More sifting through history

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Earlier this year, my husband and I took a trip to England. A few weeks before we left, I received an email from the World Jewish Relief Archives in response to a question I had asked about my mother’s first cousins Paul and Robert Zerzawy’s attempts to leave Europe in 1939. Robert was the first in the family to get out, arriving in England in March 1939. Paul soon followed in April, stopping briefly in England before sailing to New York.

I must have made my query through their website and have no record of when or what I asked. The writer, an archives volunteer, apologized for how long the response had taken. She explained that “World Jewish Relief (formerly known as The Central British Fund) opened case files for each person who came to the United Kingdom fleeing Nazi occupied Germany and Austria before the Second World War.” She told me that she found a registration card for my mother’s first cousin Robert Zerzawy and also “registration cards for an uncle by the name of Vitali (Chaim) Cohen and his wife Helene (nee Cohen).” That of course was important information for me since those were my maternal grandparents! If I understand the cards, it looks like the ones for Vitali and Helene were created by Robert after he learned of Helene’s release from Ravensbrück and the prisoner trade that sent her to Istanbul. The Istanbul address is the business address of one of Vitali’s relatives who helped my grandmother ultimately make her way to the U.S. The only thing Robert knew about Vitali in late 1945 or early 1946 was that he had last been heard from when he was imprisoned in Buchenwald.

Robert’s card indicates that the authorities believed he may have gone to the U.S. This corroborates family letters which talk of Robert planning to join his family in San Francisco. Unfortunately, that never came to pass.

Information provided by the World Jewish Relief Archives

I wrote back and asked whether the archives had any information about the Stopford Fund which was created to help Czech refugees get out. I believe that this fund helped Robert and Paul emigrate. The volunteer had not heard of it but kindly did a bit of sleuthing and found that the National Archives at Kew in the outskirts of London had information about the fund. I went on their site and asked some questions through their “chat” feature. Although I ultimately found no information in the Stopford Fund files related to the Zerzawy brothers, the librarian on the chat found Robert’s British naturalization certificate. It hadn’t been digitized, but since I was going to be in London, I could make an appointment to view the document.

The National Archives at Kew

It was fun to do something non-touristy while in another country. I took the train to Kew. Unlike other tourists, I headed for the archives instead of the famous gardens. I was given an official library card and requested the file. When the file was ready, I was assigned a specific spot in the reading room where I could look at it. The naturalization certificate told me a bit more about Robert, including his occupation – an expert in hemp and cotton spinning.

While I waited for the file, a librarian helped me search further in the online catalog and we discovered that there were additional documents available related to Robert’s naturalization. I tried to request them, but for some reason these documents had been closed for 100 years until 2069! I knew I couldn’t wait that long and made a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to be allowed to see the files. The request was granted, but not in time for me to go back to see the files in person.

When I received the digitized documents I’d requested, I learned more about Robert’s first years in England – about the company he worked for and some of his early experiences. For example, in 1940, his landlady had said negative things to police authorities about his “moral conduct” with no details or corroboration from others. Later character witnesses for his naturalization said nothing but positive things. It made me wonder whether this was an example of antisemitism or xenophobia. Not long ago, we watched the first episode of “Foyle’s War”. It takes place in 1940 and showed clearly how unwelcome Jewish refugees were to much of the general population in England during the war.  

Also on this trip, I visited a few of the addresses Robert lived in in the 1960s. An apartment building in the Kensington area of London and a small house in Chiswick, a lovely town near London. I didn’t have a house address for the Chiswick, just a name – Pontana. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to find it. However, it exists, and it still has the name rather than a number!

Apartment in Kensington

“Pontana” in Chiswick

It was wonderful to learn more about Robert. I still have questions about why he never joined the family in San Francisco. Hopefully one day I will find the answer. 

Vienna

In a recent session of Barbara Krasner’s Writing Family History group, we wrote about a geographic place that is meaningful to our family. I chose Vienna, Austria:

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I am in Vienna: the one I visited in 1978-1979 with a friend over Christmas break during my junior year abroad in France and again the following summer with my mother on her first visit back to Europe since fleeing in 1939; the Vienna of my mother’s youth in the 1920s, and of her own mother’s youth at the turn of the 20th Century.

The music of Strauss fills the air. I am swaying to the strains of the “Blue Danube.” I am in line for standing room only tickets to attend a performance of Die Fledermaus on January 1, 1979, the opera played every new year at the Vienna State Opera. I wasn’t able to attend the New Year’s Eve performance, but I came close! I had one of my first “Twilight Zone” experiences that night as we waited for the streetcar to return to our pension after the performance. Out of the darkness a woman completely enveloped in a huge coat against the bitter cold appeared and said “Hello, Helen Goldsmith.” She was a friend from UC Berkeley who was studying in Edinburgh while I was in Montpellier, France. What a strange and magical experience to have someone from home suddenly appear!

Now I am in Stadtpark near the statue of Strauss. I imagine my mother and uncle playing on the grass when they were children, with my grandmother delightedly watching them. Despite the fact that everywhere I look are signs prohibiting people from walking on the grass.

Strauss statue in 1979.

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I walk to the Hotel Sacher for a cup of coffee mit schlag, and a slice of the famous Sacher Torte, a two-layer chocolate cake with apricot jam between the layers, topped with dark chocolate icing. When I was a child in San Francisco, my mother would sometimes make a Sacher Torte for special occasions. My mouth waters as I imagine licking the spoon after she finishes icing the cake.

Now, I am peering in the window of Café Centrale, around 1906, seeing my 20-year old grandmother, a young shop girl whose social life includes visiting the café most days. She lives in modest quarters and the café is her living room. She reads the latest newspapers from Vienna and around the world and meets her friends for conversation, intellectual arguments, and laughter.

Now it’s 1934, and I am on the Stubenring looking at Libansky & Co, my grandparents’ stationery shop. This is the heyday of my grandfather’s “magic shop.” He stands outside basking in the sun, leaning against the building. He chats up passers-by, once in awhile inviting one of them into the shop for him to read their palms or sell them a mandrake root for their protection.

A postcard of the Stubenring. The arrow points to my grandparents’s shop, Libansky & Co.

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Vitali at the shop window with customers in 1934.

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Again recalling my visit over Christmas break in 1978-79, I am back at the pension near St. Stephen’s Cathedral. An old widow runs it. She has a small, wheezy, unfriendly dog who roams the halls at night. At breakfast, one of the guests – an employee of the Mexican embassy – says in stilted yet lovely English, “Madam, your dog does not look at me with good eyes.” I couldn’t have said it better.

St. Stephen’s Cathedral and ticket to Die Fledermaus from 1979.

The pension is above a nightclub (perhaps a strip club) called “Casablanca.” When my mother and I stay there the following summer, I ask her to go into the club and get me a poster as a gift for the friend I had visited Vienna with several months earlier. She is too embarrassed to do so, but teaches me the German to go in and ask myself. I am successful and secure two posters, one for my friend and one for me. A few years ago, my husband and I had dinner with friends and reminisced about student travel. It turned out that they had stayed at the very same pension and were thrilled when I gave them the poster.

Final image: it is the summer of 1979. My mother has decided she needs a copy of her birth certificate in case all the other documentation she has about her existence will not be sufficient for her to apply for Social Security benefits in a few years. We go to the Jewish organization that has all of the old books of Jewish records. It is the 4th of July, which seems auspicious! Births were recorded by hand in huge tomes. The less-than-friendly employee unenthusiastically hands my mother the book for 1921, the year of her birth. She is nowhere to be found and my mother is crestfallen. My mother decides that since we are there, she might as well see whether her brother appears in the 1924 book so the visit might be worthwhile. We find him immediately. My mother listlessly continues to turn the pages without much hope and suddenly finds her own birth recorded a few years after she was born. For some reason, her father hadn’t wanted to deal with the bureaucracy to record the information (or considered it an invasion of privacy?) until after his second child, a son, was born. 

Copy of Harry’s birth certificate from 1979.

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I smell the coffee and pastry, hear the strains of Strauss waltzes, see the Vienna of my mother’s childhood, and the Vienna my grandmother loved before it became an unfriendly hellscape. What is the real Vienna – the idyllic playground or the antisemitic nightmare? Probably both.  I look forward to visiting again to see whether there is a Vienna that is mine.

November 12

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The Value of a Translator

I found the letters we see today in the same box where Harry kept his memorabilia from his and Eva’s trip to America on the Rex (see October 9 post) in October 1939. Not knowing German, I tried to understand why a woman (a baroness, no less!) had sent an outline of her hand to Harry or Eva. I assumed she was someone they had met on the ship. We learned earlier that their relatives in Istanbul had decided that Eva needed to learn a trade that would be useful for someone emigrating to the U.S. – she learned to make silk flowers (see May 30th post). In the 1990s, my mother made outlines of everyone in the family’s hand shape with the intention of making each of us a pair of leather gloves (unfortunately, she never got around to making them). When I saw the drawing on today’s letter, I assumed the baroness was commissioning my mother to make her a pair of gloves because they had discussed it on the ship. How wrong I was!!

After Harry died in January 2017, I began going through many boxes of papers, photos, and letters. There was no organization, so each box or envelope contained a surprise. By April 2017, I was overwhelmed by the number of letters and documents I had in German. I had no idea what most of them said or whether they were important. I needed a translator and was at a loss to find one. The final straw was finding a box of letters that I thought was filled with Helene’s correspondence – I was so happy to think I had been given a window into my grandmother’s world. Imagine my disappointment when half the box was filled with a smaller box containing the Zerzawy brothers’ World War I correspondence! At that point, I still thought of them as distant and unimportant relatives.

As I went to sleep that night, my brain was churning with how to move forward. In the middle of the night, I woke up recalling that I had gone to college with a woman who completed a PhD in German. Roslyn and I had connected a few times over the decades, but not recently. The last time we had been in touch, she was a faculty member at a local university. I hit a dead end searching the college directory because she had retired. Not being on Facebook, I asked my husband to search for her through his account. Happily, he found her and we reconnected. That middle-of-the-night aha moment led to almost four years of our working together and to my getting to know my family in a way I could never have imagined.

When we met for the first time in a café in June 2017, I showed Roslyn a few documents to give her a sense of the kinds of things that needed translating. This was months before I found the envelope that was stuffed with almost 100 of the letters Helene wrote from Vienna in 1939-1941. I brought the letter with the drawing on it since it was short and looked easy to read. What a surprise when I discovered its actual contents! 

Mandrake Collector

As you may remember, you have my hand in one of your books.  I now live in America and am slowly making a name for myself as a graphologist, and I am now getting to a place socially where it would be advantageous to use my connections to achieve something positive. I think that in my position as Baroness Hasenauer and graphologist, I could work well with mandrake root if I get enough articles into the newspapers.  Couldn’t we work together? And should we sell them for an expensive price, or “lend” them?  Where could I get mandrake roots to satisfy requests I may get? Maybe you could provide part of your collection. If you need references, maybe the German Consulate here?  May I hope to hear from you soon?

Best Wishes,
Elvira Hasenauer

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12 November

Madame.

I have received your letter with the original topography [of the hand]. Unfortunately, I was not able to find your handprints in my collection, which consists of 2997 pairs of hands.  Unless you could tell me in your next letter when you had come to see me.

