Hilda must have gone to the New Memorial Museum which ultimately became the de Young. Like Hilda, I went there on school field trips, but by then it was a different building. After damage from the 1989 earthquake, the current museum structure was built.

September 18, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I got the prize. Miss Cashen said I got it because I had written about the things I had not seen in the picture, only the things the picture made me think of, and that was what the artist wanted the people who looked at his picture to do. I don’t know if the artist wants me to think of the things I thought of, but Miss Cashen said that it didn’t make any difference. I thought of reading in front of the fireplace, and Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas trees and popping corn, and a little lighted lamp in the window at night.

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Hilda’s winning essay corroborates what we have discovered this year – that Hilda was a very good writer and had a wonderful imagination.

August 14

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today’s letter is from Helene to her nephew Paul Zerzawy in San Francisco.

Vienna, 25 August 1940

Dear Paul! What situation are we living in to be able to expect a letter from you? Maybe you are reading more bitterness into this sentence than I had originally intended. Read it like “daddy buy me a pair of pants.” Maybe it’s a categorical imperative or maybe it’s a beseeching request. I leave it to you to figure out the tone of this music. You must know best what key you react to best and in which kind of emphasis I could hope to thank you for a letter. Although Eva really is good about writing, maybe there’s a lack of paper as I could see from the recent content of a past letter. And of course, the now so popular delay in delivery I see how a two week break in letters could happen. I am more than worried about the lack of letters from Harry and I really can’t explain the reason for this to myself. The facts don’t add up for me. Does he need something? If he needs something, of course he should just let us know. If he writes, his letters would have to get here even if they came late. If he perhaps only sent illustrated letters and drawings which I really can’t imagine, is that the explanation why we have not heard anything from my boy for 2 months? The last letter of Eva only had 7 censorship numbers, it used to be 2. Even if that’s the cause for the delay, there would have to be some mail when things are going right. I ask you therefore in all seriousness to reassure me and help me escape the hell of my thoughts. Also, I ask you to please let me know immediately what you hear from Robert. I already know that you have had an answer to your telegram. Nothing, Paul, nothing, can justify such a long period not writing, not even having to work 24 hours a day, which I imagine is not the norm. I also can’t imagine that you don’t have any money for stamps. You could however get together with Eva and write a letter as you did, sending it along with hers. For simplicity’s sake and to save money, I am writing the letter along with the children to Bertha’s address so excuse me. Nothing new is to be said about us. It wouldn’t matter anyway. Our health is in decent condition. If Tillie, Bertha and Hilda had any imagination of how I live, they would also write more. I am so thankful for all the dear and good things they do for you and the children, I ought to be satisfied with it since I would owe them even more thanks if they were to write to me. Everyone has his own thing to do and it is unreasonable to demand that you enter the psyche of another person. In my case it’s probably not even possible. There’s a line from one of your favorite songs, Feldeinsamkeit. This expresses how I feel - it is as if I had died a long time ago. A very strange combination of ideas. When I hear this song or think about it or even hum it, I think about the bouquet of Dürer and I think of a hands study which I once bought at the Dürerhaus. Both reproductions were taken away from me in Rosenheim (1918) since it was forbidden to take printed material over the border at that time. The silhouette of Salzburg that soon appeared helped me get over the loss; that is, for that moment I often thought that I might have been able to replace these items, especially that beautiful bony hand which reminded me so much of that of my father. And so I imagine the hand that used to rest over us and protect us.

I hope I have achieved with this letter that you will sit right down and write to me whatever there is to write. I am giving you the duty to extend my best greetings to Tillie and Julius, Bertha and George, Hilda and Nathan. Prove that you haven’t forgotten us and please reassure me. It’s really, really important. I really need it. With many greetings and kisses I remain

Helen

Paula says hi!

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Even in her complaining about a lack of letters, Helene’s humor and love peek through. Hoping to inspire Paul to write at last when mere pleading hasn’t worked, she uses musical analogies to invoke their shared love of music and long-ago musical soirees.

