We must remember to protect the facts or soon people will forget the truths of what led to the violent hatred of the Holocaust and other atrocities. We must never forget to act to stop hatred in its tracks when telltale signs indicate the future is starting to resemble this past history.

Joanie Holzer Schirm

Author:  Adventurers Against Their Will; My Dear Boy; Steadfast Ink 

joanie@joanieschirm.com

www.joanieschirm.com 

…What it Means for Today     By Joanie Holzer Schirm 

“For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”            —Simon Wiesenthal

In late May 1942, train records indicate that my paternal Czech Bohemian grandparents, Arnost and Olga Holzer, perished at the hands of the Nazis at Sobibor death camp near a swamp close to the small village Sobibor, Poland. During the German occupation, the area was known as the Lublin District of the General Government. Their lives likely ended on the day of their arrival: May 27, 1942.

On that same date in 2009, with my husband Roger and Czech cousin Tomas by my side, I visited the memorial at Sobibor. A Holocaust expert from Poland, Robert, who accompanied us, said my grandparents were likely some of the first victims to arrive at this death camp, murdered that same day via a gunshot or poison gas. Experts now believe Sobibor was the fourth-deadliest Nazi camp after Belzec, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. As we got into the car to leave the grounds, Robert said in a sympathetic murmur, “the grandparents you never met were murdered simply because of the Nazi’s hatred of the Jewish people.”

The creation of Sobibor was a well-planned initiative. In November 1941, Reinhart Heydrich, then Chief of the Reich Security Main Office, Deputy Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia, and SS Oberguppenfuhrer (Lieutenant-General), sent invitations for a January 1942 conference to be held in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb. His invitation list included fifteen senior representatives from government ministries and representatives from the SS. Of the fifteen, eight held doctoral degrees. A letter from Hermann Goering dated July 31 had authorized Heydrich to plan a so-called Final Solution to the Jewish question. That became goal number one.

But before the January 20, 1942 conference occurred, much changed on the war front. The Soviet Army began a counter-offensive near Moscow, intensifying the war with the Nazis. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor, causing the U.S. to declare war the next day on Japan. The Reich government then declared war on the U.S. on December 11, leading to the U.S. declaring war on Germany the same day. Around this time, experts believe that Hitler resolved that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated.

The conference’s secondary goal was to arrive at a definition of who was Jewish. Identifying degrees of Jewishness, Heydrich announced that Mischlinges (mixed-race persons) of the first degree (with two Jewish grandparents) would be treated like a Jew. When I learned this history as an adult, I realized had I been born at that time (of my parent’s later marriage), I would have identified as a Mischlinge. I might have met the fate of the forty-four Czech relatives who died in the Holocaust, mainly at Auschwitz.

My father, Dr. O. A. Holzer survived by escaping Prague for China, where he served as a physician in Shanghai, Ping Ting Hsien, and Beijing (then Peking). Eight decades have passed since the Wannsee Conference led to the killing of one in three Jews living in Europe at the time. Often as the decades go by, we forget what history teaches us. But we must never forget Simon Wiesenthal’s quote:

“For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

Wiesenthal’s words feel hauntingly appropriate in 2022, with democracies worldwide under violent attack. We must each do whatever we can to keep from repeating a violent past like the one that took away my paternal grandparents and some eleven million others, Jews and non-Jews, who perished in the Holocaust.

Play a part in strengthening democracy by upholding just and fair democratic values that serve as the cornerstone to creating and maintaining stable governments, of the people, for the people.

We must not be silent. Joanie Holzer Schirm  joanie@joanieschirm.com

Nonfiction Author:  Adventurers Against Their Will; My Dear Boy: A World War Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation; Steadfast Ink: The Journey Within 

www.joanieschirm.com 

Solving a mystery from the past for the Holzer Family

It is often said that digging into family history can transform us.  Findings have the power to alter who we are. I’m one of those lucky people.

Two decades ago, after my parent’s deaths in January 2000, I chose as my inheritance a secret collection of World War II letters, documents, vintage photographs, and film, personal artwork, and more. My Czech-American father hid them away after World War II, and by the time of their unearthing, they’d lived in two Chinese lacquer boxes for some fifty-five years, mostly in Florida. The contents changed my life.

A decade following the discovery, my life journey veered away from a life in the business of engineering through the willingness of a few business partners to acquire my company ownership share. This liberation allowed me to loosen the knots in my shoulders as I took on the journey of a lifetime into my richly cultural Judeo-Christian heritage.

In the beginning, I had no idea where I was going. The search for connective threads within the fragile onion-skinned 1930s and 40s letters written by over seventy of my dad’s friends and relatives led me to an understanding of a tumultuous past of which I knew little—voicing proud, lukewarm and secret Jewish heritage as the threat against their lives heightened. Refugee lives. Lost homelands. Family and friends, just as their young lives were blossoming. The men and women I met through their written words sharing epic tragic and triumphant adventures that reshaped the course of their lives changed mine.

Around a third of the writers survived WWII. Most of those who lived to tell their tale had already passed on by the time I read their letters. A few I was able to meet, hearing heartbreaking and miraculous tales of escape and rebuilt lives. Some of my questions were answered by descendants in four continents, themselves learning more than they’d known before reading the letters.  All encounters profoundly changed my 360 viewpoints.

