January 4

Feldpost 211, 4 January 1918

My dear ones!

Yesterday I received together letters from Robert, Helene and Kätherl. Today I received a card from Papa from the 26th. 

I see from these that my letter has reached you all together in Brüx and I expect your response at any moment. I will write therefore immediately, even though nothing new has happened. About my well-being, do not have any worries. I am splendidly healthy.

Kissing you all,

Paul

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Paul Zerzawy was Helene’s nephew, eldest son of her sister Ida. Paul was born in 1895, his mother died in childbirth in 1902 leaving four children under the age of 7. Paul’s father married Mathilde, another of Helene’s sisters in 1903 and in 1904 Käthe, his half sister, was born. Mathilde died in 1910 and it appears that Helene’s mother raised her grandchildren after their mothers (her daughters) died.  

When I heard Paul’s name as a child, I assumed that he was a distant relative. I probably felt this way because he was so much older than my mother – he was already 25 when my mother was born in 1921. He was far closer in age to my grandmother, yet he was my mother’s first cousin. He died long before I was born so I felt no connection to him.

Over the past few years, I feel I have gotten to know Paul – he is an integral part of the family story. He saved many letters and documents that have helped me understand all that happened. While she was stuck in Vienna hoping to follow her children to the U.S., my grandmother’s letters to him were more direct and less protective than those she wrote to Eva and Harry. He played an important role in helping her children come to San Francisco and tried his best to help Helene and Vitali follow.

When I was going through the papers in Harry’s closet in 2017, I found a box that looked like it contained a stash of my grandmother’s letters. I was so excited because it promised to be a window into her world. However, I ended up being disappointed because although there were some of her letters, a large part of the box was taken up with correspondence from Paul Zerzawy and his brother Erich that they wrote as soldiers during World War I. It was fascinating to know I had letters that were 100 years old, but they felt very tangential to the family members I cared about. Fortunately, an incredible trove of my grandmother’s letters was still to be unearthed!

Most of the letters from WWI were written in Sütterlin, an old German handwriting style that is impossible to read if you were not trained in it. Unfortunately, the friend who translated hundreds of documents for me does not know Sütterlin. At the end of 2020, I met someone who could translate these letters. Little did she or I know that I would suddenly need some letters translated immediately! I contacted her for the first time in early December and she translated a few letters. By mid-December I decided to write this daily blog and realized that some of the WWI letters were dated in early January. I asked her to translate them ASAP and she was incredibly obliging. Fortunately, these letters were brief and I am able to post the first one today.

Letter written in Sütterlin handwriting.

Even a letter as short as this one from January 4, 1918 offers insight into my grandmother’s life and world. In 1917, she had already been living in Vienna on her own for many years. Here she was in Brüx, Bohemia (now called Most in the Czech Republic), apparently spending the holidays with her mother, brother-in-law, niece and nephew.

One challenge in organizing the letters is one that is less a problem today when our computers and phones automatically date things correctly. As we go into a new year, it is sometimes difficult to remember to write the correct year. You’ll notice that the date written on the letter is 1917, but the postmark above is 1918. Easy enough to fix if you have a postmark. Unfortunately the envelopes are missing from most of my grandmother’s letters, so we must rely on context for them.

Contemplating Loss

Over the past few months of shelter in place, I have spent many hours reading through my grandmother’s papers. Sometimes I feel as though I am experiencing life in the past and present simultaneously.

As the number of Covid-19 deaths in the US have reached almost 160,000, I have been thinking about the number of lives cut short, the loss to their families and friends, the contributions to the world that will never be. At the same time, I have a deeper understanding of my grandmother’s family and the amount of loss she suffered over almost a century.

One thing that strikes me is that many of us in the first world have had the luxury of not having to face much loss in our lives, sometimes “only” losing family members and friends who have lived to a ripe old age. That wasn’t the case for my grandmother or indeed for most people of her generation. Death and loss were sad, but not unusual.

Helene was the youngest child born in 1886 to Adolph and Rosa Löwy. My mother told me that Rosa had 13 pregnancies, but most of the children died in childbirth or infancy. As a child, Helene knew her sisters Ida, Matilde, Clara, Irma, and Flora, and her brother Max. As far as I can tell, by 1918, Helene’s only surviving sibling was her brother Max, although I’m not even sure of that.

Ida married Julius Zerzawy in 1894 and died in 1902 following a miscarriage, leaving 4 young children behind. Ida’s death had a devastating effect on the Löwy family — Rosa and Matilda left the family home to take care of the Zerzawy children, leaving only young Helene with her father. Matilde married Julius in 1903, becoming stepmother to her nephews and niece, and had a daughter Käthe in 1904. Matilde died in 1910. By 1918, Helene’s only surviving nephews were Paul and Robert. Her nieces died in 1916 and 1918 and her nephew Erich died as a prisoner of war in Eastern Siberia in 1918. By that time, young Paul and Robert had lost 3 siblings, their mother, and their stepmother. As a soldier, Paul no doubt had experienced even more loss.

After several happy years with Vitali and her children, Helene again faced tremendous loss when she sent her children away to safety in America. Then came four years of worrying about them and watching her opportunity to follow become nothing more than a dream. Then separation from Vitali as they were sent to Ravensbrück and Buchenwald, and she was never to see her husband again. Finally she came to America, was reunited with her children.