Helene is especially worried about not having heard from her son. She mentions his illustrated letters – we saw the only surviving example in the June 6 post.

Helene refers to a song by Brahms which translates to “Alone in the Fields” — click on the link to read the lyrics.

This is one of Helene’s most bittersweet letters – identifying with the lyrics of a sad song, remembering her father’s/Paul’s grandfather’s hands protecting them decades earlier.

Paul is the only person in her life who would have memories of her father. His brother Robert was too young to remember much if anything. Interesting that her son Harry fashioned his own “newspapers” in his illustrated letters – perhaps inspired by his mother’s tales of growing up in her father’s print shop and newspaper press room.

There are many examples of prints of hands by Dürer. The most famous one appears to be Praying Hands  Perhaps that is the print that was taken away from her. This link takes you to several Dürer works featuring hands. The only bouquet that comes up in a search of Dürer’s complete works is one of violets.  

July 27

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today, we have a letter from Paul Zerzawy to his brother Robert. At this point, Paul is a soldier in Serbia and Robert is finishing high school in Brüx, Bohemia. Their mother and step-mother have both died, their father is in the army, and their grandmother (Helene’s mother) is taking care of Robert and his sisters. Their brother Erich is a soldier – we saw the only non-POW letter we have in the July 14 post.

Although this is one of the earliest letters in the archive, it is one of the last I had translated. In 1916, Paul was writing in the old German script known as Sütterlin which my friend and translator was unable to decipher. Given how generic Paul’s brother Erich’s postcards as a POW were, I wondered whether it would be worth finding a translator. But when Amei Papitto started translating the letters, I gained a new perspective on the times and on the Zerzawy family’s close relationship with their aunt/my grandmother.

The return address and stamp show that Paul was working in the Statistics Office of the Economics Group in Belgrade. As with letters written more than 20 years later, much of each letter is taken up discussing with the state of the postal service – although the postal service during World War I seems to have been far more efficient than in World War II – or at least when letters were being sent on the same continent. Paul mentions how he hasn’t heard from his loved ones – echoing the same message he often will receive decades later and a world away.

Paul mentions Mila – I don’t know who she was, but clearly she was an important person in their lives - Helene mentions her in letters to Paul in 1940 (see yesterday’s post).

Belgrad, 27 July 1916

Dear Robert!

You will receive these birthday congratulations late, because the assumption that I already talked to you about in Leibnitz that I would not be able to write in time has proven correct. It takes a little time to adapt to unusual circumstances, but now I have adapted and I find it quite nice here – if you discount little annoyances which are probably because of the southeastern geography.

I have not wandered around enough yet in the interesting parts of town in order to get something like a present for you. Let’s see what happens.

I have not received mail either from Papa or from Helene but it also is not really possible because a letter takes 3-4 days. But I have received 8 pieces of mail which were sent after me from Leitmeritz, including finally a letter from Papa, 2 cards from Erich, a letter from Helena.

Packages take 3 weeks to get here. I hope to get letters more often. I have enough money until the end of the month. Should I remain here longer, I will need more money. What I am doing here you can kind of detect more or less from the address. The description of what I am doing and of Belgrad and so on will follow as soon as I have written to Papa. Just a brief description for now of the trip. Leitmeritz to Vienna was a terrible night trip. A very overcrowded passenger train, but a military car. Helene was incredibly surprised and she offered me very sweet hospitality. I also visited Mila who bought a watch for me and gave me cigarettes. Because of the “trottelosis” [idiocy] of my military transport commander, already at night we continued our trip to Budapest, once again a bad night’s travel. There we were allowed to take a rapid train because of a good idea of mine. First class which was an incredible advantage in the very fertile but hot and boring Hungarian lowlands. At 2 o’clock we arrived at our destination. About an hour before Semlin, the visible signs of war began to appear. Ditches, destroyed buildings. The most interesting between Semlin and Belgrad was the railway bridge over the Sava. It was constructed in a temporary/makeshift way. Next to the railway bridge there is a pontoon bridge. During our journey we saw only in the distance the main goal of attack of our bombardment, but we also saw the buildings on the Lahn and we also saw that parts of the city on the Danube and Save are totally demolished. To be continued.