Now, I look back and better understand what happened leading up to and during the war that followed the war to end all wars. I recognize the story’s relevance for today. I hear the echoes from European democracies that slowly, then quickly disappeared, taken over by autocrats. Democracies let down by the silence of those who stood by watching. I hear today the same words from strongmen telling lies, creating fear of the “other.” Attacks on free media, using scapegoats and untruths to further the strongman’s cause. I witness long-standing social injustices that spread across the land with little outcry against the facilitators. Widespread hate-filled prejudices, much like we see today worldwide, led to forced displacement and atrocities we now know as the Holocaust.

Amid the darkness, the one candle that lit up my writing room were the revelations of hope from those who survived and rebuilt lives throughout the world. Although not physically at my weary side as I blossomed as an author, my father, Dr. Oswald “Valdik” Holzer showed me the way—inspiring me to speak up. Share his story. Be a speaker in classrooms or virtually present, and at functions where related topics can be shared and planned actions explored.

Over the decade of global research and discoveries, my two nonfiction books emerged—honoring all who struggle in exile. Adventurers Against Their Will and My Dear Boy now help readers, high school and college students gain through vivid personal narrative and primary sources the reality of what led to the loss of democracy. They learn of heinous acts of violence, and the surge in refugees that scattered across the world looking for places of refuge.

Together, I hope we learn from our past and better protect the future by serving as champions for human rights. We must not only care; we must care enough to act. Joanie Holzer Schirm www.joanieschirm.com    joanie@joanieschirm.com

*************

With that shared goal in mind, please consider a free partnership with Echoes & Reflections and nonfiction author Joanie Schirm and your school or organization to deliver an online professional development program on the experiences of refugees during WWII and the Holocaust and forced displacement today. For more information and to schedule a free program, please contact Jesse Tannetta, jtannetta@adl.org

To create lesson plans, Schirm engaged two United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellows, Kimberly Klett and Jennifer Goss, who also are Echoes & Reflections facilitators. The two lesson plans stand-alone or may accompany her nonfiction books for more in-depth study. Lesson Plans:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZNNu8A3JDP7pZmsByJ92I7waojiHdXAS/view?_hsmi=88938004&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–SQZhPweVv15Cp63z3vOGS_N-08h2LSRAnJKXQyqjz1SJw3J0db2vlZZ0Vix8yT3nh3MC8LJ46tbVC3ee7wXlevUHjcg

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/14sIQBcRlTkd3tomRuVKuHXAnF-EYC0Sv/view?_hsmi=88938004&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–xY71TaGkSIc0wj62TgLZn2ODGf2AsAgIHOTz0JUCTlekcjsd64_MycbzOJT3nLJrpPQqjNJX_FhHrWU1EU5MCvEJGfQ

In the Echoes & Reflections professional development program, Connecting the Past with Today: Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust, a facilitator models resources and classroom activities that focus on the history of Jewish refugees during the 1930s and 1940s. Educators learn to connect those lessons of intolerance, inaction, and indifference to how students understand today’s refugee and human rights crisis. The story of Valdik Holzer in My Dear Boy is a valuable resource when teaching about refugees during the Holocaust. For use in classrooms, the lesson plans incorporate compelling letter excerpts from her father and his refugee friends and family, enhanced with relevant modern-day web links on the topic.

For Echoes & Reflections: please contact Jesse Tannetta, jtannetta@adl.org

Joanie Holzer Schirm  

Since the March 1, 2019 publication by Potomac Books of My Dear Boy: A World War II Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation, the reception of this powerful story of my Czech Jewish father’s past that resonates in our present time has been wondrous. (book trailer) Today, I share with you two book reviews that speak to the heart of the story:

Sunday, September 1, 2019, “My Dear Boy” book review, Goldsboro News-Argus

Extraordinary biography honors all who struggle in exile

By Liz Meador, Language Matters

Ideas for topics for this column come from many sources, and I especially appreciate family and friends who suggest books to review. For last week’s article about “Ruthless River,” I am indebted to my sister Marie and brother-in-law John who read and discussed the memoir in one of two book clubs to which they belong.

The suggestion for this week’s extraordinary book comes from my friend Dr. John McRae who attended school with Joanie Holzer Schirm, author of “My Dear Boy: A World War II Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation” (2019).  McRae has become an unofficial promoter of book as he would like to see it studied in schools.

The “boy” in the title is contained in the salutation of a letter from Schirm’s paternal grandfather to his son, Oswald Holzer, nicknamed Valdik. This letter occurs at the book’s close when the fate of Valdik’s parents is to become two of the millions of Jews removed from their homes and taken to concentration camps and certain death. Schirm discovered 400 letters her father had kept in two Chinese red lacquered boxes as she and her siblings sorted through their parents’ belongings at the Florida beach condo where they had resided before their deaths. Her father died in 2000, but Joanie Schirm and her siblings, Tom and Pat, had no idea of the journey their parents had undergone to find a home in America. The tragic tone of this final letter from his parents haunted Valdik, who never thought he had done enough to remove his parents from the Nazis’ program of deliberate extermination of Jews.

Schirm’s goal to publish a book about her father took years of planning, but she had sold her Orlando engineering consulting firm, and she was inspired by her grandfather’s words to his son Valdik: “I wish for you to find full satisfaction in your profession [as a physician]. I also wish that your profession of curing doesn’t just become a source of wealth for you but that you yourself become a benefactor to suffering humanity.”

