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 12

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

In the August 8 post we saw a letter from Robert Zerzawy written on August 11 in German to his aunt Helene. Today’s letter was written the following day in English to his cousin Eva. Perhaps he wasn’t sure how much German Eva remembered.

12 August 1964

Dear Eva,

Yesterday I posted a letter to Helen. I didn’t find the time to address you at the same day as I had in mind. I had also first to read over our last correspondence to try and find out where we stopped the last time and how far we are informed about each other in very broad outlines. What I found is a charming letter from you dated 10th April 1963 adorned by a delightful snap of Paul’s of Helen, i.e. Helen-Rose, on her fourth birthday. I just remember with a shock that I completely forgot her birthday in March which is a shame and at the same time symptomatic for my state of mind. We agreed once that our birthdays are useful links in our contact – moral impulses without which there is the risk that any communication might stagnate. Alas, you did not respond to my request for disclosing your exact age – I somehow mislaid the note of your birthday. You didn’t reach the stage where you might wish to conceal it. Which leaves the explanation that you want to protect me from committing myself. That’s nice of you but I take the risk. So please let me know and give us the treble chance to write each other within a calendar year.

My letter to Helen (senior) must have sounded very dry and factual. It is difficult to write if one knows so little about each other’s life, environment and happenings – that’s why I appeal to you to inform me with a few lines about your mother’s health and doings. I trust you will bring me at the same time a little up to date about the Goldsmiths and Lowells in general and Helen Rose in particular. – I wished she could pay me a visit as she wanted to do on a first impulse. We shall have to wait for a few years. Instead of it I got quite some visitors who bring the past back. The other day a couple from Valparaiso turned up whom I had seen in Brüx [now Most] 42 years ago and today a girl phoned to bring me greetings from Hermann Zerzawy from Vienna. She is herself a Zerzawy by birth from the “aryan” lineage around Brünn [now Brno]. – Hilda had unexpectedly sent a Xmas card from San Francisco with a hint that she might come to Europe. I had hoped that she might then bring some news from you but so far she hasn’t turned up. Is she still in San Francisco and what are her latest exploits?

Last but least, I should like to know how you are getting on. In your professional life as well as in the home. And I fear it will mean an effort but I hope you do it all the same.

With my love to you all,

Robert

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As with many things in my archive, although this letter refers to another letter, they were found in 2 different locations. My mother Eva kept this letter, which had ended up together with a letter from 1966, so it was only recently that I figured out which pages went with which year. Eva’s brother Harry saved his mother’s correspondence, which included the August 11 letter.

In this letter, Robert speaks of forgetting to send a note on my 4th birthday in March of 1963. I assume he is referring to the photo below taken by my father (who used his middle name Paul in the U.S., just to confuse things).

Robert’s letter tells us that the cousins made a “pact” to mark birthdays in order to make sure they kept in touch –the more birthdays to be celebrated, the more connected they would feel. Yet, here it was, more than a year since their previous contact.

Harry and Eva had far less of a connection to Robert than to his brother Paul. He was more than 20 years older, and never lived in Vienna or the U.S. with them.

It’s nice to see that Robert maintained connections to people from their past. We saw a letter to Hermann Zerzawy in the April 23 post.

August 2

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today’s letter from Helene bears the same Clipper and censorship numbers as the one we saw on July 29, confirming her complaint about her “untrue Vitali.”