Regarding your request about mandrake root and our possible collaboration, I would be glad to pursue this suggestion as soon as I arrive in the USA, which has been my plan for some time. I have already submitted [application] to the American Consulate; I would be very grateful if you could use your connections to ensure quick immigration for me and my wife. I would then bring over my mandrake collection, my handprint collection and all related works.  It is an interesting field that would be suitable for both parties.

Included is a brochure containing some of the expert appraisals I have received.  If you wish, I can send you an English translation of this which I am working on.

Sincerely,

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There is little easy-to-find information on the Baroness. In a newspaper search, I found an article taken from marriage records about her marriage in the December 8, 1938 edition of Baltimore Evening Sun, and announcements in the Reno Gazette of her subsequent divorce proceedings the following summer. The former stated that she married a 28-year old New York composer named Carlos Muller. She was 33-years old and “identified herself as a countess of Holland, divorced in Austria in 1937. She stated she was a graphologist.”

The Baroness’s letter is undated and the copy of Vitali’s reply does not have a year. I assume the letters were written in 1939, when Vitali got his testimonials translated (see May 22nd post) and was working to get papers so he and Helene could join their children in San Francisco.

Vitali’s handprint and mandrake collections are described in the 1934 newspaper article that we saw in the June 29th post. The Baroness had great confidence in Vitali’s abilities, thinking that the outline of her hand would be sufficient for Vitali to recall their meeting! Below is a photo of Vitali making a handprint in one of his books:

Archived with these letters was a newspaper clipping about an odd-shaped branch (not mandrake). Given that the Baroness mentions newspaper articles, it’s quite possible that she included this with her letter. In preparing today’s post, I did a quick search for “mandrake” in the New York Times, and found very few mentions, most of them before 1930.

November 5

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The real nightmare begins

Life in Vienna became virtually intolerable for Jews by the late 1930s. Helene and Vitali remained there until late 1943 when Germany arrested Turkish citizens and those of other countries who had been allowed up until that time to remain. If their native countries did not repatriate their citizens, these people were deported to the death camps just as German citizens and those of annexed countries had been.

Despite the humor and affection, Helene’s letters to her children from 1939-1941 give us a vivid picture of the difficult times they lived in – food and heat were in scarce supply. They were not allowed to earn money at the same time as costs skyrocketed. Every attempt to escape Vienna was thwarted by bureaucracy and rule changes. Helene wrote about the times leading up to and including their arrest in the October 15 post. On November 5, 1943, she and Vitali arrived at their respective hells: Ravensbrück and Buchenwald. As we learned in the August 24 post, Vitali did not survive the war.

Germany kept meticulous records and today we see paperwork from Helene and Vitali’s registration into each camp.

October 15

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DOOMS-DAY, OCTOBER 15, 1943

In addition to hundreds of letters, Helene wrote a number of stories and reminiscences, mostly during the 1950s while she was in San Francisco. She often wrote more than one draft – the following knits together several of her drafts. Helene’s writing about the horrors she experienced look and sound very different from the stories of her youth – they are single-spaced and feel very intense and immediate. By November 5, 1943 Helene was imprisoned in Ravensbrück and Vitali in Buchenwald.

The small group of about 60 Jews of Turkish nationality (the fate of those of German, Austrian or other origin is universally known) learned by a rumor which spread like a wildfire over Vienna that they had to leave Austria within a fortnight. That was on October 1, 1943.

My husband and I were rather astonished when some of our non-Jewish friends, who lived in different districts told us over the phone that they incidentally heard about a Gestapo-decision concerning the Turkish Jews, and wanted to know if there is something in it as the story goes. Some invited us to come in their house, which we gratefully refused in case it would be true, it would have been too dangerous to them. At first, we thought it was merely a false alarm, or it was one of the notorious Nazi jokes of which the German-Supermen have been so very fond of. Maybe the Gestapo spread this news to have some fun in scaring people who were in a trap. Playing cat and mouse (a nice and favored entertainment for the gallant nation of heroes). If it was not a joke, then it was bestiality in the most cruel form, coward and hypocrite. Every child has known that to leave the country was impossible, because all the borders were closed, and even if those people had had valid passports (which they did not have), they could not leave Austria, because none of the satellite states had granted them a transit-visa. Not even Switzerland. They were too afraid of Germany. So was the situation of this bunch of people whose crime was to be born as Jews. They would have shaken off the dust of their sandals, and their sandals too already if there had been the slightest opportunity.

Who knows? Perhaps there was still a grain of verity in that Tartar-tidings. In spite of the early hours, my husband and I found the ante-room to the office of the Consulate General crowded with people who got the alarming news as we got acquainted with the Hiobs-message [Hiobsbotschaft = terrible news]. The inquiries showed that indeed such an ukase was issued, but that was not for the first time, one of the Vice-Consuls said, indicating that Berlin for 5 years harped on this subject, and nothing ever happened to the Jews of Turkish origin. “Food never will be eaten as hot as it cooked.” [may be a version of a line attributed to Heinrich Müller, a high level Nazi official: “Soup is never eaten as hot as it is cooked.” in The SS, Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945 by Gerald Reitlinger]    The consolation was well-meant and sincere, but not too convincing. The Consul General showed much consideration and would have liked to help, if help would have been possible. His countenance expressed Goethe’s: Noble man should be helpful and kind.

With Hitler’s entry into Austria, the Turkish Embassy has ceased to be a beautiful building, in the same room was the Turkish Consulate General established. The Diplomatic staff and the office personnel were mostly the same, but the Turkish Ambassador was recalled, and a Consul-General appointed, who unfortunately had not the same plenary authority as the ambassador. All directions came from Berlin. The small number of Turkish Jews were the rest of one, once-upon-a-time big and rich colony, which was very significant for the Export and Import Trade between Turkey and Austria before and after World War I. The majority of the well-to-do Oriental Rug Dealers, brokers, and importers said good-bye to Vienna as soon as Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933.

Actually, that small bunch of Turkish Jews was protected by the Turkish authority in Vienna from 1938 until 1941, in spite of Hitler’s parole: it was an act of humanity, de facto the God-forsaken group was stateless by a decree of the Turkish Government, saying that all the Turkish subjects living in foreign countries who have not entered Turk territory became expatriated. This decision was retrospective because nobody in Vienna knew about it, otherwise they would have had plenty of time to leave Austria; their children were born there and attended Viennese schools, and all were over-optimistic; like the Austrian people, they didn’t believe in Hitler’s conquering Austria. That was their fatal mistake.

My husband was furnished with his military papers showing that he served in the Turk army under Kemal pasha of Gallipoli.

The Consul General intervened on their behalf as often as any necessity occurred, except in residential cases, viewing that this would have been an interference in affairs of the German authorities. Until June 1941, the T.J. [Turkish Jews] were not much more bothered than those Austrian “Aryans” known to the Gestapo as Non-Nazis. They did not have to wear the yellow star on their garments, could even stay in a park if they wanted to, could ride the street car, privileges the native Jews didn’t have. The discrimination consisted of ration cards for food-stuffs. The Jews received cards with the ominous letter “J” which exempted them from the purchase of so-called valuable victuals such as eggs, “tea” (substitute of course) which was not too hard, because the receiver of ration cards without “J” didn’t get those items either because they were available on paper only. They were also exempted from the ration-card for smoking materials.

With the entry of the USA into the war, things changed. The first observance of the Hitler doctrine “Jew is Jew” was put into practice, that by decree the T.J. were to be evicted without delay. The Wohnungsamt — that branch of the Gestapo which had evidence about any place called “habitation” — badly needed places for the invaders from the Reich (Germans who invaded Vienna locust-like). It was their business to find a roof over their head – if not ,the Gestapo had moved away their furniture. They were only allowed to live in the Leopoldstadt — the Viennese Ghetto — which had a long time ago ceased to be a Ghetto. The former inhabitants, if they were still alive, populated the concentration camps. Several families had to live in 2-3 room apartments with one kitchen, bedrooms separated by a folding screen or curtain. Such mass quarters were occupied by people who had not been on speaking terms before. The number of people who had to live in such a close community depended on square measures.[?]

Incompatibility grows quickly in such a dense and involuntary Wohngemeinschaft [shared flat/communal living], and in such a nerve-racking time even with friends. That life was hell, but compared with the existence fate had in store for them, it was paradise.

That the boisterous, demanding Austrian people disparaging “brothers” from the Reich were not warmly welcomed by some landlords was no consolation to those who had to give up their homes in their favor.

For two weeks life went on as before, only that the frightened people idled in the ante-room of the Consulate, too afraid to be on the street or in “their homes”. This building was extraterritorial and the arm of the Gestapo couldn’t fetch them as long as they were there.

On one of these exciting days even when no arresting had taken place — the calm before the storm — my husband said to me: “You traveled a lot with the children; several times you took Family-passports. You even had a Tev [?] Have you kept them? I had, and my husband went to the Consulate again. He treasured and said that it would be possible for me to get a passport to enter Turkey but not for him. I was a Turkish-Subject (subject, not citizen) by marriage, married in Vienna and registered as Turkish. I refused to leave my husband alone. Our children were saved and at this time fortunately American Citizens already, my son — we learned from the last letter delivered to us — enlisted in the army.

October 1

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Today we see two letters from Helene and Vitali’s friend Paula in Vienna, one from 1952 and one from 1955. We saw letters from Paula in the July 11 and August 22 posts.  

Vienna, Oct. 1, 1952 

Dearest Helene,

Today I am taking time to write to you, my dearest.  Thank you for your last letter, but don’t take it the way Franz said it.  We know you love us very much.  A friendship doesn’t just end like that.  We have done enough together, and you are not like the others.  As you know, we have helped many people and now they don’t want to hear about it, because we might need help, they all have excuses.  I think you know what I as a friend have done to help.  She wouldn’t be able to live abroad and I wrote to her that maybe she would like to lend us some money, she could have also demanded that interest be paid.  We are not looking for a handout.  Her excuse then was that she can’t get it for free, but previously I could do anything.  Yes, my dear Helene, you can imagine that we are very sad.  Franz could have rented a business and everything would have been paid back by now, but the poor fellow has to go as a representative where he only earns something when he brings in orders, no health insurance, no child support, nothing, I would like to work but unfortunately I can’t find anything, you know, if we didn’t have any debt it would be easier, everything was stolen from the old man at Salamander, and what he brought there he will not get back, believe me, dear Helene, I don’t write to the friend anymore because I don’t deserve this, she complains to me because she did transfer a few hundred Schilling and she thinks that is enough, you see, dear Helene, we can’t help this person any more, you can imagine that they will have to leave everything behind, but we aren’t helping anyone anymore.  When Vitali comes, you are different, even though you have so many problems, you still think of us, but believe that better times will come for you, Vitali will come back as soon as he can and then things will be better for you dear Helene the package you mentioned has not arrived, please don’t send any more, it’s too bad about the money you spend and which is so hard to earn, and the others have it.  Dear Helene, years ago you sent me a coat, I had it altered for Annemichen, and it turned out so nice that everyone thinks it is a new coat, you know, I sew every day to make something useful out of old things for the child, it won’t be long until I will have to go out in an Eva suit because my daughter takes everything away from me, I’m just glad I can sew everything. You would be amazed at all the things I can do, but it’s just that I can’t get work to help support my good husband which makes me very sad but as soon as Vitali comes he will tell us what to do.  I often see him in my dreams and he encourages us, telling us he will come soon and stay in Vienna as far as we know, and you will come back to us and everything will be calm again and better times will come dear Helene forgive my mistakes but I am in a hurry because I still need to go shopping although I don’t know what I’m going to cook but I will find something my dear I’ll write soon and you must believe firmly that Vitali will come we really believe it and think he is doing better and he will soon have everything he needs.