Escape

The book’s subtitle reveals its approximate organization into three major portions, beginning with the chapter entitled “My Flight.” Told in her father’s words from the letters, Valdik relates that he crossed five continents to find a place where he felt accepted though he was a refugee running from the German army which would have murdered him. Twenty-seven when his journey begins, Valdik starts his story with his birth in 1911 to Arnošt and Olga Holzer in a small town, Benešov, twenty-five miles southeast of Prague. His parents and grandparents were prosperous merchants who gave Valdik a comfortable childhood and education at Charles University where Valdik became a doctor of medicine.

Jews had lived in the area since 1570, and by 1893 numbered 800. Valdik’s family practiced no religion, however, in a country where Catholics and Lutherans prevailed. In 1914, Valdik was three years old when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Valdik’s father joined the Austro-Hungarian army which he served for four years during which he was incarcerated in a Russian prisoner of war camp in Siberia. Life continued after World War I, but Valdik became more aware of the prejudices against Jews as he grew older: “I never thought of myself as Jewish. I felt being Jewish. . .meant belonging to a religious community and going to services, which my family rarely did. Like others in Bohemia [now the Czech Republic] who mixed Jewish and Czech Protestant traditions and culture, we celebrated Christmas and Easter in a non-religious way that today we might describe as commercial.”

The family revered books, art, music, science, technology, and history instead. Books fed Valdik’s interest in medicine to the extent that the family moved to Prague so that Valdik could graduate from Charles University. Prague had a Jewish population of about 35,000, and Valdik began to worry as Adolf Hitler and his anti-Semitic Nazis won seats in the Reichstag in the 1932 election. Valdik admitted that he was naïve to believe that “a government of law” could quell Hitler’s power. By 1935, the Nazis had adopted the Nuremberg Race Laws which stripped Jewish Germans of citizenship and imprisoned those who intermarried.

Exile in China

After graduation, Valdik served two years in the Czech army, but as he watched Hitler’s advance, he knew he needed to leave his homeland to find a place where he could establish himself as a doctor and send for his parents. Eliminating Palestine and the United States, Valdik learned that China was a possibility for his resettlement. In May 1939, his family bade him farewell, and he embarked on the long journey, chronicling his time in Shanghai with his ever-present camera and in letters. Valdik accepted several jobs in medicine, but they were part-time or they shut down. Finally, he heard about the need for a chief physician at the American Mission Hospital in Pingting Hsien in North China. Hampered by lack of the Chinese language, Valdik accepted the mission’s offer to send him to Peking {Beijing} for three months to study Chinese language and culture.

In his letters Valdik recounted the struggle he had as a doctor to impose modern science on patients who relied on superstition. He urged patients to open the windows to allow fresh air, but the Chinese believed that their “home ghost” would escape.

Meeting Ruth

Valdik’s story continued in Peking where he met Ruth Lequear, the daughter of American missionaries from the German Reformed Church China Mission. Ruth had been born in Hunan Province, so her Chinese was excellent. Immediately the couple found parallels in their backgrounds and common interests that led them to love and marriage. They eventually realized they must leave China as turmoil continued. After much red tape in securing visas, they sailed for San Francisco then Los Angeles where they stayed with Ruth’s relatives until they could find work.

Schirm calls her book “narrative nonfiction biography,” and it is all those genres and more. She creates a tribute to her father and all people who have endured exile and exclusion.

Liz Meador is a retired English instructor from Wayne Community College and an adjunct at North Carolina Wesleyan College.

And, #2:  Backstory and Review 

https://adastra.fit.edu/blog/campus/secret-history/secret-history-the-oswald-holzer-medical-center/

Secret History: The O.A. Holzer Medical Center

BY GORDON PATTERSON ON JULY 12, 2019

SECRET HISTORY  Dateline: 1981

Oswald Holzer 1938

The boots gave him away. “The Germans,” the train conductor quietly observed when he came to the young medical officer, “won’t fail to notice those army boots of yours.” Two weeks earlier the Nazis had seized control of Czechoslovakia. On March 15, 1939, a triumphant Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Service, arrived in Prague. A fortnight later, Oswald Holzer found himself on a train trying to pass unnoticed by the SS and Gestapo’s watchful eyes. Holzer remembered trying to conceal the tell-tale boots by pulling his pant legs down. “That won’t help,” the friendly conductor added, “You have to keep moving. There are Gestapo on the train…” (Schirm, 2019, p. 53)

Oswald Holzer Keep Moving

The past two weeks had been chaotic for the twenty-eight-year old, newly minted physician. The Czech army ceased to exist. Hitler’s henchmen began an active campaign of arrests and detention of what they deemed politically and racially suspect individuals. The situation was particularly dire for Holzer, a Jew and army officer, who had had the temerity to publicly criticize the Nazis thugs. “Keep moving” was the conductor’s imperative advice. During the next thirteen years, Holzer did “keep moving” making his way across Europe to Egypt, Yemen, Djibouti, Singapore, Shanghai, China’s interior, and on to Peru, and Ecuador, and, finally, in the summer of 1952 to Melbourne, Florida, where Holzer became the seventh doctor accredited to the Brevard Hospital Staff (Holmes Regional Medical Center). Until his death in 2000, Holzer and his wife Ruth Alice “Chick” Holzer found a safe haven “in a cozy Melbourne Beach house one block from the ocean —our only enemy the ubiquitous mosquito.” (Schirm, 2019, p. 286)

Oswald Holzer was a remarkable man. Like so many immigrants, Holzer felt a deep love for the country that had given him refuge. In the 1950s and 1960s, he served on innumerable city, county, and state commissions. He had a special passion for helping young people. That was undoubtedly one of the reasons why Holzer became friends with his Melbourne Beach neighbor Jerry Keuper. A graduate of Charles University in Prague, Holzer shared Keuper’s conviction that education held the key to a better future. China was another connection. Keuper had served as an intelligence officer in the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS) during World War II. The two men regaled one another (and whoever else would listen) with stories of their experiences in the Middle Kingdom. When Holzer told Keuper of his intention to retire, Keuper began his campaign to convince Holzer to become the head of the fledgling college’s student health center.