Vienna, 2 August 1940

My dear children! The untrue Vitali did not mail my letter from the 30th, which annoys me because letters which one does not write or send cannot arrive. But there are so many of them on the way that a disruption in our news cannot be assumed. The situation that I have taken a half sheet you can figure out that I don’t have anything new to say or have very little to report to you. All of my thoughts are concentrated only on the one idea that there must be some letters because of the intensity that something must have gotten through. Eva’s last letter is still the one from July 3rd, from our nobleman from June 10. To be condemned to such passivity is a very unpleasant thing and harder to learn than any other subject you might study. So I’m doing some remedial work on what I didn’t have time to do over the past few years and I am reading a great deal. My intellectual pursuits are with Leonardo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and their contemporaries. As you see I am living in the deepest Middle Ages. Papa is doing the same thing, but the difference for him is that he has done this for years and I’m more like someone just starting school. I really had to figure out how to hold a book. It’s a lot harder to read when you hold the book upside down in your hand. The weather of the last week was so unfriendly that I preferred to stay home and can vegetables for the winter. Vitali was very industrious in helping me because you can’t just read all the time. So with these two completely different activities - one for the mind and one not - I am perhaps more inclined toward the last. At least you have a way to leave your thoughts free and the thoughts come right to you. The day before yesterday I promised my mother in a dream that I would not leave her behind and that I would stay here. In the morning I regretted my premature promise. Jo’s visits have become less regular. They are almost more like irregular rather than regular. She did come rather irregularly but several times a day. Now she shows up every 2-3 days. But we do see each other every day because she walks by to go shopping and I am on the balcony waiting for the mailman. (This is how I spend my time these days.) She has probably seen enough of my face from this distance. The paper is about to run out, so kisses

Mutti

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Helene feels that her life is on hold. Her only desire is to join her children in San Francisco, but the way is not clear. In her dreams, she struggles with the idea of leaving her past behind. Daily life is difficult and becomes more isolated each day. Her only joy is receiving mail, but it rarely arrives. I imagine her standing on one of the balconies below, awaiting the postman — this is the building they lived in in Vienna. (photo courtesy of Corry Guttstadt).

The building on Seidlgasse where Helene, Vitali, Eva, and Harry lived.

Helene’s comments remind me of how I’ve felt during the last 18 months of near isolation due to the restrictions of the pandemic. Although I had the best of intentions to improve my mind and to be productive, in the first few months especially, I found it difficult to concentrate. I didn’t can vegetables, but I did discover the joys of sourdough!

July 24

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today we remember Paul Zerzawy, Helene’s beloved nephew.

Paul was born on October 2, 1895 and died on July 24, 1948 at the age of 53. He was born in Bilin in Bohemia, as had been his mother and aunt. He was a soldier in Romania in World War I, survived the 1918 flu, lived and worked as an attorney in Vienna, and came to the U.S. in 1939. He helped his young cousins come to the US and tried in vain to help their parents do so. He found it difficult to make a living in his new home. He was unable to establish himself as an attorney, but found that he could make use of his musical avocation.

The doctor who signed Paul’s death certificate was Dr. Gropper. I remember that name because Dr. Marc Gropper was my mother’s physician until he retired. Like my mother, he was born in Europe and his family escaped Vienna in 1938 and eventually landed in San Francisco. Although he would have been too young to have been a doctor in 1948, his father was also a doctor so it appears that his family cared for mine for decades.

When Paul came to San Francisco, his mother’s cousin Hilda and her husband Nathan Firestone welcomed him into their home. Nathan died in 1943. Paul’s will shows how grateful he was to Hilda for all she had done for him.

As I was preparing this post, it occurred to me to look for an obituary for Paul. I found it in the San Francisco Examiner. In addition, I found two brief items mentioning him in earlier editions of the Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle.

His death notice on page 11 of the July 26, 1948 issue of the Examiner reads:

“ZERZAWY – In this city, July 24, 1948. Paul Zerzawy, cousin of Mrs. Nathan Firestone; a native of Czechoslovakia, aged 52 years. A member of Musicians’ Union, Local No. 6.”

 Although the newspaper lists his age as 52, he was 53 at the time of his death.

On page 50 of the February 25, 1940 issue of the Examiner in the “Music and Art World” section, a small advertisement appears:

“New Piano Studio. Formerly of Vienna and Prague, Paul Zerzawy has opened at the Heine Piano Company, 279 O’Farrell Street, a piano studio for instruction, for coaching in ensemble and for accompaniment.”

On page 55 of the May 11, 1941 Chronicle, an item on a meeting of the National Council of Jewish Women mentioned that Paul Zerzawy would be a “guest musician” during the intermission of a presentation.

My mother often spoke of the musical evenings she enjoyed as a child at their home in Vienna. I now realize that the music was often supplied by her older cousin Paul. Fortunately, his love of music and avocation of playing piano allowed him to make at least a meager income in San Francisco.