That’s all for today my dear, a thousand kisses from me and the little one and greetings from my husband

Your Paula

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Vienna, October 13, 1955

Our dear good Helene,

Please don’t be mad that we haven’t written until today, but unfortunately there is always a lot going on, here too, and it’s something different every day.  Also, I am not as healthy as I should be, and my husband suffers a lot from headaches, and unfortunately he can’t afford a vacation.  If I could contribute by earning something, it would be easier, but the ladies always want me to stay all day, and I can’t do that.  After all, I have my own household to take care of.  And, as you know, the occupying forces have left, but unfortunately Salamander can’t work here because the local shoe factories are opposed to that, and so it’s hard for my husband too, but with God’s help we will stay on here until Annemarie has finished school, and hopefully she will have a good job by next year and be able to support herself.  So, my dear Helene, now about your question re Vitali.  He is in Turkey, but why he doesn’t get in touch we cannot say, but please write to his sister and tell her to put a notice in all newspapers asking him to report in.  And we will go to the Turkish Delegation here; maybe they can do something.  I think by now he must have found the means to come here.

This Jewish man, Rosenberg, has not been here for a long time.  I also don’t know if he may know something, I repeat how everyone left Buchenwald and he came along too, but then he stayed behind but did not die, my husband also says why does he keep quiet for so long, but it’s strange:  I often dream of seeing him packing his suitcase, but we are very far from giving up hope about him coming.  Whether your children believe it or not, that doesn’t change things.  But you, Helene, must believe that you will see each other again.  You know how many people were declared dead in this war, and now, gradually, they are returning and many women are married.  If you were here, you would be amazed by everything that is happening.  Dear Helene, as soon as we can, we will go to the Consulate here, my husband will go too, so that he can give an exact report, and his sister will certainly offer the money to put notices in the newspapers.  Vitali must read some newspaper or other; it seems unlikely he would be somewhere else.

My dear, we wish you good health and don’t be sad, everything will be all right, it would be better if you were here with us, then you could handle it all better.  America is no country for you.

Many sincere greetings from us all and many greetings and kisses from me

Paula

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Paula’s earlier letters are stream of consciousness and manic – perhaps not surprising considering how difficult life was in in post-war, occupied Vienna. Letters continued to be censored, finding employment was near impossible, old friends seemed to have deserted them.

Paula felt that Helene was one of the few people who stuck by her, sending hand-me-down clothes and other gifts, not all of which arrived. Paula talks of going out in an “Eva suit”, which presumably was one of my mother’s old outfits that Helene sent for Paula’s daughter Annemarie/Annemichen. Now that her daughter outgrew it, Paula will wear it herself. Like with Paul Zerzawy’s recycling of an old dress shirt (see September 29 post), we are reminded how precious material and clothing was - not like how virtually disposable fashion has become.

Although my grandmother was a prolific letter writer – even after the war when she was reunited with her children – she saved a relatively small number of letters she received in the 1950s and virtually nothing from the 1960s and beyond. Did she stop writing letters after her grandchildren were born? As earlier in her life, did she write far more letters than she received? Or did she only save the letters that had the most meaning? Why were Paula’s some of the only letters she kept? Paula kept Helene’s hope alive that she would see Vitali again. By 1955, Helene’s children were trying to convince her that it was unlikely he had survived. It must have been so much more comforting to pin her hopes to the ravings of an old friend, one who knew Vitali well and who wanted to believe almost as much as Helene did in his eventual return.

Salamander was a German shoe company founded in the late 1800s by a Jewish man, Max Levi (no relation to my family), and a Christian man, Jakob Sigle. Max’s family was forced to sell their shares when the Nazis came to power and the company used forced labor during the war. According to Wikipedia, in March 2020, a memorial plaque was posted in Berlin acknowledging the company’s role in the war.

September 10

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I first saw today’s letter in 2007 after my mother had a stroke and I was organizing her papers. She had a packet of papers: a few Red Cross letters, Helene’s letters from Istanbul in 1946, correspondence and official documents related to Paul Zerzawy, and this letter sent from Vitali to Helene between Buchenwald and Ravensbrück. If I didn’t have it in my possession, I wouldn’t have known prisoners were able to write to each other between the camps or to receive care packages and letters from family and friends.

Somehow Helene managed to keep this letter safe (although not in one piece) during the next 6 months in Ravensbrück, took it with her to Istanbul and then to San Francisco. A heartbreaking letter of love and hope.

10 September 1944
[The day of Release cannot yet be given. Visits to the Camp are prohibited. Inquiries are useless.] 

[Excerpt from the Camp Rules:
Each Prisoner may in one month receive and send 2 letters or postcards. Submitted letters cannot be more than 4 pages of 15 lines per page and they must be neat and easily read. Money may be sent by Postal order only, giving first name, surname, birthday, prisoner’s number, but without any messages. Including money, photos and sketches in letters is forbidden. Letters and postcards, which do not follow these rules, will not be accepted. Letters that are not neat and are difficult to read will be destroyed. In the Camp one can buy anything. National Socialist newspapers are available, but have to be ordered by the prisoner himself in the Concentration Camp. Food packages may be received at any time and in any quantity.
The Camp Commander]            

Most dear one///I am always with you and your mind. It is all as in a dream. In August, I sent greetings through your friend Rosa. I received a letter from Elsa stating that further packages will be sent to you. I receive on average 6 packages per month. I hope that you receive as many. Elsa sent the letters from Eva to you through the Red Cross. I am certain that you got much joy from them. //We will soon see each other again and I delight endlessly in the thought that we can, as before, live together “en famille.” I predict that we will see the prompt realization of all our wishes.

Vitali

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Reading this letter now that I know Vitali’s fate (see August 24 post) is all the bittersweet. This was Helene’s only written evidence of Vitali’s love and existence as she waited and hoped over the next 35 years for him to arrive and for them to be reunited en famille. 

August 24

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Warning: today’s post may be difficult to read.

In yesterday’s post, I described the most recent part of my journey to learn more about my family, particularly about my grandfather Vitali. Perhaps some of the information has not wanted to be found until quite recently. Or perhaps I wasn’t ready to find it.

Only by searching in the right source at the right time have I been able to get answers to questions, some of which I thought might never be answered. Perhaps a particular document has only recently been digitized or uploaded, or perhaps it’s the luck of the search. My search has certainly been easier than it was for my grandmother and the thousands of people looking for traces of their loved ones at the end of World War II.

This summer I decided to look for information about Vitali at the Arolsen Archives in Germany. I had searched there in the past and found nothing. As I mentioned in the July 5 post, I found several items related to Vitali’s time at Buchenwald, including what may have been the original document that said that Vitali had been seen at the time of liberation – the statement that encouraged Helene and her children to believe that Vitali had survived (helped also by her friend Paula’s letters assuring her that she’d seen and heard from him).  

Häftlings-Personal-Karte, Haim Cohen, Buchenwald p. 2; ITS Digital Archive, Arolsen Archives; https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/G/SIMS/01010503/0273/52439235/002.jpg

Handwritten statement: “This person appears on lists of liberated prisoners (compiled by the American Army)”

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Most of the documents were intake and other official cards, with information about him and the belongings he brought with him to Buchenwald. The document below (which is the front side of the image above) sent a shock wave through me and it took several days to recover. Having an intellectual sense of my grandfather as a prisoner was very different from seeing photos.

Häftlings-Personal-Karte, Haim Cohen, Buchenwald p.1; ITS Digital Archive, Arolsen Archives; https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/G/SIMS/01010503/0273/52439235/001.jpg

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In early August, when I went back into the Arolsen Archives, I found additional documents, including one that answers the question of Vitali’s fate – that he died on a “death march” near Penting, Germany. When I first spoke to historian Corry Guttstadt in late 2017, this was her theory –tens of thousands of men were marched out of Buchenwald in early April 1945 when the German SS realized they were losing the war. Few prisoners on the marches survived.

Investigations regarding the sites Neunburg vorm Wald - Rötz. DE ITS 5.3.2 Tote 29; Attempted Identification of Unknown Dead, https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/H/Child%20Tracing%20Branch%20General%20Documents/General%20Documents/05050000/aa/ao/pl/001.jpg

The document states that Haim Cohen was among the unknown dead who were buried in Penting on April 21, 1945 and were reburied in Neunburg v. Wald in the fall of 1949. He was deemed to be one of the buried based on his prisoner number.

Although the above document was created in 1950, it was never found during the many times my grandmother requested information about her husband.

It appears that Vitali died on April 21, about 165 miles away from Buchenwald. The map below shows the distance between Buchenwald and Penting. Also on the map is Flossenbürg – the only reference to Penting I could find said that the prisoners who were in Penting had come from Flossenbürg concentration camp. It would make sense that they would believe that Vitali had been with the group from Flossenbürg since it was on the way from Buchenwald to Penting.

All of my life, I knew that all four of my grandparents had been interned in concentration camps. My grandmother Helene was the only grandparent I ever met. It was comforting to think that Vitali might one day fulfill his wife’s and children’s hopes that he would show up on their doorstep.

For most of my life, I avoided reading books and watching films about the Holocaust – I never felt I “needed to” learn about the specifics because I had internalized the loss and trauma and didn’t feel the need to gain more understanding or empathy. It’s taken me until now to be able to look more closely – poring over my grandmother’s letters and stories, and looking until I finally found what happened to Vitali. Over the past few weeks I have felt sad and anxious and sick. It has taken me many days to sit down and write this post. Last week, I arranged to meet with my translator to look at some of the Buchenwald documents before writing today’s post, and conveniently “forgot” to hit send so she was not able to look at them in time. But they really need little translation.

When Corry and I spoke about discovering Vitali’s fate, she hoped that I would feel a sense of closure, that I would feel better no longer wondering why he never contacted his family if he survived. At this point, I guess it’s good to know that he didn’t desert his family. Still, it’s hard to let go of the dream my family held for so long and accept that the life of this smart, resourceful man was cut short in this awful way.

I’m glad that at the same time that I was discovering evidence of Vitali’s death, I found more information about his life in Vienna through newspaper articles (see yesterday’s post). He was much more than a victim or a statistic.

After learning about Vitali’s fate, I began thinking about my grandmother’s time in Istanbul. She arrived there in April 1945, about the time Vitali would have been marched out of Buchenwald. She remained in Istanbul for an entire year, boarding the SS Vulcania on April 14, 1946 and arriving in the U.S. on April 26. The Jewish period of mourning is twelve months. Unknowingly, my grandmother spent the entire year after Vitali’s death in his birthplace. There seems something sadly poetic about that.

August 23

Finding my way to Vitali

The past few years of delving into my family history have been a fascinating journey. I’ve learned a huge amount, done a lot of research, discovered a new and unusual avocation, and met and reconnected with a lot of wonderful people along the way. This summer has been no exception. I continue to find new documents and articles that paint a fuller picture of my family. For most of the year, I have concentrated on my grandmother. Over the past month, I’ve found myself focusing more on my grandfather.

One of the most unexpected discoveries has been that my quest to learn more about my family is somehow inextricably linked to my learning about and doing hand analysis. I make the most progress when I am involved in both. Often my grandmother’s papers lead me to my grandfather, while my grandfather’s metaphysical pursuits lead me back to my grandmother. Apparently, neither of my grandparents wants to be ignored.