The need for a campus student health center had surfaced in 1970. The initial “missilemen” (both men and women) who worked at the Cape who had formed the first cohort of Brevard Engineering College and Florida Tech students were covered by their employers’ health plans. Florida Tech had become a residential college by 1970. On January 27, 1970, Jerry Keuper held his annual meeting with student body. In his prepared remarks, Keuper announced plans for a new dormitory which would include a cafeteria (Evans Hall) and a “snack bar” that would be open “til one o’clock in the morning…so it will always be available for cokes and hot dogs.” Additional plans called for enhancing student services included a four-lane bowling alley, improvements in the gymnasium, and expanded parking.

At the end of his presentation, Keuper asked if there were any questions. “Is there any chance,” a student shouted, “of getting [a]campus health facility?” Keuper acknowledged that this was a growing concern. A recent flu epidemic had swept through the dormitories. Students complained that they were unable to find a doctor willing to treat them. “This is something,” Keuper declared, “that I’ve been concerned about recently with all this flu epidemic. Up until very recently we really haven’t had a pressing need for someone full time on campus such as a doctor or a nurse. But I think the time has come where we’ve got to give it very serious consideration. It might be that we should consider putting some sort of infirmary in the new building. Anyway, that’s a good point and we are going to have to do something about it very soon.” (Anonymous, February 10, 1970,

Jerry Keuper’s use of the word “soon” is open to interpretation. Four years elapsed before the university was able to employ a full-time physician. In 1974, Oswald Holzer retired from his medical practice. In 1975, Holzer agreed to become Florida Tech’s unpaid medical director. During the next six years, Holzer, who was affectionally known as “Bubba,” organized the college’s nascent student health center. Seven years later, in June 1981, the ground was broken on the O.A. Holzer Student Health Center. The $65,000 facility which was located on the west side of Country Club Road was largely financed through the generosity of the Holzer family. (Anonymous, 1981)

Oswald Holzer continued to serve as the university’s medical director until the early 1990s. In 1984, Holzer and his wife returned to China where they had met in Beijing nearly forty years earlier. When they returned from China, Oswald and “Chick” Holzer chronicled their experiences in the inaugural lecture in the university’s Humanities Lecture Series in the pavilion of the newly opened Evans Library. As a memento of the conductor’s advice to “Keep Moving,” the Holzer’s presented the Evans Library with a Tang Dynasty relief of a horse that hangs in the library’s stairwell.

A Red Chinese Lacquered Box

Oswald Holzer died in 2000, two days after his beloved wife Chick’s passing. In the weeks following their passing, the Holzer’s children (Tom, Pat, and Joanie) began the process of sorting through their parents’ belongings. “My siblings and I reminisced,” Joanie Schirm recalled, “…until Pat brought us back to the task at hand. ‘Where do we start?’ ‘With the Chinese red lacquered boxes,’ Tom laughed.” The two boxes contained 400 letters that Oswald Holzer had kept chronicling the odyssey that brought him from a railway carriage in Europe to a “cozy home” in Melbourne Beach. In 2019, Potomac Books an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press published Joanie Schirm’s edition of these papers in My Dear Boy: A World War II Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation.

The letters document moments of monumental pain and loss. And, yet, through all the suffering, Oswald Holzer remained hopeful that good could prevail. In 1945, Oswald Holzer learned that his parents had perished in the Holocaust. An aunt sent him a sealed envelope which contained his father’s final message. “My dear boy,” Arnost Holzer wrote, “you have always been a good boy, and we are proud of you. I wish for you to find full satisfaction in your profession. I also wish that your profession of curing doesn’t just become a source of wealth for you but that you yourself become a benefactor to the suffering of humanity.” (Schirm, 2019, p. 269) The Holzer Student Health Center is but one example of Oswald and Ruth Holzer’s service to others.

A Life Well Lived

The students, faculty, and staff at Florida Tech who knew Oswald Holzer will always remember the sparkle in his eye, his contagious laughter, and his gentle, self-effacing irony. On March 8, 1940, in a letter sent from China to his cousin Hana Winternitz in London, Holzer observed: “You know, when one gets out into the world, only then is one able to see what a conceited simpleton he has been. I realize more and more how unworldly, and in a way provincial we are. And so, Adolf provided us with at least this profit, albeit we paid dearly for it.” (Schirm, 2019, p. xxvi) Sound advice from an immigrant who found a home in America and played a critical role in improving countless lives.

A brief overview of Oswald Holzer’s life

Note: Joanie Schirm’s My Dear Boy is a marvelous read. www.joanieschirm.com

Anonymous. (1981, June). Healthy Start. The Pelican, 8(6).
Anonymous. (February 10, 1970). Keuper Meets with Students. The Crimson, 3(11).
Schirm, J. H. (2019). My Dear Boy: A World War II Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation: Potomac Books.