In item 4 of his will, Paul leaves his personal effects to Hilda and his brother Robert in England, and indicates that whatever is left should be destroyed. Under item 6, he states: “I assume that Hilda will contact my cousins Eva Goldsmith and Harry Lowell to find out if there is anything of interest to them.” Eva kept Paul’s photo albums and official papers and Harry kept a box with copies of letters and loose photographs. Paul’s gifts to our family in life and in death were invaluable.

July 23

Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today we have another letter from Helene in Vienna to her children in San Francisco. When the children came to the U.S., they were split up and sent to live with different relatives and attend different high schools.

Vienna, 23 July 1940

My dear children. It’s not easy for me to write to you today because I am very worried about Harry because I haven’t heard a single line from him. On the other hand, I don’t want to worry you or fill your heads with worry if it’s just a matter of a disreputable postal service, so you must keep in mind that I am worried and try to put yourself in my shoes, even if just for a few moments. Time is really dragging from one postal delivery to the next and the disappointed hopes when no letter arrives cause an emptiness which is quite agonizing. My attempts to form a halfway reasonable thought are not going to be as successful today. However, just to reassure you about how we are doing, I do assure you that we are healthy and everything is going fine except for the agonizing worry which does disappear when the writing from little Harry will appear, which we so desire. In lighter moments I say to myself that Eva’s dear little letter of the 3rd of this month is so filled with happiness that the thought that there could be anything wrong with Harry is absurd. But then come the evil thoughts like demons and they whisper to me: “How does Eva know how Harry is doing because they’re not together anymore?” I feel sorry for Papa who has to put up with my presence on such days. He really earns my admiration.

There’s a little showpiece from our wax figure shop: an old man, forgive the expression, but the man was old, even for an old man - he was closer to 100 than 90. He came into the store, trembling and halting, asked for a postcard of Egypt. While Papa was sticking Ramses into an envelope, the old guy said “One more time I’d like to climb up on a pyramid and spit on the entire world.” When Papa asked him “why do you want to go to so much trouble?”, he put his treasure in his pocket, coughing, he said his goodbyes and he left the store, and in his mind he was probably already back in the land of the Pharaohs. There’s got to be some sort of philosophy of life implied in this wish of the old man - to spit on the entire world, well, sure that’s a very freeing thought! I really can’t do anything more today. Maybe there’s mail from you on Friday and I will make everything right again. Please write in detail and soon and please say hello to all of our dear ones most sincerely.

In love,
Your Mutti
Helen

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There is a handwritten note at the top that numbers this Letter as #42 since 2 letters were sent that were numbered #39. However, I do not have a #39 in my archive. We saw 2 letters with Clipper No. 40 in the post on July 19 — perhaps that is what Helene meant. Or perhaps letters #39 never made it to their destination.

As with the July 19 post, we have a window into the non-metaphysical world of Helene and Vitali’s stationery shop Libansky & Co, eking out a living selling pencil sharpeners and picture postcards.

Harry was a bit of a hoarder, but only in one room and more I think from a sense that everything could come in handy and that one never knows when you’ll need to escape and will have no resources. Not a surprising attitude, given his life experience. My mother Eva was similar. Neither Eva nor Harry were very good at organizing their possessions with any rhyme or reason. They tossed odd assortments of things into boxes and put them “away”, rarely being able to find something that had been put into a safe place. The boxes might have letters, photos, paper clips, pens, pads of paper, knick knacks, etc. Like a little box of treasure. Which my cousins and I thought of as junk.

In the last few years of Harry’s life, I helped him organize his things. I didn’t have a lot of hope about making progress, but it was a wonderful excuse to spend time with him. I made him promise not to throw out important papers or photos, and he kept that promise, as evidenced by this blog. He held out the prospect of our going through the photos one day when we were “done,” something I realized we’d never be.