In 1939, Helene’s nephews Paul and Robert made their way to the US and England, respectively. I cannot imagine the loss and disconnect they felt as they left the old world behind to start anew in a different country and a different language, leaving in Vienna their Aunt Helene, their only surviving blood relative. Paul worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to bring Helene and Vitali to San Francisco. Although a lawyer by training, he eked out a living in San Francisco as a piano teacher, dying in 1948 at the age of only 53. His brother Robert died in London in 1967. Helene survived them both.

What would it be like to lose everyone and everything? I am in awe of my grandmother’s resilience facing loss, rebuilding her life, and finding ways to continue in the face of such tragedy and loss.

Helene - clever from the beginning

Helene was a clever, curious, articulate child. It sounds like her older sisters were much less interested in language and wordplay. She was the youngest of a large family, so her oldest sister Ida was quite a bit older than Helene. Thus, Helene became an aunt while she was still a child herself. Ida’s first child, Paul Zerzawy, was born in 1895, when Helene was about 9 years old. Helene ended up being Paul’s and his brothers’ babysitter, and had a very maternal feeling for them throughout their lives, despite their closeness in age.

Helene’s older sister Ida

In a (translated) letter to Paul in San Francisco from Helene in Vienna on March 6, 1941, she wrote the following memory of a young Paul. As with many of her letters at the time, the main point was to ask her nephew why he didn’t write more often.

Dear Paul! Your mother [Ida, Helen’s sister] calls my entry into this veil of tears a bad joke. When my father on 23 November 18.. [would have been 1886] awakened her with the words, “Get up Ida, you now have a little sister,” she turned over on the other side and said, half asleep, “Dad, I’m used to more delicate jokes from you.” She did manage to come to terms with my appearance, but she also decided to raise me in a very strict way, in order to compensate for the errors of the other siblings who spoiled me endlessly. So, for example, she didn’t let me eat too much when there was something particularly good. Later she didn’t let me read the books that made my son [Harry] blush despite Eva’s tales of working in the hospital. Ida seemed to me to have come into the world to not let me have any fun, I often thought. But I got back at her when you appeared on the scene and were spoiled much more. The “Look Ida, look what Paul can do,” was unending, and your poor mother fought against six aunts, an uncle, and a beloved pair of grandparents to let the child be. When another one came and reported to her that the wonderboy Paul had learned something amazing, she explained to us that she wanted a healthy, normal child, not a wonder child. Ida’s “spleen” was incomprehensible to all of us, especially to me who had the ambition to teach you everything I knew even though you weren’t even school age yet, which Ida had forbidden me to do. Why should I not get back at Ida because she’d always forbidden me to do what I wanted to do? I pretended that I had taught you to read. I took a book from Father’s library. It was an example book of typefaces from the company Schelter und Giesecke in Leipzig, and in this there were samples of the most delicate “Nonparaille” [apparently a small typeface] to the thickest letters for a poster and every time there was printed the following litany: “God gave us the spirit.” I decided to go get you and say “Paul, look, here it says ‘God gave us the spirit’” and I turned to another page and I explained to you again “and here it also says ‘God gave us the spirit.’ When your mother asks you ‘what does it say here?’, what are you going to say?” And you answered bravely: “God gave us the spirit.” You got an Indian donut [apparently a pastry from the 19th century - looked like a cream puff] from me and my older siblings kept a lookout when I took you by the hand and went to see Mother. “Ida, Paul already knows how to read!” Ida, who would imagine I could do anything except anything good, practically threw a crying fit and said: “I told you not to drill the child.” I did not step out of character and I took the book and said “Paul, what does it say here?” “God gave us the spirit.” Ida took the book from my hand and opened it to a different page and asked you “what does it say here?” And you answered “It also says ‘God gave us the spirit.’” Ida was getting suspicious and then she took the Neue Freie Presse [Viennese newspaper] that was right in front of her and asked you, “what does it say here Paulchen?” and you said, “God gave us the spirit.” Ida was so happy that I had only taught you to “read” that I didn’t get punished that time. So why am I telling you that? Wouldn’t it have been better if I had taught you to write? Then maybe I would have gotten a letter from you every now and then. If that were the case, then well look I would have answered your questions succinctly and I wouldn’t have to make such long introductions to my writing. Maybe you should just write to yourself. So pull yourself together and return the favor. If it weren’t for this reading instruction, at least you could thank me for the pastry. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. Vitali wants to play Tric-Trac [a backgammon-like game] so I am delivering you from the evil, Amen.
Affectionately
Helen

From Paul Zerzawy’s photo album. Probably Bilin in the early 1900’s. Helene’s mother (and thus, Paul' Zerzawy’s grandmother, as well as the grandmother of Helene’s children Harry and Eva who will be born almost 20 years later) is the older woman on the left in the back. Helene is the young woman second from the right. Possibly Paul Zerzawy is the boy in the middle reading - which by that age he actually was able to do!

Young Helene

Helene was a precocious and voracious reader and an aspiring writer from an early age. She hung around her father’s print shop and wanted to write for his weekly newspaper, the Biela-Zeitung. After coming to the United States, Helene wrote down some of her childhood memories.

An early issue of Adolf Löwy’s weekly newspaper.

Helene was the youngest of a large family and seems to have been her father’s pet. Her sister Ida was much older and her eldest son Paul was born when Helene was 9. Although her nephews were closer to siblings in age to her, Helene thought of them throughout their lives as contemporaries of her own children (who were decades younger than their cousins!). Three of her nephews were soldiers in World War I and wrote many letters home to their family, even as prisoners of war. By then, Helene was living in Vienna.

Postcard from Helene’s nephew Erich from Russian prisoner of war camp in 1917.