Sorting through her parents’ belongings after their deaths, Joanie Holzer Schirm discovered an extraordinary lost world. Hand-written on faded and brittle stationary, stamped by Nazi censors and military authorities, and neatly filed in two lacquered boxes were some 400 letters by 78 correspondents along with carbon copies of the messages her Czech father had sent to them during World War II.  Author Joanie Holzer Schirm had the letters translated and turned what she learned about the world then and now into two nonfiction books: Adventurers Against Their Will (Global eBook Award winner: Best Biography 2013) and My Dear Boy. She’s a writer, community activist, photographer, retired Orlando, Florida award-winning businesswoman, sought after public speaker and a regular contributor to the Central Florida 100 Sunday column for the Tribune’s Orlando Sentinel.   joanie@joanieschirm.com     www.joanieschirm.com 

Oswald “Valdik” Holzer arrives in Shanghai, China, July 5, 1939

RARE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT  IN OLD LETTER DETAILS

MY FATHER’S ARRIVAL IN SHANGHAI, CHINA 80 YEARS AGO – JULY 5, 1939 

After escaping Hitler’s growing threat in his occupied Czech homeland, and traveling nearly 10,000 nautical miles from Marseille, France, Oswald “Valdik” Holzer, on July 5, 1939, reached Shanghai.  My father was a 28-year-old physician in a very foreign land.

(Watch award-winning MY DEAR BOY book trailer here.)

During 1937-1941, some twenty thousand desperate European Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai.  While traveling the globe as an author for research and speaking engagements, I’ve learned this illustrious Shanghai history is well known among Holocaust scholars but little known to others.

Echoing the immigration turmoil of today’s world, during the late 1920s and 1930s, in the shadow of a global economic depression and the threat of war, many countries, including the United States of America, refused to increase their visa quota numbers. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Holocaust Studies, Shanghai took in more Jewish refugees than Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and South Africa combined. This little known truth makes “Shanghai” synonymous with “haven” and “rescue” in the narrative of the Holocaust era.

On this 80th anniversary of my father’s arrival in Shanghai as a Czech Jewish refugee, I share my dad’s eyewitness account via a letter he wrote (preserved with a carbon copy), to a close friend, Frantisek Schoenbaum, trapped with his wife Andula and young son Honza (John), in Prague under Nazi-control. The letter from the Holzer Collection was translated in 2008.

Shanghai, 7-20-1939

Franta, don’t be angry with me that I am bothering you, I have had no news from home for a month already. Please call my family and tell them to write to me airmail at Hong Kong POB 370 c/o Leo Lilling as that is my address. If something would happen, God forbid, with the family, write it to me, please, so that I can possibly help them somehow if it would be possible.

I am also including a letter for {Pavel} Koerper. He wants to come here, so I must work him up a little so that he would not be surprised. If some of you are in a lousy way perhaps, come here, it is better here, despite all that misery, than in Prague or in Europe in general. Notably, one can work here, and I will be already sitting {meaning probably in a place with medical practice} by that time so I could help you. Eventually, one would not stay here forever, and a man can get to some other place somewhat easier from here.

Thank you for your lovely letter.   In the meantime, you received undoubtedly my chattering from the ship.   We must stay in writing contact all the time.   You have no idea how happy you made me with that letter of yours.  You know, when a man does not hear that dialect of ours anymore, at least one can have something for enjoyable reading again.   To tell you the truth: that distance is not so big, and it does not seem so huge, but I am damnably homesick for all and for everything, mainly when a man is almost entirely without news and when he does not know when, and if at all, he will return. Such thoughts would develop in your head only after some time.   Do not be angry that I am responding to your cheerful letter with such sentimental jabbering, but it is called here “S’ai depression,” and supposedly everybody is going through that during their first time.  After all, you know that is not my nature.

I hope that in your literary ass {meaning: forgotten area, away from the center of action}, you will also mention the good physician Osvald who left his mother country to treat poor little Chinese.  In order for you to elaborate on this topic better, I am sending you the following contribution:

So already for three days, I have been partially pummeled with malaria. I caught it someplace in Saigon, such an idiotic French Indochina, but it is better than tuberculosis.   Hey, one must always be content.   I am curing it by myself, chiefly with whiskey, which is dreadfully cheap here (1 liter 7.-Kc [crowns]).   Otherwise, it is possible to catch in this beautiful but strange country everything from measles to leprosy.   Hey, so that I won’t forget, if you happen by any chance to talk with my family, do not tell them anything about these lovely things, they would be unnecessarily afraid.  It is not so bad.

As you had read “Chuan in China,” approximately 20% of it describes things well; otherwise, everything is yet crazier by far.   In a week here, you set aside all European social prejudices, you let yourself ride in a rickshaw, you are cursing Chinese, in Czech of course, you start to booze.   In short, you become a white shadow; it is somehow a matter-of-course situation.

Franta, there are 20,000 emigrants here, 98 % of them without money, so the society gave them housing in a quarter almost entirely destroyed by Japanese shooting, from where the Chinese fled.   And those Jews, Israelis, etc., built from those ruins their houses, opened businesses, coffee houses, even Jewish prostitutes are there.   But of course, who will guarantee them that the bombing of the area would not start tomorrow again?    Those who do not believe in that place and have a little money, live in the French Concession, it is first of all safe.   Like in a circus created for adventurers, you can make so much money here in a day that you don’t need to do anything else in life ever, and in an hour, you can have all of that go into a toilet.   The dollar dropped yesterday, and today by 30 %, that has been talked about here for a week already, so some people became wealthy, and others lost their shirts in the process.   Even the weather is so crazy:  I get out nicely in the morning in a white suit, with a towel around my neck as is a fashion here to have something for wiping when one is sweating like a pig, I sat on a bus and started moving.