In seeking to learn more about my grandfather, a few years ago I decided to look into hand reading, one of the only things I knew about him. I found my way to Richard Unger and hand analysis through a newspaper article about Josef Ranald which my grandmother had saved – see the January 19 post. During my training with Richard, I had to read at least 100 hands. A few years ago, a friend brought together a few of her friends to get me more hands to read. It turned out that one of the people there was a relative on my grandmother’s side whom I had never met!

During the pandemic, I’ve read a few hands and continued learning about hand analysis by attending Zoom classes with Richard and other much more experienced hand analysts who had been trained by Richard or his graduates over the past 30 years. Earlier this summer, I had a conversation with one of Richard’s former (and current) students, Jena Griffiths, a master hand analyst in Zurich. When I mentioned my theory that Vitali may have known Josef Ranald, she suggested I research Ranald to see if I could find anything. There wasn’t much to find. But my search led me to a fascinating article by Ranald’s granddaughter, Caroline Ranald Curvan. I emailed Caroline and we had a marvelous conversation, granddaughter to granddaughter.

Caroline mentioned that several years earlier she had been approached by Alexandra Nagel, a doctoral student in the Netherlands who was writing her doctoral dissertation on German psychochirologist Julius Spier. Per Alexandra, a psychochirologist was “a Jungian type of hand-analyst. He lived in Amsterdam from the beginning of 1939 until his death in September 1942, having legally fled his home country.” Alexandra and I had a great conversation and have emailed back and forth quite a bit. Early on, she sent me a Viennese newspaper article that mentioned Vitali, in a non-metaphysical context – in 1934 he gave a lecture (in Italian!) at a social club on the subject of “old and new Turkey”:

From Neues Wiener Journal 25 April 1934, p10

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Earlier this month, I attended the 2021 IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. This is the second conference I’ve attended, both of them virtual. The amount of information and number of people involved in genealogy is amazing. I learned a great deal and found new resources. At one session we were encouraged to do newspaper research through the Austrian national library. I have translations of newspaper articles and have wondered how to find them. I have no citation for some translated articles and sometimes the articles do not refer to my grandfather by name – calling him Mr. C or something else impossible to search for. Inspired by Alexandra’s success, I decided to brave the archive myself, despite my lack of German. Incredibly I actually found a few things! I realized that it would be helpful to search using a relatively unusual word so I looked for the German word for mandrake root – “Alraunen”. In addition to a number of unrelated articles, I found one that is similar to a photo I have in the archive — I didn’t realize it had been taken for use in a publication. As often happen when I do not have a translation or have inadequate information, I create a story for myself about the item. In this case I decided Vitali had the photo taken in 1938 or 1939 to be included in his “portfolio” for coming to the U.S., showing that he had a successful business which could be transferred to San Francisco. Instead, this photo was taken in 1934 for an article about mandrake root!

Photo on left from my archive; photo on right from Wiener Magazin 8 November 1934 p42

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I also found an advertisement for mandrake root sales at my grandparents’ shop:

From Mocca 7 January 1934 p 86

Translation from Google Translate: “Mandrakes: A meaningful Christmas and New Years present. Real mandrakes are sold from a well-known collection. Get yourself a lucky mandrake now. Himmelpfortgasse 6 and Stubenring 2” — the latter is the address of my grandparents’ stationery store.

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At the IAJGS conference, I attended a workshop given by Yad Vashem, the keepers of the Arolsen Archives in Germany. We saw Helene’s requests for information about Vitali’s whereabouts, including one made to the International Tracing Service ITS and to Arolsen, Germany in 1955 in the June 21 and August 21 posts. In the week before the workshop, I looked at the Arolsen archives and found some documents related to Vitali. After the workshop, I searched again and found even more. These will be the subject of tomorrow’s post.

Warning: tomorrow’s post may be difficult to read.

August 22

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

On July 11, we saw letters written in 1950 and 1953 from Helene’s friend in Vienna named Paula. She kept Helene’s hope alive for Vitali’s survival. Today’s letter from 1952 is signed by Pauline. Before the letters were translated, I thought Paula and Pauline were different people, but all refer to her daughter Annemiechen.  

Vienna, 22. August 1952

Dear Helene!

Excuse that we are only writing to you today and not before, but we couldn’t do it before because we had lost your address and we had to wait for your letter to come. We thank you for sending the dear package. Annemiechen was really happy because a package came from Tante Helene. That caused such joy for her, as you can imagine.

Don’t worry about Vitali. He is living safe and sound in Turkey and we believe he will come to Vienna in the next months. You can fully believe in his return. He knows where you and the children are. If he shows up here first, we will let you know right away. So believe in it and don’t let yourself get discouraged, one day he will be there.

We couldn’t explain why you were silent for so long and thought maybe you were somewhere else, that you had moved or that you were sick. Perhaps you would have thought what do I need friends in Vienna for, it’s probably best if I let them go one at a time or something like that.

Now you have written again and we are happy you are still thinking of us. We are sorry to hear that you’ve had such a hard lot, but believe it will eventually go better for you. When Vitali is there, you will be finished with your troubles. It is the same there as it is here, people who work have nothing but burden and the other ones have the money.

The number of unemployed is increasing constantly here. The prices are awful, especially for food. The taxes are high and they keep going up so that a worker cannot really afford much. Then business doesn’t work very well either, because the main consumer, the worker, cannot buy anything. All the political considerations in the world do not work out to our advantage, because we are living on loans from other countries. What is said to us from the west, the east takes away so that nothing remains for us except debt. It is really not nice to live here right now. Maybe later a better time will come, but right now it’s really not interesting to live here.

Annemiechen is almost as tall as her mother and she is studying hard. She now has 2 more years of school and she will be glad when this time is over. She is a good girl, but she’s not really enthusiastic about going to school.  

Pauline seems very calm and she was so happy to get your letter and is expecting further reports from you. You haven’t written anything for a long time, so you must have quite a bit to tell. We in any case will all be happy when we hear from you and get a longer report.

We are sending this letter from to you from our neighbor land. You must know that we still have censorship and that no letter comes from a foreign country or goes to a foreign country without censorship.

Don’t research where Vitali is - he is living under another name and doing so might be a disadvantage for him. He didn’t do well at first but now his living conditions have taken a turn for the better. We hope that he will not have to remain missing too much longer and that he will show up either here with us or come to you soon.

We are sending a picture of Annemiechen at her confirmation which was 2 years ago. She is now wearing her mother’s clothes and her mother is wearing the old well-worn rags, because she only wants the new ones. Normally it’s the other way around - the children wear the old rags from their parents.

Elsa is over there also and is telling horror stories about Pauline. How much did Pauline help her after the war and gave her dollars so that she would have some money on the trip and as a way of thanks, she said that she helped Pauline so much. There are many of her relatives who do not want to see her in Austria anymore because she’s been so insincere.

We hope to hear very soon from you and wish you all the best. Most sincere greetings from all of us

Your
Pauline

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Living in Vienna after the war continues to be difficult – poverty, censorship, few opportunities. Paula/Pauline has had a difficult life and feels betrayed by those she had helped. As she begins to refer to herself in the third person, my mistrust of her assurances about Vitali’s situation grows. Paula/Pauline has suffered a lot of trauma over the years, and who knows what is real for her anymore?

August 21

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

In the June 21 post, we saw several attempts by Helene from 1947-1955 to find out what had happened to Vitali at the end of the war. Today we have a few more letters, this time from 1947 and 1949. She never lost hope that her husband was still alive.

In the earlier post, the form dated July 7, 1947 was addressed to Georg Weil who was writing from Frankfurt on Helene’s behalf. I do not know who he was but from the August 30, 1947 letter below, it appears that he and Helene had a personal connection.

Dear Mrs. Cohen,

We were happy to receive your letter of August 21 and to see that we really were able to help you by taking away a small amount of your troubles. Now we just have a sincere desire to find your husband.  That has not happened yet. However, every morning at 9:15 on all radio stations in Germany, we now hear reports of missing persons.  We have asked to have your husband’s name mentioned in these reports.  If he has perhaps already left Germany, possibly someone knows something about him. We hope so.

My wife and I send you warm greetings.

Georg Weil

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From August 17, 1949 via the Zionist Organization of America in San Francisco to the Jewish Agency for Palestine in Jerusalem:

Subject: Inquiry into whereabouts of Haim Cohen
Nationality: Turkish
Last Place of Residence: Seidlgasse 14 Vienna, Austria
Born: 1888
Place of Birth: Istanbul, Turkey
Migrated to Austria: 1919

Gentlemen:

I have last seen the above, my husband, in October 1943, when I was transported to Ravensbruck, while he was arrested and interned in Buchenwald. I received his last letter in February, 1945 from Buchenwald.

I have received on July 7, 1947 information from the I.R.C. Search Tracing Division in Wiesbaden that my husband was registered in Buchenwald under the number 31452, that the reason for his imprisonment was “political”.

Last information available: “Alive in camp at time of liberation.”

Inasmuch as my husband does not know of my whereabouts, I am most anxious to have him traced wherever there might be a chance to find him. Ther eis still hope that he might have entered Israel recently.

I would be extremely grateful to you if you could conduct an inquiry as to whether this is the case and have me informed. 

Should you desire any further information I would only be too pleased to furnish it. 

I wish to thank you heartily in anticipation for the trouble you are taking.

Yours very respectfully,
Helene Cohen

Without the computer and telecommunications tools we have today, somehow people found each other after the war. There were millions of pieces of papers in disparate locations around the globe. In the first letter above, we see that one method of searching was to name missing persons on the radio. Amazing that anybody found anyone. Helene’s requests went to organizations around the globe.

July 11

Today we have 2-1/2 letters from a friend of Helene’s from Vienna. They appear to be from the same person, although the ones from 1953 look and sound very different from the one written three years earlier. In letters Helene wrote from 1939-1941 (see January 28, February 25, March 26, May 4 and May 30 posts), she mentions two different friends named Paula, one who seemed to visit often. I assume this is the same woman.

When my friend Roslyn translated these letters, I finally understood why Helene and her children hung on to the belief that they would see Vitali again one day.

Vienna 11 July, 1950

Our dear little Helen,

Once again, it is a long time since we’ve heard from you.  We have written two letters to you, but they remain unanswered.  We have no explanation as to why you don’t write to us or even answer our letters.  Today, we actually have good news.  We haven’t given up searching for Vitali and researching this, even though it doesn’t seem humanly possible.  Yesterday, we received word that he is alive and knows how you and the children are doing.  But he can’t come home, or to you, right away.  It will take some time, but it will happen.  But surely it will only be a fraction of the time that has already passed since 1945.  You know his capabilities and they will help him keep up on whatever interests him.  We must stop doing further research, because it costs a lot of money, which we don’t have at the moment.  As soon as we are doing better, we will get back to the search and we will succeed in finding out where exactly he is.  We need time and money, so please be patient, but it will happen.  At least you do know that he is alive; that is a lot.  Now you know what to think about and you don’t need to be plagued by doubts.  He is working in his profession there, and one day he will show up here.  Pray to God that this happens soon.  We do hope to be able to make progress not too long from now.  You know your life has meaning and that you did not go to America and wait, not knowing, in vain.  We are very happy that we finally have some positive news.