Robert Zerzawy sketching his grandmother with his sisters in the background.

June 30

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today we have a picture postcard in German and English from (and of) Helene’s nephew Robert Zerzawy with a note in pencil that it was received on June 30, 1963.

This is not Mr. Dean Rusk; rather, it is your nephew on one of his missions to Germany. Touchwood, I have a little slimmed since then. 

Love, Robert

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A few comments:

The photo credit is by the airline – perhaps they took photos like they do these days on cruises and Disneyland rides?

The photo at Wikipedia entry for Dean Rusk does indeed show a resemblance.

In the 1960s, Robert worked for Bayer. Presumably this photo was taken on a business trip to Germany as he was preparing for the opening of the London sales office:

When I began this project, I thought of brothers Paul and Robert Zerzawy as distant cousins who were tangentially related to my family’s story. As we have seen, Paul was a major presence in my grandmother’s and her children’s lives. Robert is also important, but I have far less evidence. In March, we saw a few letters from him from the 1960s as well as a few letters to him from Helene from 1945-1046 in Istanbul – he appears to be the first relative she was able to reach. Helene mentions his sensitive nature and how life might be particularly difficult for him. In Robert’s letters he mentions emotions, while letters from his brother Paul, who was trained as an attorney, are usually all business – as a soldier in World War I, trying to make sure that family members at home have all they need and that Robert is taking care of business in his absence; and during World War II, emigrating and trying to help Helene, Vitali and their children emigrate as well. Although Robert also intended to emigrate from England to San Francisco during or after the war, for some reason that never happened, and he was separated from his family for the rest of his life.

Robert seems to have had a sensitive artist’s temperament. Although he tried to follow in Paul’s footsteps and study law, from the WWI letters it appears his heart wasn’t in it. Below is a photo of Robert that was probably taken during WWI that shows him sketching his grandmother while his sisters watch in the background. At this point his father and older brothers Robert and Erich are away at war (Erich probably in a POW camp in Siberia at this point), so young Robert was the man of the house. He had lost both his mother and step-mother by the time he was 11.

Below is a self-portrait Robert drew dated September 16, 1921, when he would have been 22 years old — a portrait of the artist as a young man.

June 15

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Domestic scenes – the life they left behind

These two photographs of Helene’s nephew Paul Zerzawy’s apartment are dated June 15, 1938. They are a nice window into his homelife in Vienna. I wonder whether he took these photos because he knew he’d be leaving Europe and wanted to have a keepsake of his old life.

Perhaps the following photo was taken at the same time for the same reason.

The entire Zerzawy family enjoyed music. Below is a photo of Paul’s brother Robert with their father and step-mother in the 1930s.

Photos from the 1930s of Eva and Harry show them in their apartment on Seidlgasse in Vienna. Snapshots of happier, more carefree times.

Harry on a swing:

Harry and Eva in fancy dress:

Eva busy at the sewing machine

A portrait of young Harry which he doodled on, adding a mustache and monocle as well as other details.

Eva walking through the park

Harry and Eva on the piano. The photo of Eva is very dim but shows clearly the drawing of Helene which appears in other photos we saw in an earlier post.

Eva and Harry brought the portrait with them when they came to San Francisco in 1939.

Music played a central part in everyone’s lives – something we know from Helene’s many musical references in her letters and because she named her daughter after a Wagnerian heroine. Happily, music knows no boundaries and the family could enjoy music in their new home as well as their old. Nearly everyone in the family played piano, some better than others. This was a lifesaver for Paul Zerzawy — he was unable to practice law when he came to America, but was able to make at least some money in San Francisco by teaching piano and accompanying singers.

Eva loved music but was never a musician, for many years having season tickets to the opera and symphony in San Francisco. Harry had perfect pitch. He never learned to read music but could imitate anything he heard. He entertained himself and others, often spending hours each day playing piano.