However, a typhoon came in the meantime, and I had to get off the bus only with extreme difficulty, then I was running down the street until I exquisitely fell.   For a while, I was rolling in mud, and when I looked around then, I found out that numerous gentlemen are lying there in the same manner and that they have a good time looking at the mess.   So I had a good time, too.   Once in a while, some gentleman crawled over me with the necessary…” sorry.”  Oh, but all of a sudden, there was a loud sound beside me, a roof fell there.  I don’t know where because surrounding houses had none already anyway.   Under the roof, there were lying some rickshaws and an overturned car.    Therefore, I told myself again: safety first, and I slithered with the crowd into a nearest passage-way, where I waited for six hours till it was over.   One cannot distinguish now what was destroyed by Japanese and what by the typhoon.

For me, as a physician, there are some possibilities here.   I have some acquaintances here, and I feel that I would not get lost here.   However, I would not like to stay here as I lack some such feeling of home.  When I make some money here, I will rush farther inland immediately.   Otherwise, one can manage to live beautifully here, for 77 pounds a week, you are a big gentleman.  You can furnish a luxurious apartment for 5 pounds, and for 1 shai. Dollar, you can have a beautiful Miss for a week with everything.  And yet, I envy you those strolls along the river Luznice when there is a sweet fragrance of hay near us…

P.S. Write on airmail paper, you naive man, who are you paying the postage?

Valdik    {Oswald “Valdik” Holzer}

©2008 From the collection of Joanie Holzer Schirm.  Reproduction only with permission from Joanie Schirm: joanie@joanieschirm.com

www.joanieschirm.com

Dad’s story in MY DEAR BOY came to life via revelations from a treasure trove of four hundred letters he preserved after the war. Seventy-eight friends and relatives, along with Dad’s own seventy carbon-copied letters and journals written during his 19 months in China, detail the emotions, circumstances, and revelations encountered by displaced persons along with those trapped behind under Nazi-occupation. Former USHMM archives director, Henry Mayer, called the Holzer Collection “one of the most complete personal collections of WWII correspondence seen in years.”

The timeless letters remind what it’s like to be forced penniless from home, losing native land, family, friends, possessions, livelihood, and identity.  I exist because my father made it to China. My paternal grandparents, Arnost and Olga, and forty-two other relatives were not so fortunate. All hope-filled futures were lost as they perished in the Holocaust. Dad’s only tangible connection to his lost world were these old letters.  He hid them away in old Chinese boxes, moved to America and served as a family physician in Melbourne, Florida. The letters were discovered after his death and in 2008. Upon translation, they revealed a universal, timeless story relevant to today’s world.

MY DEAR BOY: A World War Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation                        by Joanie Holzer Schirm

Book trailer

Available anywhere books are sold. In all formats: Hardcover, eBook, Audiobook

Through my publisher, Potomac Books, use a discount code 6AS19  https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/potomac-books/9781640120723/

MY DEAR BOY: Lesson Plans soon available at www.joanieschirm.com/teachers

Photos from the Holzer Collection. (Photo reproduction restricted without permission from author Joanie Holzer Schirm joanies@joanieschirm.com )

Now showing at the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education  Center of Florida:
DISPLACED PERSON: Oswald Valdik Holzer’s story with audio, featuring WWII letters, documents, photographs, vintage film, and clothing currently on exhibit. Upon the 2023 opening of Orlando’s new museum —Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity—the DISPLACED PERSON exhibit will become a permanent reminder of the ongoing struggles of displaced humanity throughout our world and what together we can do to diminish this plight.

Joanie Holzer Schirm    joanie@joanieschirm.com   

www.joanieschirm.com     For speaking engagements: joanie@joanieschirm.com

Setting the Voices Free

Part 2 in the Series 

As the years slipped away during the writing of My Dear Boy, one thing became crystal clear. My journey of research and writing was dramatically enhanced by the people who often serendipitously came aboard for the ride and then remained my friends to the journey’s end.

What follows in this Part II, is an introduction to Tom Weiss, number two of the key individuals who helped set free the seventy-eight voices of the four hundred World War II letters my beloved father, Oswald “Valdik” Holzer, hid away after the war. Translators, experts, travel guides, administrators, archivists, and more, each with full heart, played an indelible role.

Tom Weiss

Before the age of sixty, Tom (Fischer) Weiss of Newton, Massachusetts, had little interest in his family history. He thought it would be nearly impossible to research his family in Europe because many had vanished in the Holocaust, and he assumed no records existed. His interest changed when serendipitously, in 1996, Tom had a conversation with a second cousin on his mother’s side who mentioned he’d been in touch with Tom’s first cousin in Wales. Tom was shocked to know he had a first cousin, much less one in Wales. Alena Morgan née Fischer was the daughter of Tom’s father’s brother. Until that time Tom didn’t even know that his father, Rudolf “Rudla” Fischer, had a brother. When long-distance communication was established Alena told him Rudla had a cousin in sunny Florida whose name was Valdik Holzer. Valdik’s mother, Olga, was a sister to Tom’s grandmother, Karolina. Through this lineage, Tom Weiss and I share great-grandparents, Jakub and Teresia (née Vodickova) Orlík. When Alena described Valdik’s adventures in China, Tom remembered he’d seen photographs of someone in China in his mother’ photo album. When he looked at them, he saw they were marked as Valdik.