How are you doing otherwise?  Well, we hope.  It’s getting almost unbearable again here, the prices are going up so much that no mortal can afford them.  And, as before, there is war psychosis.

Annemarie got a good report card, and in the fall she starts secondary school (Hauptschule).  The school is not far from the apartment, so she’s got a short way to school.  She will go to the school associated with the teachers’ college.  It is supposedly quite strict there.  She will learn a lot and have to be industrious. But she will push on, and succeed.

Dear Helen, please write soon so that we will have news from you and share your joy. 

Warmest greetings from all of us, and kisses from Annemarie

Your
Paula, Annemarie and Franz

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At first, Roslyn and I thought that the letters from 1953 were a single letter, but it appears they were written a few weeks apart and have different censorship stamps. There is an interesting blog on Mail Censorship in Allied Occupied Austria 1945-1953 which explains the continuation of mail censorship long after the war had ended.

Vienna, 2.July.53.

My dear dear Helene! Please don’t be mad that I haven’t written for so long, but I have waited for the packages to arrive so I could let you know that everything had arrived and what you wrote - I will dye the costume and it will look good on Annemiechen. We three thank you very much for it and I will still have the possibility to thank you as soon as our dear Vitali comes to Vienna then he will stay with us until he has decided what he is going to do but I believe he will stay with us in Vienna and we will have the great luck that you will come to us again. My dear Helene I can only tell you that it will all be good for you when Vitali is here and believe that he is coming now, he is doing much better. We don’t know anything about his relatives and they really wouldn’t help and also he is not recognized as a Turk anymore so you will understand that he does not want people to write to him. We know he’s alive and he has brought it along so far that he will be able to come soon and that is the main thing. You know his talents and his capabilities and he has to do everything the way he sees fit now but dear Helene don’t doubt then if you did that you would not have the strength to keep going. I see him often at night and he’s packing his suitcase and you know that he can show himself. I am so happy that I will be able to send you the letter that he is healthy and safe and sound and that he has arrived and this time will come faster than we think.

My dear little Helen, we are just sad that you have it so hard that you have gone through enough, but when the need is the greatest then God’s blessings is closest. Believe that. You will know that Vitali is informed about everything that is going on with you one would only hurt him if we would do anything that he does not want. He sees everything better. Maybe you can write to his relatives that you have the feeling that Vitali is alive. Maybe they’ll think differently but I don’t think you can really promise yourself much from them.

My dear, now I will write to you about us. The little one is really excited because she will probably be able to leave. We have found a place for her where it is not so expensive that is out in the country and that’s near Peierbach [about 100 miles from Vienna], and my husband and I will eat very simply so that we can put the money away which we need for our child and vegetables are becoming cheaper now and potatoes and we can fill up on those and it doesn’t cost so much and Annemiechen needs more because she is very tall and now in the age where she’s always hungry and there dear God will help us as well to get through this and I tell you my husband is an angel. He’s such a sweetheart and he makes a sacrifice. What my husband does is not to be described. His love and his thought is just that he wants to make things easier for us so I don’t have so many troubles and he does without everything dear Helen, yes I thank God every day for this good person and for the child that they are all so sweet together and I really couldn’t complain about anything. Everything is good, know that life is quite a struggle. When Franz has something secure, maybe it will be easier to take. But that will come and as soon as Vitali is with us we will discuss everything together and how to do everything there my dear Helene. Keep hanging on. The evening of life will be a little nicer for all of us.

My dear Helene, I must now finish knitting a cardigan for Annemie because then she has something for when the evening is cooler. When you have time, then write and when we find out anything from Vitali how far away he is, then we will let you know, but don’t be misled. The main thing is that he is alive and that he is coming and you can bear everything else. So my dear I thank you for the precious things you sent, but I ask you don’t spend any money you must have to work so hard to get it and we love you just so and we are happy when you write to us because our friendship is so deep that it is impossible for anyone to destroy it. It’s very hot here now and we are going on Sunday morning to the Vienna Woods and it’s very nice there.

My dear Helene, now I must go shopping and today there are mushrooms and potatoes and everything is cheaper if we buy it from the farmers than at the market hall. Many many thousand kisses from all of us many greetings from the Krell family.

As soon as I know anything I will write to you again. Kisses

Paula

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[note at bottom: Received 12. August.53]

...that you are followed the night every night and that we have debts. Dear Helene, you write about Vitali, he’s already left there, he really ought to be here by now but everything gets put off, even with Vitali and believe me we are waiting as enthusiastically as you, we are really missing him, because we know that it will be better for you and then you can come back to Vienna because Vitali will want to settle here because it’s been much nicer here but don’t be in despair — as long as we know that he is alive and then there is no reason to be sad or despairing. Maybe we can find out something more. But now we need to wait. There’s nothing we can do because we don’t know where he is. I have seen a few times the way he is packing his suitcase. You know his talents and he will get together what he needs and now I have no more worries about him. Someday we will get there because he is coming to us first.

Dear Helene, I thank you for the packages. Some of them aren’t here yet but that always takes longer than I think. But really don’t send anything more for us it’s really so hard to send something because you have to pinch pennies too and you must have pity on me because you have it so hard too. Vitali knows about it too but he can’t really move around yet the way he would like to. As soon as he is away from Turkey then everything will be so much faster. We just have to wait, everything takes time. My dear Annemie is coming to Vienna on August 19 and now I can start fattening her up again.

My dear little Helen, how much I would like to have you here, it would be so much nicer. Franz also says it would be so much better for you here. Here you would be able to get the compensation for reparations and get everything replaced which you lost. But also you would get a pension which you could live on. You should have put in for it as I told you. All your relatives have done that and are getting it. Yes, I think even when Vitali is here he needs to report all of his losses.

My dear little Helen, I can also tell you that friends have sent me a document detailing how I helped her but it did take quite awhile. Dear Helene, my husband will also write soon because he runs around every day and when he works at home he is also the one who repairs all our shoes so that we can save some money for other things. I must tell you that this person can do everything and I thank our dear God for the grace that I have gotten this good man. He could not be better than he is.

So my dear I need to close now because I want to take the letter to the post office. Dear good Helene, hang in there and it cannot take too much longer until our dear Vitali comes. I tell you as always that Vitali is coming and then you will not have that dark mood anymore and for your nerves it will be good. Just believe in it. All bad things do come to an end.

With many many greetings and kisses I am ending my letter and many greetings and a kiss from my husband.

Paula-Franz

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These letters give me an appreciation for the clarity and humor in my family’s writing. Paula writes in stream of consciousness – almost one long sentence with little or no punctuation. Paula sounds absolutely certain that she has been in touch with Vitali. Can we believe her? She writes in 1953 that she sees “him often at night and he’s packing his suitcase,” which is clearly a dream. Is it all a dream? It may be that we will never know.

Today’s letters illustrate the trauma of war — no one was untouched and the effects could last years and even generations. In 1953, eight years after the war ended, Paula and her family have lived in an occupied country. Life is difficult and they barely have what they need to survive day to day. And yet, she tells Helene how much happier she will be returning to Vienna. A wish that as soon as Vitali somehow reappear and Helene has joined him in Vienna, they would return to the lives they left behind.

July 5

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today’s letter is the reply to Helene’s query in the June 21 post.

Special Registry Office, Arolsen

6 July, 1955

Dear Mrs. Cohen,

As an answer to your letter of June 21 re searching for your husband Chain Cohen, I must inform you sincerely that my office has no information.  The International Search Service in Arolsen has only the information that the State Police in Vienna took your husband to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp near Weimar on November 5, 1943.

Since it is possible that your husband died in the Buchenwald area after the concentration camp was liberated, I recommend that you contact the Registry Office in Weimar/Thuringia in the Soviet occupied region of Germany.

I am extremely sorry that I cannot provide more exact information.

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The Arolsen Archives were formerly known as the International Tracing Service. The office was set up after World War II specifically to deal with questions about the whereabouts of prisoners sent to concentration camps.  In preparing today’s post, I went to the online Arolsen Archives and found documents related to Vitali that I had never seen before. A comment handwritten on the back of one document from 1948 (presumably made in response to one of my grandmother’s queries) said “This person appeared on lists of Liberated Prisoners (compiled by the American Army)”. In several documents in my possession, I had seen references to the fact that Vitali had been reported alive at the time of liberation, but I had never seen it attributed to the American Army. However, I assume “compiled” means they wrote down the testimony of a presumed eyewitness, so I am no closer to an answer than my mother and grandmother were. It is heartbreaking to think how often their hopes for answers were dashed.

When I was young, my mother told me what a brilliant man her father was. She said he spoke around 10 languages. I always thought she must have been exaggerating — although my mother was always completely truthful. One document in the Arolsen Archives corroborated her claim — listing the (9) languages Vitali spoke: Turkish, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian (Farsi?), and German.

It was not unusual for people in those days to speak multiple languages, although I think Vitali had a longer list than most. It was useful, particularly in cosmopolitan areas, to be able to communicate with the wide variety of people passing through. Toward the end of Harry’s life, he was fascinated by the memoirs of Elias Canetti, which he read both in the original German and in English translation. I read the first volume of Canetti’s memoir to see what caught Harry’s interest. I’m guessing part of it was feeling a kinship to Canetti for being the son of a Sephardic Jew in western Europe and the other was to read his memories of Vienna in the decade before Harry was born.

Harry followed in his father’s footsteps, fascinated by any publication in any language. As a student at UC Berkeley after the war, he studied Russian and I think Japanese. He considered pursuing a career in the foreign service. By the end of his life, Harry had amassed a library of hundreds of books in dozens of languages. I sometimes wondered whether that was also a way of hiding in plain sight – an interest in multiple languages could hide the fact that he had not been born in the US.

Harry kept his father’s Turkish-German phrasebook. According to the Wikipedia entry on the publisher, Meyers Bibliographisches Institut published German language phrasebooks from the 19th to early 20th century. The phrasebook I have is embossed with Vitali’s initials.

Genealogists and family historians all recommend periodically searching for answers to unanswered questions. More information and documents are being digitized every day.

June 29

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today we have a translation of a newspaper article about my grandfather, Haim (Vitali) Cohen, that appeared on pages 5-6 of the June 28, 1934 issue of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse.

The Magic Shop.

There are no magic links and no miraculous tickets for sale in this shop - none of those little things which keep “a whole party” amused. There is nothing but – paper. A simple stationer’s shop in the center of the city is the place, where ‘miraculous things” do occur. It has happened, several times already, that a buyer would hand the stationer his fountain pen in order to get it repaired – and that, while he was waiting for it, he would, quite casually, be told some details about his life, past, present and future. For some quite unaccountable ideas and images had come into the mind of the cheerful little man dealing with the fountain pens – images and ideas which he himself paid no attention to at first; until they became so powerful that they forced their way and forced him to splutter them out. And it turned out that those were the private lives of his customers which he now was, quite truthfully, describing!

This paper-dealer, being an oriental and a Turk, is not quite inaccessible to mystic tendencies; yet on the other hand, having formerly been an architect and engineer, he cannot help considering himself a cool rationalist. His first reaction to these events were a kind of shame and embarrassment; and he tried not to listen to the voice within himself. Yet when, the next time, people again came to have their fountain pens mended, the vague characters which they scribbled in order to try them out again gave reason for the Turk seeing and telling about images and impressions.