Below is a photo of Eva in front of her piano in San Francisco - if I recall, she inherited it from Helene’s cousin Bertha with whom Eva lived while she finished high school. When my husband and I moved back to San Francisco several years ago, we had no room for the piano and had to give it away. That was the one possession that was difficult to part with and brought me to tears.

Eva’s piano leaving our lives forever.

Below is a photo of Harry playing piano at home and at my wedding.

May 27

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today we have a letter from Helene in Vienna to Harry who is about to graduate from Mission High School in San Francisco.

Vienna, 27 May 1941

Dear boy of my heart and newspaper boy! The Lord God himself must have felt sorry for me because he saw my useless waiting for letters from you. In order to right this injustice your letters from April 30 and from May 8 from Frisco came today. The great detail in these made me even happier and my resilience - Papa hasn’t really suffered that much from not getting letters. I almost believe it increased his agility and his activity has helped him make quite a bit of progress on our matter. As soon as we receive our passports and clearance certificates [certificates of good conduct] from Berlin, there will be nothing to stand in the way of our departure. The harmlessness [?] will have happened by then. The only thing that still remains a big question mark is the statement from the American Consulate. The general consul will not issue a visa until one can show that the travel tickets have been booked, but the travel tickets are not issued until one can show a visa. So maybe Papa can figure out how to prove which came first — the egg or the chicken.

Can perhaps Mr. High School Graduate recommend some way of decreasing the specific weight of all the things that we must bring with us? I’m not too sure yet how I should do that. Should I leave all of my left shoes or all of my right shoes behind and should I present myself for my trip across the big pond as Mona Vonna when I intend to reach the holy ground of the United States? I would be very grateful to you for any advice on this. Fortunately, Papa and I have over the past few years developed sort of a common wardrobe. I wear almost exclusively his sports shirts as blouses and he enjoys wearing my trousers and my handkerchiefs - that I wear the pants at home [wear the pants in the family?] is only some sort of malicious invention of Jo’s. As far as your second aphorism goes that marriages turn into a 30 to 70 year war - I must tell you that here in Seidlgasse we are seen as a model of a married couple. Papa has never been so gallant as now, and this after we’ve been married for 21 years. Vitali by the way is commanding me to finish this up now because if I write more he will not have enough stamps to put on the envelope. Of course you will be very happy to have me stop since I am going on in this kind of tone. I hope that there will be no interruption in postal service, especially not to such an extent that I would really have to wait and pick it up myself. I would like to be able to help you deliver the newspapers.

Many, many kisses
Helen

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According to Wikipedia, La Joconde nue or Monna Vonna was a charcoal drawing from the school of Leonardo da Vinci. Other artists made similar paintings and Monna Vanna appeared in literature, music and film.

At this point, Helene and Vitali have been downsizing for over a year, thinking in vain that they were on the verge of getting on a ship for the U.S. And yet their luggage is still too heavy to meet the travel allowance.

April 18

This drawing appears in the Exhibition "French women in Ravensbrück" presented in Paris from April 18 to 26, 1959, before being installed at the Museum of Ravensbrück, opened in the former prison of the German Nazi concentration camp.  

Friends of Ravensbrück
10, rue Leroux – Paris-16th

“The call before dawn, with the sick wrapped in blankets,” drawing by Jeanne Letourneau, high school teacher at Lycée Joachim du Bellay in Angers.

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This postcard was among the things my grandmother kept that were not personal documents or letters. When I first was going through her papers, I thought that she kept these newspaper items because they reminded her of her own experiences in Vienna or Ravensbrück. However, as I delved deeper, I continue to discover that Helene knew the author (or in this case, the artist). So this is not just an interesting artifact about Ravensbrück, but a drawing by someone she knew personally.

Jeanne Letourneau was imprisoned at Ravensbrück with fellow teachers from Angers, including Lucienne Simier who became a good friend of Helene’s. We saw a letter Helene wrote to Lucienne on January 22 while she was in Istanbul.