When I first heard about this new second cousin who’d arrived on the scene, I was somewhat suspicious. I was thinking about newspaper articles I read in which the story about a long lost relative didn’t turn out so well. My father assured me that Tom was indeed not a con man but my cousin, the son of a person who at that time I had never heard of. Over the next year, through my dad, I was to discover much about the background of Tom’s disappearance during World War II. I was also to learn of Tom’s impressive dedication to uncovering all he could about his past. By the time we met, he’d already traveled to archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany, Vienna, Austria, Ukraine, Poland, and the Czech Republic for his family tree detective work.

His story was another war tale that reminded me of how far-reaching the devastation had been to families worldwide. Well beyond the death camp horrors and the battlefield casualties, for a myriad of reasons innocent families fractured and fell apart. Much of Tom’s experience had echoes of today’s tumultuous world of forcibly displaced persons. Tom’s story, when I met him, was one with heartbreaking residual effects that he was still dealing with. Unraveling the story of his life as a small boy, the adult Tom was trying to understand what and had happened and why.

In May 1999 Tom and his wife, Aurice, met my father in Florida. Tom had already been in contact by telephone for a couple of years. In those conversations he was catching up on what had happened sixty years earlier, when Tom, only four and a half years old, and his parents fled from Prague to Néris-les-Bains, France, saving themselves from the fate of so many other Jewish relatives who stayed behind. I was visiting my mother in her assisted living care home the weekend Tom and Aurice visited my father. Luckily, I had the chance to meet my old-new cousin. Instantly we forged a bond of friendship, sparked by a shared obsession for genealogical research.

Intrigued by my father’s excellent memory, Tom audiotaped his interviews, as I had done a decade earlier. A year later, after my father’s untimely death, Tom shared the tapes with me. Within the conversations were impressions from painful remembrances that I had not heard before, coupled with stories of long-ago happy times. He also sent me the photo of my father that had been in their family album. He said it arrived to his then refugee family living in France sometime between February and April 1940, just before the German invasion of the Low Countries and France. Tom also sent me a massive 2½ x 5–foot scroll of a family tree of the Vodicka branch going back to 1720—research about our great-grandmother Teresia’s ancestry. His hard work was critically helpful as I struggled to identify over three hundred names mentioned in the four hundred letters my father had hidden away.

In turn I shared with Tom the letters written from 1939 and 1941 in Czech between our fathers, detailing what his parents’ lives were like during their exile in France. They were living in a small village, thinking that after fleeing from Nazi-occupied Bohemia, it was a safe haven. That thought was shattered when Germany quickly defeated France. Tom provided me information about how Rudla had joined the Czech army in France, and after the German invasion in April and May 1940 of Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands, Rudla was called up to join the British army. By September 1940, after the fall of France, his father was in England but not with his family.

Unfortunately, for reasons we will never know for sure, Rudla left his wife and son behind in France, and with great difficulty and peril, they made their way south to Marseille. After being refugees in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal for an adventurous and sometimes harrowing twenty months—most of it in France—Tom’s mother was able to attain entry visas and ship passage to America for her and her son. Nearly destitute, they settled in New York City.

In 1947 Rudla and Erna received a divorce. Upon his mother’s remarriage in New York City to Eugene Weiss, a Hungarian immigrant, Tom became Eugene’s adopted son and took his name. Except for a little correspondence, after his adoption, Tom was estranged from Rudla for the remainder of his life.

In 2008 Alena translated the exchange of letters between Tom and my fathers. Although the letters brought Tom information he didn’t know, such as the exact date in 1939 when his family reached France and an appreciation for the warm affection in our fathers’ relationship, the letters opened old wounds, forcing Tom to relive painful feelings from his childhood. We often communicated, sharing our emotions over what the letters had revealed to us. After reading one translated letter from August 1941, about the mystery of Rudla’s abandonment of his family, Tom commented:

The letter did make me sad. But I have mixed feelings about it. I think he did care deeply for my mother, but I also think he felt guilty about abandoning us in France and leaving us in a very precarious situation. But who knows what anyone would do in such situations?

I am also taken aback at the thought expressed in the letter that my mother did not really need any help. She worked in a sweatshop in New York’s garment district, and I recall she worked five full weekdays and a half-day on Saturday. I would go with her on Saturday since she had no one to take care of me. It was very difficult work and took its toll on her health. She died just before her forty-fourth birthday.

As Tom read German, he became my go-to translator for German documents except for those written in the old German cursive style known as Kurrent. Tom informed me that Hitler had outlawed Kurrent around 1941 because he characterized it as being of Jewish origin.

We both wondered why our fathers let their relationship dissipate after the war. We weren’t even sure if they had ever met again. Long before our modern world’s many available avenues of communication, Tom’s summary described the story of so many broken family bonds after the war: “I think maintaining relations is hard over such large distances and large time separations. Both my father and yours carved out new lives and went their separate ways.” Thankfully, our relationship grew, and Tom and I were given the opportunity to continue the extended family bond when he and Aurice visited Roger and me at our Florida home in 2010.

www.joanieschirm.com  Order MY DEAR BOY anywhere books are sold.   Or through my publisher, UNL Potomac Books,  use code 6AS19 for 40% off.

Learn from the past. Change the future.