On one of our sorting sessions, we came across the small leather portfolio in the photo below. It was in great condition and I didn’t think much of it. Something he’d hung onto but seemed ready to let go of. I was eager to add it to the pile to go to the thrift shop. However, when I opened the portfolio, there was the label, which meant nothing to me. Harry off-handedly mentioned that the label was from his parents’ shop in Vienna. I had never known the name and suddenly this worthless item was priceless to me. I took it home to keep it safe, so it wouldn’t be thrown back into a box of stuff, perhaps never to be unearthed again.

Below is a page of stationery stores from the 1925 phone book from Vienna. At the bottom of the left column, my grandmother’s name is listed as the proprietor of Libansky & Co. (highlighted in green)

February 13

Family Trees

As I’ve mentioned before, my mother Eva and her brother Harry didn’t make it easy for their children to ask questions about the past. I knew the names Hilda, Tillie, Bertha, Paul and Robert and that they were somehow related to us. I’d seen a few photos and heard a few stories, but all of these people seemed very distant from me.

In the mid-1990s, my mother got a phone call from a man who was married to a woman who was related to my grandmother’s side of the family. He was putting together a family tree and was very meticulous. Now that I’ve spent time poring over the tree, I am in awe of the work he did, particularly in the early days of the internet when very little would have been available online. He asked my mother and Harry a lot of questions about what they knew about the Löwy side of the family. To my surprise, both Eva and Harry were very forthcoming with this stranger who lived hundreds of miles away. I guess it was a lot easier to talk to him about facts than to talk to my cousins and me about their memories.

The letter below is a copy of one she wrote to clarify some points on the tree. Jon did an incredible job, including footnotes with stories and memories of all the people he interviewed. I now know things I’d never heard that he learned from my mother!

 A few things about this letter – like her mother, Eva used a typewriter (a good thing, since her handwriting was virtually illegible) and made this carbon copy for her files. She tells of the serendipity of finding Helene’s memoirs – she moved a bookcase and voilà! I have been amazed at how often serendipity or fate has seemed to play a role in my journey. I’m glad to see I am following in my mother’s footsteps.

One more thing about this letter. You’ll notice that she remembers clearly that Helene’s mother Rosa was born in 1848 – she says she recalls that because it was an important date in Austrian history. This week I spoke with a genealogist in Prague to ask him to help clarify some of the family dates that have eluded me, whether because I couldn’t find them online, I couldn’t do the research since the sites weren’t in English, or the information is only available in physical form. The first thing he did was find information on Rosa’s grave and the year of her birth – 1844, not 1848! As he told me, he likes to rely on facts rather than people’s memories. My mother was absolutely certain the year was 1848.

I was overwhelmed by the family tree Jon created – it is 21 pages long - just a few of the pages are related to my immediate family. Now that I’ve spent time poring over the document, I am incredibly grateful for the trove of information he had compiled and shared. Unfortunately, when I tried to contact him to thank him for all his hard work and tell him how valuable it was, I discovered he had died the year before.

Excerpt from 1997 family tree

The other family tree I have was in Paul Zerzawy’s papers. This was also a challenge to follow, especially since out of 6 pages, only 2 really pertained to me and the entire document was in German. From the page listing Julius Zerzawy’s dates and marriages, I learned the identity of Elise Zerzawy (red mark next to her name) and her son Fritz Orlik. I also learned the birth and death dates for two of my grandmother’s sisters. You can see that the tree was created before 1939, as Paul wrote in the date of his father’s death.

Excerpt from Zerzawy family tree

Using both documents, I’m still finding it challenging to create a family tree of my own, even using software specifically made for that purpose! I am in awe of whoever put together the Zerzawy family tree in the 1930s. No computers or search engines, just hours and days of legwork and library research. Not to mention the painstaking hours of typing up the final document with multiple carbon copies.

You can see a preliminary family tree made last year incorporating info from the Löwy and Zerzawy trees on the Family Tree and Bios page. It’s time to update as I learn more about the family!

January 7

January 7, 1948

In April 2017, I attended a genealogy workshop at my local public library. By the end of the session, I had learned to maneuver through the library edition of Ancestry.com and found many documents, including the one below.

I was astounded by how quickly and easily I could learn a great deal about my family. As mentioned yesterday, it is worth looking often and in different ways to see if anything new has turned up. There are some documents I found that day in April that I have never stumbled upon again and I continue to find new ones.