CUSTOMERS HANDS ARE PAINTED RED

Mr. C., the clairvoyant in spite of himself, now happened to visit the lecture of a chirologist - an event which occurred about a year ago - who, with the help of various photographs and plates, revealed the secrets of palm reading. “Why, that’s as easy as playing a child’s game,” thought Mr. C.; and when, on the following morning, a customer entered the shop he simply smeared his palms with red ink - much to the horror of the good man - and pressed the red palm down on a sheet of white paper; he then examined the portrait of the hand. Fates appeared before is mind’s eye, images whirled through his brain, and, full of eagerness, he told the customer what he saw. This was repeated several times; and the customers, amazed, could but corroborate the accuracy of his “visions.”

Within his inmost heart, C. admitted that he actually had no idea of palm reading; and that he only spoke out of intuition. Yet he got all the more interested in the network of lines which appeared different in every hand; and he took imprints of the hands of his relatives, friends, and customers with great eagerness. His predictions and prognoses became more and more daring, and more and more sure; until, one day, he told a rather taciturn fellow, who was out for acquiring some wrapping-paper, some of the most intimate things about his whole life. The buyer turned out to be one of the best-known chirologists in England, who on his turn, amused himself by proving that the prophet had not the slightest ideas of any questions of palm reading. Yet he could not deny that the things he had said were true. Quite the contrary: he wrote, underneath the imprint of his own hand: “Well roared, lion!” and encouraged Mr. C in developing his faculties.

2200 PAIRS OF HANDS WITHIN A YEAR.

C. has taken the advice. It is not much longer than a year since his customer’s private affairs first forced their way into his mind - and he already owns 2200 well-ordered imprints of pairs of hands. He no longer has to beg people to let them take the imprints of their palms: quite the contrary, there are many who beg him to look at them. But his sixth sense is not well disposed toward all callers; and he is quite capable of being disagreeable in some cases. Yet he always has time for those who really are in need of help. And he knows to tell, dramatically, of the way in which people can be spurred to higher efforts by the very intensity of their despair. It yet does occur, however, that, leaning in front of his shop in the sunshine, he suddenly will rush up to some guileless passer-by, draw him into his shop, and then, in a small back-room, will tell him the most important and urgent matters about himself; until the surprised visitor will feel almost faint with surprise and emotion.

This small back room looks queer enough. The skeptical, paper-selling and prophetic Turk has had the blue walls painted with symbols of the zodiac; which still make a mystic impression on innocent minds. There is a wash-basin which serves the practical purpose of having the clients wash the color off their hands; for C. no longer uses stamp colors, which can only be removed with the help of some chemical ingredients; but some color that comes off quite easily. He shows the unique case of a college teacher, whose right palm is imprinted in the brown color which actually was used on it, while the left- being painted with exactly the same material - has come off green. C. Is not quite certain of an explanation for this phenomenon; he supposes some abnormal polarization of the emanation of the hands; or the consequences of a cure of injections which the college professor took, and whose poisons, being now part of the skin, transformed the color as it touched it for chemical reasons.

THE SECRET OF THE WOODEN BOX.

And then there is a mysterious small wooden box, which C. hands to every visitor, requesting him to place each hand on it, alternately. I do it just to please him, I spread my hand over the little box, and, after a few minutes, I feel a breath of cool air on my palm. I now change the position of the hands and I feel —- nothing at all. Mr. C. begs me to put my observations down in a book, which is already filled with notes written by my predecessors. One has felt warmth in the right hand, and, on the left, a feeling of having touched upon an electric current. The other one felt nothing at all in his right hand, but a violent twitching in — the next when he held the left hand above the box. And what is there in the box? I open it, and find nothing but a small, withered root, which is oddly ill-shaped but, on looking at it more closely, one discovers that it is the likeness of a bearded man in a dancing position. “Why yes, it’s a mandrake,” the ever- cheerful miracle man will answer to my questioning look.

The mandragora, the famous magic plant of olden days! Oval leaves have grown from it, and berries which all served magic purposes. Arabs, to this day, eat these berries in order to go to sleep; but as aphrodisiac effect also is ascribed to them. Love-potions were distilled from them in antiquity. The leaves were placed on open wounds in order to soothe the pain; and the root was uses as anesthetic for operations. If the fleshy, beet-like root is dried, it assumes, in many cases, the oddest and most uncanny shapes; and, with a little good will, one may see the likelihood to a human form. It is a small wonder that miraculous powers were ascribed to them. They were supposed to bring luck and money, and they were being secretly tended and kept like human beings.

MANDRAKES FOR SALE.

These products of the Mediterranean regions had, in our time, been forgotten. An Austrian ex- serviceman, Colonel Franz Koeppl, was the first again to take interest and to study these rare objects; and, in the course of many years, he acquired 900 of them - all shapes and sizes. A laic might take it for granted that, owning so many talismans, this man must be loaded down with luck and riches. But this point does not seem to be quite clear; the Colonel certainly has handed his collection to Mr. C. for the purpose of selling it; for he says that it is to every mandrake that will bring luck to every man; it takes a clairvoyant to discover the root which fits one. “I originally thought that all this talk about the mandrakes was nothing but a bit of humbug,” says Mr. C. “But there remains the strange fact that the owners so often come to see me, and will assure that they are gaining new strength by the possession of this queer plant - and, consequently, new successes. I daresay it is all imagination - but the favorable effect does remain the main thing.”

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This newspaper article was among the documents Vitali had translated into English in the hopes of continuing his occupation when he and Helene finally made it to America. We saw translations of testimonials in the May 22 post. We saw a far less complimentary article from 1939 in the April 7 post. What a difference a few years made.

When I read this article, for the first time I had a sense of who my grandfather was. He seems to have been a brilliant, charismatic, confident, insatiably curious, and intuitive man who was open to unusual and unpopular ways of thinking. Palm reading piqued his curiosity after attending a lecture in 1933, and by 1934 he was sharing his insights with anyone who would listen. In other posts, I describe my own journey to get to know my grandfather – first, having my palm read and then getting trained in hand analysis. In my year-long training with Richard Unger, I was required to read 100 hands, which was a daunting task for me. In the same amount of time, my grandfather had looked at more than 2200 pairs of hands!

Although Eva and Harry never told us about their father’s occupation, we have a wonderful photo of him taking handprints of the entire family. My archivist colorized this photo beautifully. You can see Eva and Harry looking on with great interest while Vitali rolls ink on Helene’s hand to take a print. Pages with handprints are strewn on the table.

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In the photo below, you can see Vitali at work with all the tools of his trade: an inked handprint, a pendulum, mandrake root and a few other things I can’t identify.

June 25

Today we have a postcard from Vienna sent on June 22, 1958 to Helene in San Francisco.

We think of you often, not least in Vienna, on the Ring. Why don’t you write.
Love,
Judith & Alfred

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I thought this would be a very brief post, given how short a greeting there was on the card. But as often has been the case on this project, more puzzle pieces came together and suddenly this seemingly random postcard from an unknown friend leads us to something much richer.

When I first saw the postcard a few years ago, I read the signature as being from someone named Judith Alfred. I’d never seen her name before and was surprised that my grandmother had kept the card. Perhaps because the picture on the card was of the Vienna opera house? In the March 13 post, we saw what Helene wrote about the rebuilt opera house in 1955 after it had been destroyed during the war. 

As I was preparing today’s post, I looked again at the signature. I realized it might say Judith & Alfred. Which made me recall the name of someone whose writing takes up a lot of space in the papers my grandmother kept. In addition to several binders of her own stories, Helene kept two binders with magazine articles, German language cartoons, newspaper clippings, etc. Included in the binders were several articles by a man named Alfred Werner. I found that, like my grandmother, he too had lived in Vienna until being deported to Dachau. He came to New York in 1940 and became an art historian and journalist. His first wife died in the 1940s and he married Judith in 1953. You can learn all about him at the Center for Jewish History and can look at and download his entire archive. 

Since they had been in Vienna at the same time, I assumed that my grandmother was interested in Werner’s writing because she’d read work by him in Viennese newspapers and because he often wrote about her beloved pre-war Vienna in US publications. As I looked more closely at the articles my grandmother kept, I noticed that he had signed two of the reprints for her. He signed a reprint of a 1949 article entitled “Vienna Paradise Lost” that first appeared in The Chicago Jewish Forum (Volume 7, Number 4, Summer, 1949), when he was in San Francisco in 1955: "To the muse of twelve generations of Austrian writers and artists, honored by one of her many sons of the muse - Alfred, SF 1955." Presumably he is likening Helene to her namesake Helen of Troy. The signatures on the article and on the card look like they came from the same hand. Although there was an age difference of almost 25 years — Alfred was born in 1911 — Helene and Alfred shared a love of literature and music. I imagine them meeting at the Café Central in the 1930s and chatting for hours.

We have already seen a bit of his writing in the May 22 post, showing the testimonials to Vitali’s work in Vienna. Alfred Werner’s quote does not appear in Vitali’s “business card”, but it was in the translated document created when Vitali and Helene were preparing to come to the U.S. I do not have the original German.

Sub specie aeternitatis
The deeper I am looking into thee, blue sky,
The nearer dost thou still appear to me;
The stronger, God, I think Thee to the end,
The pitifuller do I fall before Thee….
From my volume of poems
To Mr. Cohen, with grateful admiration.
Alfred Werner.

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As I have found so many times before on this journey, my grandmother kept everything for a reason. Even people who at first seem like strangers or mere acquaintances end up playing a much more important role in my grandmother’s life and story than I could have imagined.

June 21

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

The Search for Vitali

Helene and her children never stopped hoping to see Vitali again. One of the most poignant things my mother ever said was in March of 1988 when she acknowledged that she probably would never see her father again. She had never lost hope that he would arrive on her doorstep one day. He would have been 100 years old.

Helene’s search began the moment she arrived in Istanbul from Ravensbrück on the SS Drottningholm in April of 1945. The JDC archives include several documents that included Vitali’s name on the list of missing persons being sought by the released prisoners. We learned about Helene’s voyage and experiences in Istanbul in several earlier posts, including JDC documents posted on April 16 and April 20.

Today we see documents from 1947, 1949, 1950, and a copy of a letter from Helene dated June 21, 1955. Helene was tireless in her search for Vitali, ever hopeful that she would see him again.

21 June, 1955

To Special Registry Office

Arolsen
Germany

Dear Sirs,

With this letter I send my polite request that you inform me about further steps to take in my quest to find out if my husband is still alive.  I would be extremely grateful to receive any information about him.

My husband and I were arrested on October 15, 1943 in our home.  While I was transported to Ravensbrück, my husband was sent to Buchenwald. 

From the PCIRO Child Search Tracing Division Wiesbaden (16) I received this information on July 7, 1947:

Cohen, Haim, political prisoner (Jew) was alive at the time of liberation. 

The attached document contains a copy of the data I have.  I will be glad to send more if necessary.

Thank you in advance for your trouble,

Sincerely,

May 22

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

First page of HSM (Vitali) Cohen’s “business card” - title is “Abandon Not Hope - Turn to Me!”

In a few previous posts, I’ve written about Helene’s husband Vitali’s occupation in Vienna. Although my mother Eva never talked about her father’s metaphysical endeavors, she spoke of how many people sought his advice. I never had a clue what form that advice took until my cousin discovered the photo of Vitali at work when we were young adults. My mother merely told me that many people, including some famous and/or important, came to Vitali for assistance. A few prominent people gave testimonials, and in those cases the people were identified. All others were identified by their initials and sometimes their profession.