On this day 80 years ago, May 21, 1939, my twenty-seven-year-old Czech Jewish father, Oswald “Valdik” Holzer said his last good-bye to his parents at the Prague railway station. After Nazi-occupation and persecution, dad was driven from his native land. His 1^st port of refuge was Shanghai, China. Soon he was practicing medicine in the interior of China. In Peking/Beijing in Fall 1940, he met & fell madly in love with my mother, Ruth Alice Lequear, born in China of American missionaries. Their love affair lasted 60 years before dying within two days of each other in Melbourne, Florida.

Because of pure hatred, my dad lost his parents and 42 relatives in the Holocaust. Today I remember that I exist because my father chose to leave all that was precious to him and against all the odds find a way to start a new life of good works in America.

Dad’s story is timeless, timely, and relatable for so many people today.  With these words of remembrance, I honor my grandparents Arnošt and Olga and their son, my dad.

Quote from Olga Holzer’s letter, May 1942, Prague:  “My dear Valdik, Today is Sunday, and it has been exactly two years that I saw you off to the railroad station. That was the most painful day of my life. What all has changed in your life, perhaps it was just your good luck. In my mind, I send you and your Ruth a kiss.” Your Mom

Never forget: What you do can banish the darkness. What you do can protect the dignity of others. We each can make a difference in creating a more caring world.   Let’s do it.

MY DEAR BOY – A WWII Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation  

By Joanie Holzer Schirm

“It’s not the “retirement” Joanie Schirm imagined. A family mystery turned into a global quest, a journey of discovery, and a personal transformation into an internationally respected scholar, teacher, and author. Her new book MY DEAR BOY is a great read and a powerful reminder of the dangers of human aggression and intolerance and the power of love and compassion.  Check out Joanie’s Website for more information on her book.

Watch Growing Bolder video for an excellent backstory to the making of MY DEAR BOY – plus a window into the mission I’m on to help ensure we achieve a big goal: build a world without hate.

The Family Mystery That Turned Into a Global Quest

MY DEAR BOY’s World War II story of escape, exile, and revelation is an inspirational account of my Czech dad’s survival during wartime, a cinematic epic spanning multiple continents, a love story, and ultimately a tale with a twist—a nurturing story that will move readers for generations to come.

While celebrating a decade of research, writing, editing, writing and seeking a publisher (thank you literary agent Steve Harris and Potomac Books), I couldn’t forget my time already spent in classrooms which make all this work entirely worthwhile.

Inspired by the heart of my story – the discovery of a treasure trove of World War II stories revealing amazing tales that accompanied my father as a forcibly displaced person traveling through five continents—students went in search of their own family history.  Like a fingerprint, every one of their stories is unique.   Here’s a sampling to show – this is why I do what I do.  We can learn from the past and from what we learn, understand our role in changing the world for a better future:

• A young man interviews relatives to uncover that his great grandmother escaped the Nazi’s by fleeing the country in a coffin, on a ship, that left her in America, alone and alive.
• A teenage daughter interviews her grandparents, who adopted an orphan, her mother, and gave her the gift of family.
• A student interviews her parents to uncover that her great uncle was a POW and escaped war by digging a tunnel with a spoon (sounds like a movie, but it’s real).
• A student translates an old diary and finds out that he is related to ancestors that were a part of the Trail of Tears and also the Gold Rush.
• Another young gentleman interviews his father and grandfather to learn of how his father was a radio celebrity that fled Haiti to avoid persecution for expressing freedom of speech and what being in America means to them.
• One of many compelling stories was a young teenager daughter chronologically citing her own father’s struggle with a nicotine addiction and her own fears of life and death.
• And even the simple stories of the first relative to attend college and change the course of education and opportunity in the family, or a grandmother’s struggle to raise 4 children in a tough world while suffering from a disease, or crossing the border illegally, has helped define character in these students.

The teacher’s quote makes my heart sing:

Little did I know that this project would give me the gift of purpose and meaningful discourse with my students. Mrs. Schirm set out to write her books to share her father’s story because it is one worth telling and reading. Like dominoes, her books have started a ripple effect which will continue to vibrate in these young minds as they grow and continue to revisit their roots, allowing little opportunity for them to get lost or drift aimlessly. Students have started to solve their own puzzles and develop a clearer image of who they are and what they need to accomplish in life. I share much appreciation with them and Mrs. Schirm and would be happy to help any educator start a journey like mine. Nilam Patel, nilam.patel@ocps.net

The rare original poster by the famous Czechoslovak artist was returned to Prague in September 2018 by Joanie Holzer Schirm to the Millennium Galerie, owned by Adolf’s son, Adam Hoffmeister.  Joanie was In Prague in conjunction with the Czech National Trust exhibit titled “Ticket to the New World” which featured life stories about both men among sixteen others who sought safe haven in America after Nazi occupation of their homeland. Prior to the Nazis arrival, in addition to his work as an artist, poet, and novelist,  Hoffmeister had edited one of the main Czech daily newspapers, Lidové noviny, and the main literary paper, Literární noviny.  As an immigrant and passionate anti-Fascist, Hoffmeister took up refuge in New York City. His art was part of the first exhibition of Czech art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the height of World War II in May 1943, titled ‘War Caricatures.’

At the return of the original piece, valued by Getty Images at $500, Adam’s daughter Jessika Hoffmeister translated the emotional setting with her father Adam as the Hoffmeister family received the gift of the original poster Adam had never seen before. The “Hitler—Wanted in Prague” poster now hangs in Adolf’s son’s fine art gallery in the Malá Strana area.

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