You can see other drawings by Jeanne Letourneau which she made in Ravensbrück at the Musée de L’Armée in Paris.

The Museum’s biography states (courtesy of Google Translate): “Jeanne Léonie Antoinette Letourneau was born in Angers on November 13, 1895. She studied drawing in Paris and then became a drawing teacher at the college for young girls Joachim du Bellay in Angers. She was arrested on March 13, 1943 and imprisoned in Angers before being deported "politically" to the Ravensbrück camp where she arrived on April 27, 1943. She remained there until February 1945 then was moved to the Rechlin camp for a few weeks before returning to Ravensbrück between March and April 1945. She was liberated on April 5, 1945 and arrived in Angers on the following April 18. “I weighed 33 kilogr [72 pounds] and was 80 years old,” she wrote, commenting on her physical condition at the time of her release. On her return, she writes an account of these two years spent at Ravensbrück which she calls "Barbarian Clichés" and which accompanies her drawings. Jeanne Letourneau resumed her teaching activity at Angers Lycée until 1955. She was appointed Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honor in 1952. The Musée de l'Armée holds in its collections several drawings by Jeanne Letourneau which entered the museum by donation from the artist in 1968. ‘The drawing was for me a happy diversion in the camp although a little dangerous, but I did not think about it.’”

Biographies of Jeanne Letourneau and the other teachers who were deported to Ravensbrück can be found in French at the Lycée Henri Bergson website in Angers.

March 31

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

New Guinea
March 31, 1944

Dear Eva,

Thank you for your letters of Feb. 28, March 12, and 17; it’s odd that you haven’t received any of mine yet. Your switching from typewriter to longhand makes the V-letters twice as interesting inasfar as I have to reread them in order to get an idea of what’s in them. The army misclassified me at the induction center; I should have been placed in “intelligence” – department of deciphering and decoding. (No reflection on your handwriting, mind you. People have asked me where in the hell I learned to write; most of them can’t read mine, either.)

Do you remember the famous painting of Holbein’s, “The Poor Poet” I think it is called, wherein a starved poet sits in his bed, doing his writing while he holds an open umbrella to keep the rain that’s coming through a leak in the ceiling from pouring down his bed? Well, it’s raining cats and dogs right now and my tent is full of leaks; I’ve tried everything to keep my cot dry, without avail.

While I’m writing this, water keeps dripping down my back; when I move the leak moves with me. If I were in a playful mood I’d make a game out of dodging raindrops, but I’m too wet to be playful.

We had a few spring-like days already, especially after rain which cleans air and plants the freshness of which gives one the impression of Spring tra la la. Spring here isn’t Spring in the States; when it’s Spring in the States it’s Autumn here, you see. (Simple, isn’t it?) It won’t be long before Winter will set in. (Jingle bells, jingle bells…..)

Otherwise everything is about the same as before. I’m getting kind of sick of this place, I’m allergic to too much mud and there is definitely too much much around here. The other night I got stuck up to my knees trying to find out whether I had a flat tire. I felt like a young fly stuck on fly paper (I had an advantage over the fly, being able to cuss like nobody’s business).

Well sis, that’s about all there is to say at present.

I trust you are well and in good spirits, etc. Have you become used to the surroundings of your new job yet?

Well, this is all and their ain’t no more.

Love,
Your one and only
brother,
Harry

P.S. Give my regards to Paul, Ursula and family, the Travises [?], and Mayor Rossi (Has he been elected mayor again?)

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This letter was written the same day as the V-mail letter to Hilda which was posted yesterday. I don’t know why he would choose to send some letters by snail mail and others by V-mail. Perhaps when he wanted to include an enclosure like a photo?

In all the letters we’ve seen from both World War I and II, a huge amount of time and space is spent on the mail - how long it takes, whether it arrives, how it was sent (Clipper, ship, V-mail, etc.), which letters were shared among relatives. Even in the best of times, hearing from relatives and friends was precious. And these were not the best of times.