Both Harry and Eva had copies of the translation of testimonials in their possession. Many of them were included in the green printed “business card” seen above.

The translation of the testimonials, has the same title as the original brochure: “Abandon Not Hope - Turn to Me!” It must have been translated before Eva and Harry left for America in October 1939. Vitali planned to be able to pursue the same work after arriving in San Francisco and hoped these testimonials would help his cause, both in getting a visa to come to America and in convincing people of his talents.

Cover page of translation of testimonials by people who sought Vitali’s advice.

The following are some of the testimonials from this document. As I was writing today’s post, I finally understood the numbers on the first page – between March 2, 1933 and August 24, 1939, Vitali had consulted with 3,132 different clients and given 5,584 individual consultations. The majority of testimonials simply state that what Vitali predicted came true or that he read their characters uncannily accurately. Others go into great detail. Having had a similar experience when I decided to get a hand analysis to better understand my grandfather’s vocation, I understand the surprise and fascination of having a complete stranger seemingly see into your soul in a way no one had ever done before. Vitali seems to have gone further in his readings and consultations, including diagnosing medical issues. There is a whole field of medical literature on the use of hand analysis in medicine.      

·       I admire your gift of prediction, and am hoping for a happy future for you, as well as for myself. I should like to thank you for the accurate data that you have given me.  Dr. K.R.

·       You have, on the strength of the lines in my hand, read my character and certain important moments of my life with an accuracy of 100%.  

·       You have described some details of my life - which could not possibly have been known to you beforehand - with great accuracy.   R.G., President of the Metaphysical Society of Vienna

·       This is a case where one must stop and call out in astonishment: “There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” You have, from my hands, read events of incisive importance, which could not possibly have been known to you in advance; and you have, by this, given me the impression that you dispose over the mysteries of intuition.  

·       “Well roared lion.!” You have an accurate grasp of that mainspring of our intellectual activity, direct to some purpose, which lies within our subconscious mind.

·       I am genuinely surprised. 

·       I have, today, seen you for the very first time in my life; and it was a mere accident, your offering to take an imprint of my palm. You have, on this occasion, said things to me about both the past and the present which are so strikingly true, that I greatly hope that the things which you told me about my future will also come true.

·       I was simply speechless by the truth of everything you told me.  

·       I understand nothing of those matters, and my attitude towards your gifts hence is a skeptical one; I was, nonetheless, amazed about your diagnosis.  

·       It is interesting to see, with which lucidity you read a person’s character, as well as that which he has lived through, from the lines in his hands.  O.H. Inspector

·       You cannot even know how true are the things which you have told me!   Professor M.H.

·       You have looked into my soul’s most secret corners in a manner which is perfectly amazing! I hope that your advice will be valuable to me for my future life, and I shall keep you informed for purposes of checking up on your predictions.  

·       You are an uncanny person, Mr. Cohen - with those unerring x-ray eyes of yours - I feel myself sitting naked before you. 

·       You are a man who should be taken perfectly seriously.  

·       You are a fabulous psychologist and clairvoyant. I enjoy my visits to you, for you can give me consolation and courage.  July 23, 1934. 

·       You have a grandiose intuition which is perfectly amazing; it is not the ordinary type of clairvoyance; it is more; it is seeing.  

·      Sub specie aeternitatis
The deeper I am looking into thee, blue sky,
The nearer dost thou still appear to me;
The stronger, God, I think Thee to the end,
The pitifuller do I fall before Thee….
From my volume of poems To Mr. Cohen, with grateful admiration.  Alfred Werner.

·       “Bend down to greatness! For the very greatest
who look down placidly on our storms
they do not soar, as angels and as blessed;
they bend themselves to far-off courses
of even deeper life,
to higher greatness, which they do but dream,
in that which is unmeasured, unexplored and high.”
From my poem: Gratitude to Greatness
To you, Mr. Cohen, in remembrance of a highly interesting hour of spirits
Fred Hernfeld [later known as Alfred Farau]

·       You have predicted a dental abscess for a patient of mine, who never had had anything serious the matter with his teeth, a few weeks beforehand. This abscess has now been discovered by way of an x-ray being taken; it is a highly important center of infection.  Dr. R.W.

·       You have, by intuition, told me characteristic traits as well as facts of my own and my parents’ past; this shows your extraordinary gifts of clairvoyance; and I find you, also in other respects, a very interesting man.  Dr. L.D.

·       You draw away a dark curtain, and one gets a glimpse of a strange world - one’s own.  Dr. M.B.

·       I have, repeatedly, taken the opportunity of convincing myself of your gift as a clairvoyant; but you really are filled with human kindness and philosophical peace too; and this makes your phenomenal capacity of giving advice to the questioning human fellow-being such a boon. July 20, 1934

·       I came to you, on August 5, 1933, to ask you for your advice about a certain matter; I asked you, besides, whether you could not help my boy, eleven years old, who had been coughing terribly all the time since 1931; a thing which keeps him back in his schoolwork and is a disturbance to his surroundings. You refused my request at first, saying that you were not a physician. You advised me, at the same time, to consult a specialist. It was but after I told you that I had done everything possible, but without success, that I came to you, with my son, on August 7, 1933.  After having taken an imprint of his hand you said, in your smiling way: “Now look here: you are not allowed to cough anymore; do you hear?” to the boy. It is a fact that ever since that day, and up to now - June 10, 1936 - that is to say through three years, the boy has no longer been coughing, much to the surprise of the physicians in charge of his case. I am very happy, and very grateful for the help you have given me. August 5, 1933/June 10, 1936

·       He who knows you need never despair.                   June 7, 1936  

·       My dear Mr. Cohen, I want to write and thank you for your well-meant advice, and I am, at the same time, taking the liberty of replying to it. I write to you with all my heart. Just imagine that I am much better, physically. I often feel that you must have prayed God for me, or have done something else for my sake - and that this is the reason for which my condition has changed so much during the last time. Do you know, my dear Mr. Cohen, that I think of you almost every hour of my life. Whatever I start doing, I think within myself, is that a thing that I am permitted to do? What would Mr. Cohen, the physician of my soul, have to say about it? I always see you before me in my mind’s eye; you are with me wherever I go. I shall be grateful through all my life to Mrs. V. for having taken me to you. I pray to God that He may protect you from all blows of destiny, and that there shall be nothing but sunshine in your life. That is the wish that your grateful Mary feels for you. When I shall come to Vienna again, my first errand will be to come to you. You have great power over me; I constantly have the feeling that you are near me. If you will permit, I shall have much to tell you about. I have, of late, had a good appetite and been capable of enjoying everything again. All that which is within wants to get reconciled to God and men again. I believe that I owe my wonderful recovery to you.    November 12, 1933

·       I have, ever since the mandrake is in my possession, slept deeply through the entire night; a thing which had not occurred for almost a year; for the reason of the worries waking me up again and again.             April 11, 1936/April 16, 1936

·       Two specialists wanted my wife to undergo an operation in her belly; I was terribly frightened of it, as doctors said the case was a very grave one. I went to see you, and, without having seen my wife, you told me that the operation would be unnecessary, after having asked me for a few dates. I have since sent my wife to yet another specialist, who has cured her without the operation. If it had not been for you, my wife would have been operated on the next day (i.e. July 10, 1935). After a fortnight’s treatment she has since recuperated without the operation; and she is feeling very well to this day.                    November 11, 1935/November 14   

·       On the point of leaving Europe, I should like to send you a word of grateful memory and thanks for the wise advice you have given me to take with me on my new path - to start out on a new life. Greetings! June 21, 1935, Trieste.       

·       Having no job and being, consequently, very depressed, I went to see you at 5 o’clock this afternoon. I had lost all hope of finding a chance to earn in the course of the summer. You consoled me and said, literally: “It’ll be all right as time goes on; why don’t you spit out all your ill luck?!” Involuntarily, I acted accordingly, and lo! half an hour later, walking on the street, I ran into a manager whom I had not met until then, and who happened to be walking with a friend of mine; he gave me a contract with an unexpectedly high salary!         July 18, 1935.

·       I felt so unhappy during the night from January 29 to January 30 that I wanted to blow out the gas; just so I had to live no longer. Then I remembered that I won a mandrake - I took it into my hands - my weariness of living was over at this very moment. Then again in the night from February 18 to February 19, I could not go to sleep with exhaustion; I again took hold of the mandrake - I hardly had felt it in my hand when I went off to sleep. Again my little mandrake has helped me! February 19, 1937.            

May 11

11/5/1945

I received with a great pleasure your letter dated March 18/45. I am very happy to know you have got married. I hope he is a good person and will be to you a very good husband too. All my congratulations and my wishes of happiness, I think my parents told us to send theirs too, so do I.

Dear Eva, you may understand by that letter within mine that your mother is here at Istanbul. We were all very happy to know her and do you know my dear, we love her very much, she is nice and good; we often go to see her and she is nearly never alone during the week, but I myself can only see her once a week on Sunday for I work during the other days. She is as we are very anxious about uncle Vitali, I always try to distract her from bad ideas and I speak the more and more so that I think she has a headache after I am away.

We are very anxious about uncle Vitali but it’s just impossible to say that to aunt Helene so I am always lying when I am with her saying that I’m not anxious and that we’ll hear very soon about him. But do you know? I have a secret feeling that uncle Vitali is alive and healthy, it’s a strange idea perhaps but it’s very strong and according to my idea I am able to show a smiling face to your mother on this purpose.

I haven’t read your mother’s letter so I don’t know whether she wrote you about my steps in order to know about uncle Vitali. Look Eva, there is a very good person here to whom I spoke about uncle Vitali, I gave his name, address, block number and everything concerning him and told him to answer us where he is, and if they find him to declare that his wife is alive in Turkey and her relations saw her. Of course we need very much time for it but dear we must never forget that nothing is impossible under the sun and that as long as we have the hope of being helped God will always be with us.

What about Harry? Do you continually receive news of him? I hope they are very good. Please give him all my love when you write a letter. Don’t be anxious about your mother, she is with us and we’ll never let her alone. With the hope of hearing very soon good news about uncle Vitali and that as soon as war is over forever you’ll be again the whole family all alive and healthy. 

I remain yours faithfully
Lisette

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It appears that Lisette sent Helene’s letter from May 10 along with her own. As I have mentioned before, I do not have a family tree for Vitali’s family. She was probably the daughter of one of his sisters. Lisette echoes what we learned from Helene yesterday – that Vitali’s relatives made sure to keep her company in her first weeks in Istanbul. They tried to keep her spirits up and lied to her about whatever they thought might worry her. As usual, I am so impressed by Lisette’s fluency in English - we learned from Eva’s letters from Istanbul in 1939 that the Turkish relatives were most comfortable communicating in French and Spanish.

I often wondered why Helene and her children were so certain that they would eventually be reunited with Vitali. Lisette and at least one other person whose letters I have wrote with great confidence that they were sure Vitali was alive and well and would be joining them soon which probably gave some credence to their wishful thinking. He seems to have been such a strong personality that it was difficult to imagine him gone without a trace. In 1988 when Vitali would have been 100 years old, my mother finally said that she supposed her father would not be showing up on her doorstep.

Here is a photo from 1945 from cousin Lili in Istanbul. I assume that was Lisette’s nickname.

April 7

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships. 

