Most of what they told my father, a refugee in China, consisted of tender stories, likely to prevent alarming him. However, as they kept updating him via their letters, the harsh reality of their diminishing freedoms gradually seeped into their reports on life in German-occupied Prague.

As you review this list of their slowly eroding rights, consider how you would react today if someone threatened to kill you unless you handed over your cell phone, radio, or computer. Visualize being confined to your house or apartment with no access to entertainment. This list is only a sample, not comprehensive.

From Arnošt and Olga Holzer’s Letters… Comments on Nazi Oppression:

1941 Nazis restriction of the Jews from living normal, free lives in Prague

January – restriction of Jews from traveling (could not visit Arnošt’s ill mother in the hospital outside Prague

January – could not go to the cinema

March – telephone disconnected

June – curfew: you had to be home before 8 p.m.

August – could not go to the concert hall

September – to be identified by the Germans, made to wear Jewish Star “in about one week we should be getting a special sign to wear on our breast”

October 21, 1941 – mention of transports of relatives to concentration camps; considers seriously for the first time to emigrate (but too late by Nazis)

When democracy finally dies, it can happen fast.

“Out of our memory…of the Holocaust, we must forge an unshakeable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world…fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide…we must harness the outrage of our own memories to stamp out oppression wherever it exists. We must understand that human rights and human dignity are indivisible.”

Founded in 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has welcomed more than 50 million visitors, including over 11 million school-age children. Approximately 90 percent of its visitors are non-Jewish, reflecting its broad educational mission. Nearly two million people visit the Museum in Washington each year, and its impact extends far beyond its walls. In 2024 alone, the Museum’s websites reached nearly 34 million visitors from 243 countries and territories. Through its exhibitions, archives, teacher training programs, survivor testimony initiatives, research, and digital resources, the Museum helps millions of people worldwide understand how one of history’s greatest atrocities occurred—and why its lessons remain urgently relevant today. Like many others, I am one of those people.

They have produced vast amounts of content for people trying to understand what happened within humanity to produce such a horrific atrocity. I am one of those people. From my father’s extended Czech Jewish family, forty-four relatives were murdered by the Nazis, including dad’s father, Arnost, and mother, Olga Holzer.

In May 1939, a young Jewish doctor named Oswald “Valdik” Holzer fled from his Nazi-occupied Czech homeland to China. His parents and most relatives opted to stay behind. During a period of conflict involving Chinese Nationalists, Communists, and the Japanese, Valdik worked as a doctor for eight months before reaching Peking (Beijing) in late 1940. There, he fell deeply in love with Ruth Alice Lequear, an American missionary. After numerous adventures during WWII, they settled in Melbourne Beach, Florida, in 1952, where they enjoyed a 60-year love story and raised three children.

Because of the horrors of the Holocaust, I never knew my grandparents, Arnost and Olga Holzer, or 42 other relatives. Before the USHMM opened, information about what occurred during the Holocaust was hard to access. Like my father, most families with lost loved ones only had hearsay. Thanks to the USHMM, our national institution for Holocaust documentation and research, I now understand what truly happened to my father’s family and friends.

This story might never have come to light without a remarkable discovery. After my parents’ passing in 2000, my siblings and I uncovered four hundred WWII letters in old Chinese boxes, written by 78 different authors, mostly in Czech. These letters were correspondence with my father during his journey as a forcibly displaced person across five continents. When translated, these voices revealed an extraordinary story—an unparalleled record of events across four continents that altered history forever.

When I sold my engineering consulting firm and retired in 2008, I had the letters translated. These letters, which took months or even years to reach from sender to receiver, contain the very essence of my family, my father’s friends, the fabric of the culture, and humanity’s hope. However, the answers they offered only generated more questions.

Over the past two decades of working with USHMM representatives, I’ve received research assistance and moral support at every step. First, I learned that my grandparents likely perished in Sobibor in 1942. Even in this deep sadness, I wanted to know more — for myself, my children and grandchildren, and generations to follow. USHMM helped me identify who the people in the letters were and what happened to them. Some perished, but many became displaced and rebuilt their lives around the world, having children (like me, now over 70).

The letters’ voices animate history by creating a personal link to the Holocaust and emphasizing the humanity of victims and survivors. They confront antisemitism not just in Europe but also in America. The letters illustrate the experience of losing one’s homeland, immigrating, and trying to rebuild life amid profound personal loss and guilt, whether justified or not. Often, they find new beginnings, strive for citizenship, only to be expelled by autocrats who view them as threats.

The voices of the letter writers echo the urgent plea of ‘never again,’ a warning we must never ignore. Sadly, over time, some people have come to doubt that these events ever occurred. In a December 1945 letter, written shortly after the war’s end, a close friend of my father, who witnessed the horrors at Terezin concentration camp, warned prophetically about future skeptics of the atrocities.

“If we watch the Nuremberg Trial… we have reason to be pessimistic about the future. Most people lack the gift of imagination, and what they don’t personally experience seems nothing but propaganda to them.”

My research was made possible by the support and resources of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Soon, they will shut to update their exhibits and stories. As the WWII eyewitness generation diminishes, we face a crucial moment. I want to guarantee that the principle of ‘never again’ is maintained by future generations, who will need to act if hate and prejudice reappear. It’s clear that, regardless of our backgrounds, we all have a role in the USHMM’s mission to learn from the Holocaust and understand the severe consequences of indifference.

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  

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