The painting Harry refers to in his letter appears not to have been painted by Holbein, but instead was The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg. The link to the painting includes a link to a video “tour” of the work. Like his mother Helene, Harry paints vivid pictures in words describing his experience and surroundings. Like her, he refers to their shared artistic and musical knowledge to make his letters even more vivid for his sister, and to acknowledge their shared language and experience.

February 2

Today’s letter was written on February 1, the same day as the letter to Hilda that was posted yesterday. You can see that there is the number I on this letter. Hilda’s letter had the number III. Presumably there was a third letter (number II) written to Eva or Paul which I do not have.

Unlike most letters which list a single location, today’s letter list a number of different districts and neighborhoods in Istanbul. This is a dense four-page letter to her son Harry. She has a lot to say after so much silence, especially since she is living a life of uncertainty. The first paragraph break comes on page 3 of the letter! I have done a bit of editing and added some paragraph breaks.

Helene refers to people we have met through letters already – Lucienne Simier, her fellow prisoner in Ravensbrück, and Yomtov Cohen, probably Vitali’s cousin in Istanbul. They both were extremely helpful to Helene at this difficult time. Lucienne got word of Helene’s location to her family in San Francisco and Yomtov worked with agencies and government entities to secure passage for Helene to the U.S. It’s a bit garbled in the letter, but it appears that Lucienne kept the addresses Helene had given her in her glass case so that it would not be taken by the Germans. Unfortunately, Helene only remembered Eva’s address from nursing school, where she hadn’t lived since at least 1943. She also gave Lucienne an address for her cousin Tillie Zentner who had organized Eva and Harry’s emigration years earlier.

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Galata, Pera, Istanbul, Moda, Burgaz, Balat, Fener-Bahge-Kadıköy, February 1, 1946

My dear sweet boy for whom I’ve been so afraid…I found out [that you were in the army in the South Pacific] at the same time as the very happy news of Eva’s marriage. Harry-boy, I must have become an abnormal or degenerate mother in my time in the camp, because I needed weeks to get used to the thought that my daughter, my little Ebi, is a woman…. Was it egoism that I didn’t want to admit this to myself and didn’t want to perceive or believe that Eva doesn’t belong to just me anymore? Was it wounded vanity that hurt me that Eva chose a spouse without my opinion about her choice or the thought that my daughter, inexperienced in erotic matters, might be disappointed by marriage? ….

That you are in Frisco again I found out before Robert’s communication arrived. I found this out from my friend Lucienne [Simier] from Angers …. She gave me the news that Eva was married and that you are a soldier and are hanging around in San Francisco. … [Lucienne managed to smuggle out in her glass case addresses Helene had written down] I had scribbled Eva’s address – of course it was still the one from nursing school – and Tillie’s address. All the other addresses I had forgotten. Isn’t that wonderful? I think that it’s wonderful that Miss Simier in this way could establish contact, not that I had forgotten all the other addresses. There is certainly nothing wonderful about that. Maybe an SS fist “caressed” me just in that part of my brain where I keep my card catalog where the most important names and addresses to me were stockpiled, while I could still remember all the telephone numbers of people and companies who don’t exist anymore in my head.

You wanted my exact address? You’ll have to make do with the Gislavet Ltd [Yomtov Cohen’s plastics company], because since my arrival in Galata on the 10th of April, I have lived in all the districts that I listed up on top of the letter. …

I have just as much to eat here as I did not have in Germany in the camp, and I have here just as little money as I had an excessive amount of body lice in the camp. I managed to get a dust comb sent to me from Vienna, and that saved me from having head lice unlike most of the others and I still more or less have my hair which has now become a rather shabby head covering. I don’t have all of it anymore, but I’ve got some.  