It wasn’t until near the end of his life that Harry decided to share with his sons and me some of the more difficult memories of his childhood. One day, newspaper articles and documents magically emerged from the depths of his closet. The article below is from a Viennese newspaper dated April 7, 1939. We will see a much different article later in the year written 1934, where Vitali and the shop are painted in a much more positive light. Just a few weeks after this article was published, Eva and Harry made their way to Istanbul in order to obtain passports to go to the U.S.

Vitali kept the article and had it translated. It became part of the packet of documents he hoped would prove that he would be able to earn a living in the U.S. We have seen a few letters from Paul Zerzawy where he tries to disabuse Vitali of this notion. The translation below was made by someone in Vienna in 1939. For some reason, the 1939 translation did not include the first paragraph.

I could not find much information on this newspaper – as evidenced from the tone of the article, it appears to be a work of Nazi propaganda. Although the article says he has been in Vienna “a few years”, he had lived in Vienna since 1919. Nowhere in the article does it mention that the stationery store had been in existence for decades. Helene worked there long before she met Vitali.

1939 translation

THE DARK AGES ON THE STUBENRING.
HOCUS-POKUS AND QUACKERY FROM
TORAH AND TALMUD.

It is unbelievable which sums flow, even still today, into the pockets of those beneficiaries of delusion who know how to play themselves up as experts on the so-called fourth dimension and lure weak-willed people. The business of spiritists, alchemists and occultists, even down to the quack on the corner, is doing famously. Every week, thousands of reichsmarks are poured down the insatiable throats of Egyptian hill dream interpreters. Money that would truly be worth spending on something better.

“ABANDON NOT HOPE - TURN TO ME!” There is one Jew who goes to work with an almost incredible amount of cynicism. He is cleverly camouflaged as a paper and stationery dealer on the Stubenring, opposite the former Ministry for War…..and he exploits his victims - and that in broad daylight - in the most unbelievable fashion. This Jew who boasts the typical name of Cohen (Kohn) has come to Vienna but a few years ago. Shortly after his arrival, he sets himself up as a stationer on the Stubenring. But the business did not go well. Then some time later, the Jew had a new brain-wave, which helped his business. He divided the shop in two halves; he had a part closed away in the background and papered with black paper. Egyptian and Turkish, as well as Assyrian hieroglyphs were painted - as uncannily as possible - and in gilt, on the walls. In this dark chamber there is a rickety table, on which he placed a worm-eaten magic folio. Two chairs complete the room, in which the spirits are called upon, and which is reminiscent of the witches’ kitchen in the scenic railway in the Prater. A few “letters of thanks” from clients, plastered in the shop-window, completed the outfit, and the business-like Jew had a few packages of booklets entitled “ABANDON NOT HOPE - TURN TO ME!” printed. And the swindle could start at full speed.

H.S.M. Cohen was soon well-known among women: known as clairvoyant, palm-reader, soothsayer, astrologer and magic healer. Daily did H.S.M. Cohen “heal” persons suffering from kidney-diseases, as well as diabetes or intestinal diseases by his healing hands, ay, he even managed to bring broken and stiff legs to move again…… Even to this day, the Jew is giving out regular “diagnoses”, and he hypnotizes his pitiful victims into feeling pains, which they do not have at all. For all this, the “doctor with the magic baton” requests twenty marks for every “session.” A certain type of strolling smear [sic] Jewish physicians even have written complementary letters to this public injurer. One of them says: “Mr. Cohen has predicted an abscess in the teeth to a patient, who never actually had a toothache. This abscess was now stated by way of an x-ray, but it has never caused any discomforts. Dr. R.W. assistant at the polyclinic”

GHOST AS CURRENCY AGENTS. Now, how should this man, who is so powerful in the world of the spirits, who can Nero and Napoleon and Ahasver’s father-in-law talk at will, who can heal imaginary diseases, fail to be an A1 lawyer also? Thus a Jew states the fact (reprinted among his complementary letters) that “his money which has been confiscated in Germany had been given back to him, without his having asked for it. F.S. October 2, 1935.” Or, another example: “you have given me an amulet, and I have, right after, seen my mother again in a dream, and she has given me the necessary inspiration to make new connections (new business) which have, up to the present, proved successful. R.K.”

This wizard also interferes in matters of law, and predicts the result of lawsuits at 20 marks apiece. And in order to keep his business from suffering any standstill, he has added the trade with mandrakes to his assets.

How much disaster must this Jew, who sails under the flag of Turkish citizenship, already have brought upon weak-willed people in our own city! Like a vulture waiting for a victim, he walks, slowly, up and down in his shop, until some curious soul gets enabled in his “letters of thanks.” Then the Jew comes slowly nearer, and bores his eyes into the passer-by. If this happens to be a weak-willed individual, he will be intimidated, and follow into the shop, where the Jew will predict an illness for him, but, at the same time, call his attention to the fact that he might, in the course of the afternoon, pay a visit to his “cabinet of spirits” where, against 20 marks, and by way of his healing hands, he will on the spot, free him from the lurking disease.

How much longer will the ghost haunt the “chamber of spirits of H.S.M. Cohen? And how much longer are poor individuals going to be bled there?

Saturday, April 8th 1939
“VOLKSZEITUNG”, Vienna.
(“People’s Paper)

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My mother and Harry spoke of their father with awe and respect. They always mentioned the many languages he could speak. Although they never talked about their father’s metaphysical activities, they told us that many people, some of them quite influential, came to seek his advice. The subheading “Abandon not hope – turn to me!” is taken from the front of Vitali’s “business card,” a folded sheet with dozens of testimonials from satisfied customers – sort of Yelp reviews of the time. Although the article talks of Vitali taking in unsuspecting women, the majority of the testimonials are by men.

Vitali working at the back of the stationery shop

March 20

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

 Today we have two letters written on the same day.

Front side of Helene’s letter to her son Harry.

Vienna, 19. March 1940.

My only little Harry boy.

In what I sent to Eva, you will have realized how few pieces of news get through from you and you see how hungry I am for even the littlest bit. If I did not have my imagination, which allows me to imagine what you’re doing, I would have to be very sad. Papa is trying his hardest to distract me and he is such a good person. For other reasons I am looking forward to Sunday because the following day is Monday and I might have a chance to get some mail that day. Last Monday brought us a letter from Eva but the fact that you’re worrying about us and doing things for us is making me sad. No sense in worrying. It’s not in the cards - it would be so easy to solve the problem that we are separated from you - but that would not even be normal. Parents are always interested in what their children’s lives are about. One of the oldest things in the order of the world, which nowadays has really come into a certain amount of disorder. I feel like I am a country cousin who is sitting at the train station hours before the train is scheduled, waiting for the train. The waiting period seems so long, but finally I hear the whistling of the locomotive. The heart pounds a bit more and you get to your destination. 

How are you doing in school? Do you have nice classmates and what do you do in your free time? Easter is just around the corner, are you going to work as a clerk again? When I imagine you doing this job, I think about all the Hanseatic books once occupied my imagination. From “should and have” started to “Max Havelar.” We live in our world of thoughts and that’s not really such bad company.

Your letters are the only thing we have to read because we don’t really have to concentrate on those.

Yesterday I wanted to go to procure for E&H Lowell some shaving cream for Papa for March 21 [Vitali’s birthday] but our account was overdrawn. We have an advance until July and so can’t really buy anything.

Yesterday, there was a family scene and I thought about the fact that you were not here really didn't think it was possible to win the following fight without help. I wanted to get Papa’s nightgown, the one with the Indian pattern, to be washed because you could barely see the design anymore. But Vitali went wild and was making crazy gestures. I had to laugh how he was defending his piece of clothing and I could almost not win this battle. He was afraid that washing his nightgown might ruin its “elegance” and the expression on his face was so fearful that I promised he could borrow my morning parade outfit. That lasted 1/4 hour and then his nightgown with its one-time Indian pattern was indeed sent out to be cleaned. My promise was kind of a ruse because I knew Papa wouldn’t be able to use my clothing because it wouldn’t fit him. He didn’t take me at my word but he bought himself another one for the points he still had so he could change and he’s quite proud of his new acquisition. It was a really nice Busch family scene. Unfortunately, I can’t use your camera. That’s too bad because you would have gotten a kick out of this. What is your Baldina doing? Is she working? Is she out of a job? Not making movies anymore? It seems like maybe she’d make 5 schillings, but that seems unlikely.

I’m glad that my waiting will bring me the reward of a detailed letter. I will soon join the ranks of classic “waiting women” like Penelope, Solveigh, etc.

So that’s it for today, greetings to all the dear ones.

Kuuuuuuuuuss

Helen

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Front side of letter from Helene to Paul Zerzawy

(handwritten note that it was received April 3)

Vienna, 19. March 1940.

My dear Paul! I assume that you did not just leave it at the one card from November 4 and that letters from you and from the children are still on their way. So I am answering one of these imaginary letters. Please excuse me if I don’t respond to any questions that you might have asked. You can’t really accuse me of superficiality in this case.

If I were to give you a description of our days you could be forbidden to fish because you are yawning so much. That’s why I can only assure you that it’s not an easy task to go from being quite busy to being forced to do nothing. Well, doing nothing is not quite the right expression because my time is really taken up with cooking, washing the dishes and the laundry, straightening up, and other kinds of housework. However I have enough leisure during these activities to think about a lot of things. This thinking is what reminds me in a painful way that in our matter we must take consciousness of our situation. In addition, there’s the matter of the mail dragging along and that just makes me have dark thoughts. But I don’t want to foist off my melancholy mood on you. It goes away as soon as I get one of those letters that’s on the way.

Now you’ve been in San Francisco for 5 months already and we only know from you that you’ve arrived well, you live at Bertha’s house, and that you are studying language with Hilda and paying for it by the clearing certificate. That’s quite a bit, isn’t it?

For the care of my children in New York I have not really thanked you, because I only recently found out from a letter from Harry from October 21 in what a selfless way you cared for the children. I will make up for all of this and I hope that I can pay back all the love that was shown to my children.

I am afraid I have today against my will have let myself go here and I hope I haven’t ruined your mood. Sometimes one is so melancholy and it would be better to not write letters when one is feeling that way, but today is the last day for Clipper post. Even though I know that it will still lay around, I don’t want it to be my fault that you are delayed in getting mail.

Paul, get yourself together and write me a very, very detailed general report. Maybe send it as a package so it’ll be cheaper.

I am wishing all the best for you. I am your

Helen

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Although written on the same day, the letters posted today were translated 18 months apart — we get a fuller picture when both are read together. Like the letters from March 17, Helene’s letters to her son Harry and to her nephew Paul were very different. To Harry she tells a story of family life filled with literary references. To Paul, she is much more direct. We learn that Paul met Eva and Harry when they arrived in New York and how he helped them make their way to San Francisco.

Helene’s likening herself to the “waiting women” of myth and literature paints a vivid picture. From a summary of characters from Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, “Solveig, Peer’s ideal love, always beautiful and always patient. Although she grows old and almost blind while waiting for Peer’s return, she has power to defy the Button Moulder by her belief that her faith and love reveal the real Peer. She seems to represent love, holy and remote but everlasting.” Edvard Grieg wrote music to accompany the play, including “Solveig’s Song.”

Even when asking Harry about his job as a clerk (probably for the Levy-Zentner wholesale fruit and vegetable company), she brings in references to old international merchant and trading companies and efforts, painting a more interesting picture than the mere title “clerk” would do.