Declaration of Intention to become a US citizen

Helene’s “Declaration of Intention” includes a wealth of information:

-Her address in San Francisco
-Her birthplace
-Her vital statistics
-Her husband’s name, birthdate, and date and place of their marriage
-Her children
-Her last place of residence
-The name of the ship and where it left from – in this case, the SS Vulcania from Alexandria Egypt
-Date of arrival in the US

It’s wonderful to get all of this information in a single document. It has helped me in other searches. It also is consistent with information my grandmother wrote in other letters and paperwork. One of the things that genealogists emphasize is the need to corroborate family stories and lore with official documentation. There are times when I’ve wondered whether my grandmother’s memories might have been faulty, as our memories often are. However, I continue to find articles and paperwork that prove that Helene’s memory was excellent and that she was reporting the truth as she remembered it. This gives me confidence at the times when I don’t have something official, that what she has written is likely true.

This journey has made me feel even closer to my grandmother, not simply because we share the same name. The timing of my research has been especially poignant. A few years ago as we began translating my grandmother’s letters during the war years, I realized that I was her age when she was writing them and then sent to Ravensbrück. Currently I am the same age that Helene was when she filled out this document. Thanks to her efforts to provide a better life for her children, what she went through is completely foreign to my own experience.

Aside: if you are curious about your own family history and have always wanted to try Ancestry.com and similar services, now is the perfect time to do so. It used to be that you could only access these services by paying or by researching in person in your public library. Since libraries have been closed, these companies and the libraries themselves have made many services available from the comfort of your own home. All you need is a library card!

Fantastic Voyage

I am speechless when I consider all that has happened over the past few years. I would never have believed that sorting through Harry’s closet filled with a treasure trove of papers, letters, and photos would teach me so much about my family’s past while opening unimagined doors into my future.

Perhaps because they had to leave almost all of their belongings behind, my mother and Harry spent the rest of their lives keeping almost everything, always assuming that the most innocuous little thing would come in handy someday. My favorite scene in the movie “Crossing Delancey” is where Bubbie carefully folds up and stores away the brown paper and string that a package was wrapped in, as if it were something extremely valuable - my family treasured worthless items at least as much as Bubbie did. However, unlike Bubbie, Harry and my mother didn’t necessarily keep things in a neat orderly way. Both of them would fill boxes with a mish-mash of unrelated items so you never knew when you might come across a treasure or junk, most often both stored in the same place. I’m guessing I inadvertently disposed of some important things my mother had kept when we hurriedly packed up her belongings after she sold her house. Many of her treasures were carted away by 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Thankfully, I learned my lesson and didn’t let that happen to the things Harry kept. I combed through each box and leafed through each book, making sure not to toss something worth saving. Each time I thought I’d found everything, suddenly I’d stumble on something that I’d missed.

The most important example of buried treasure was a small envelope stuffed with old letters. I found it several months after I thought I’d unearthed everything in Harry’s closet. I can’t even recall where I found it.

I’m pretty sure I found the letters in this envelope.

The envelope was perhaps an inch thick. It turned out to be stuffed with letters my grandmother had written from Vienna to my mother, Harry, and other relatives in San Francisco between November 1939 and October 1941 - there were about 100 letters written on thin air mail paper and crammed into that small envelope. When my mother and Harry first got to San Francisco, my grandmother wrote almost daily, trying to maintain a connection to her children who were thousands of miles away. I’m guessing no one had looked at those letters since they were stored in that envelope back in 1946 or earlier. Roslyn finished translating them recently and I understand so much more about both my mother’s early years in America, as well as the ultimately unsuccessful efforts by so many people to bring my grandparents to San Francisco to reunite them with their children.

My mother had told me the names and shown me photos of seemingly distant family members but never told me much about them. Now that so many letters have been translated, I feel like I know some of these relatives intimately and I realize how integral they were to my mother’s and grandmother’s stories.

Over the past few years, thanks to this treasure hunt, I have met dozens of new people, some of them related to me. I have discovered a fascinating new pastime (hobby? calling? who knows what it will turn out to be?). All because I opened a closet door and looked inside.