The last place I stayed in Istanbul has the highfalutin name of Bark-Oteli, a former nun’s cloister. In my room, there was a window made of stained glass which reminds me that in the next room where now there are men who appear to be cheating at cards and having wild brawls and orgies, at one point that was used for fervent prayer. … 

Moldy, cold air is what you find in these rooms. I feel like I’m lying in a tomb. The first nights my teeth were chattering and I had two dust-covered but not warm coverings and I couldn’t sleep. The bare, cold walls seem to be saturated with the … unheard prayers and sighs of my predecessors, the nuns. …Maybe someday my groans and moans will bother the people who come here to sleep after I do in the same way as the moans of the nuns have been conserved here. But no, this will not be the case, because this cloister building which is in the middle of a splendid park is going to be renovated into a hotel …. A Jewish committee will be paying a fortune for this. …  

This park must be quite splendid in the summer, because it’s right on the Marmara Sea, even though it’s quite squalid currently. The garden, which is surrounded by a brick wall, has cypresses and pine trees. In front of my window there are laurel trees from which when I have kitchen duties (twice a week) I can get bay leaves for a spice for our meat and fish dishes. I can also get rosemary. There is a splendid spinach growing, not in the plant beds, but it grows wild on the lawn and … I have learned that one can make a good dish from malva leaves. On every day when we don’t have rain, I use that time to go pluck chamomile and thyme which is good for the people living here, but not really my main duty. For me it’s relaxing.

The radio, newspapers, and movies were what I used to seek for relaxation before I was put down to the level of an animal. Here I have found a few nice people and good books. Unfortunately, moving from one shelter to another happens lightning fast. Only twice did I have a chance to make a phone call, and the distance from one part of the city to one of the islands or far-flung suburbs especially in winter is quite large because the ship traffic is quite reduced. I was visited in Moda but I already lived in Antigone, in Borgaz. … The time involved is quite a sacrifice, aside from the fact that the travel costs play quite a significant role for the relatives we have, who are mostly not that well off.

Yesterday I discovered hiding under some ivy what is probably the grave of a monk. Why not, since this was in fact a cloister for nuns? The garden has sort of a terraced structure. There are steps made of marble which lead from one terrace to the next and in the marble crosses and Greek inscriptions are engraved. I just read Axel Munthe’s [Swedish doctor and psychiatrist] book “The History of San Michele” and I feel like I’ve been sent back to this time. The blue sea with the snow-covered mountains, even in the summer, flutter in but they seem more like Carinthia [a province in southernmost Austria] than the Mediterranean landscape. A garden in our area could have stood as the model for Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead.

It really might be splendid here if my head were ready to accept all this beauty, but so much that is in there is not beautiful and is sending everything else away, making it impossible to find the beauty in the beauty. My ability to be enthusiastic ended with losing Vitali, but as soon as I hear from him, and we will hear from him that he is alive, then this feeling will come back. I thought he might be in Vienna, but I have read some articles about Vienna which make me believe that Papa is somewhere else, maybe still in a camp or a hospital, maybe staying there. He has no idea that I am in Turkey, nor does he know how to get in touch with me, even if he did know I was here.

For the last two months my main support has been Robert. I always knew that he was a sentimental and emotional boy, but I did not know that he would show so much loyalty, devotion, sympathy, and love…. Unfortunately, I have not heard anything, I haven’t received even one line of writing from you, from Paul, Tillie, Hilda, or Berthe Schiller. It was so sad to see that all the comrades in suffering and fate were getting letters from all over the world, but not me. The kindest person must be jealous, and I have never thought of myself among the kindest. I have become tired. I am not used to writing anymore. Please kiss Eva, her husband, Paul, and all the loved ones for me and a hug from me….

Greetings and kisses from

Helene

I talked about the work of the Joint on January 14. There are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of documents in the JDC archive concerning the fate of the Drottningholm passengers. Most of the correspondence deals with money – there was never enough, the Turkish government kept asking for more, it was difficult to help the former prisoners make their way to whatever country they wanted to end up in. One way to save money was to find cheaper lodging for those who remained unhoused, thus the constant movement Helene experienced. As you can see from the letter, even if Vitali’s relatives could have helped her (as she pointed out above, most of them did not have the means to do so), they couldn’t keep track of where she was staying.