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.

My road to the truth was a long one. Growing up on a peaceful island on the east coast of Florida, my father, Oswald “Valdik” Holzer’s stories from his Czech homeland mesmerized me. During the years between wars (WWI and II), Dad’s childhood tales as the only child of Ashkenazi Jews living in Bohemia always sounded joy-filled. His photographic memory recalled vivid descriptions of a list of relatives I had not yet met – grandparents Arnost and Olga, Uncle Leo and Aunts Valda and Olga, cousins Jiri, Pavel and Hanus, and more. The family’s history traced back more than 300 years.

Memories of catching ugly bony carp in Benešov’s nearby ponds sounded familiar to my attempts at catching ugly bony catfish in the Indian River Lagoon. His springtime walks near his home with his dad on the grounds of the famous castle, Konopiště, was impossible to top. There was no renowned local comparison on our island as his hometown castle dated back to the 13th century. We also had no history to cite as famous as the last Konopiště owner—the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination served as a starting spark for WWI.

As Dad spoke of his years at Charles University, Prague’s Old Town Square took front and center with pub crawls with Czech named friends like Vlada, Karel, Franta, and Bala studying medicine, like he or attorneys- in-the-making. He shared little reflection on what was bubbling upon their country’s border in my youth. Much later, I would realize the same years of his joy in the 1930s were the same as when the German Nazis were flexing their muscles with the new leader Adolf Hitler voicing his vitriol not just for Jews but towards anyone he deemed inferior.

All the people Dad spoke about became engulfed in the terror that became WWII. His parents and forty-two other relatives lost their lives in the Holocaust. Many of Dad’s cousins and friends either fled the country as he did, taking on the life of a refugee, or remained trapped behind in German territory. Most lost family, friends, home and homeland, possessions, occupations, religious faith, and sometimes identity. Their old letters echo Ukrainians’ fear, despair, displacement, loss, and hope in the worst of circumstances – while we watch our TVs or stare at our social media, helpless and distraught, looking for actions that stop the madness.

As I became more and more intrigued about the truth behind his stories, I decided I must make a pilgrimage someday to his homeland. Little did I know a secret WWII letter collection that my father hid away after the war would take over the last chapter of my life. What started as a journey inspired by my dad’s stories and letter collection ended with a tribute to him. I’ve made five trips to the Czech lands. Each with a family reunion-now multiplied. Although my dad became a proud American citizen, he never lost his love of all things Czech.

I’ve traveled the world meeting some of the seventy-eight correspondents of over 400 letters. I’ve met descendants for many of them. I continue to seek the truth of how a vibrant democracy in Germany and Czechoslovakia can fail under the watchful eye of those who cherish their freedom. One thing I know. As democracy erodes, silence is dangerous.

The journey for truth also changed me, my children, my grandchildren forever. They know they exist because Dad became a refugee – thrust into a world at war, not anxious to provide safe harbor for those on the run.

As Putin’s war now sends millions of Ukrainian refugees into the world, I know their lives are forever changed. May the world’s people provide the Ukrainians, facing an uncertain future, a safe harbor until they are safe to return to their homeland.

Teach peace.   Joanie Holzer Schirm

www.joanieschirm.com

NPR/WMFE 3/3/22 interview with Joanie Schirm about Ukrainian refugees situation with echoes from WWII 

Consider giving to the:

International Red Cross Ukraine

International Refugee Committee (IRC) 

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 

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

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

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.

www.joanieschirm.com

#MYDEARBOYBOOK

Benesov Mayor Marik greets Tomas Masaryk at Benesov Rail Station

https://youtu.be/MZgf8l56tQg  In this video from 1918, at about 8:10 minutes, the Mayor of Benesov, my dad’s Czech hometown, greets Tomas M. Masaryk returning from exile during WWI to become the president of the newly former Czechoslovakia. At the time my dad was six years old. My father’s aunt Valda was married to Jaroslav Marik, the son of the Mayor.  In the 1960s, when my father was visiting Czechoslovakia, Uncle Jaroslav, knowing my dad collected hats, gave him the top hat that Mayor Marik wore on that day.  After my father’s death in 2000, I chose the hat as part of my inheritance as I knew what it meant to my father. I intend someday to return the hat to the Marik family, a family I’ve gotten to know well through my writing journey and multiple family reunions, hosted at great Aunt Valda and Uncle Jaroslav’s Neveklov home, passed down in their family to their grandsons.

In August 1940, an aunt who’d also managed to escape wrote from Camden, Maine to my refugee father living in the war-torn interior of China, about what she was facing:

“I can easily imagine how you feel and I would be really happy if you could get here as soon as possible. Not that the conditions here are much better. There are huge unemployment problems and strong anti-Semitic feelings. In the newspapers, you can read daily ads as: “Will only hire Aryan” etc., signs on some houses read: “Will rent a flat, to Aryans only.”   I am not afraid of anything, and curiously waiting how it all ends.  I don’t see a very bright future, though…”

In 2018, we see people exploiting the fear of ‘the other’ by spreading rumors and misinformation about the actual facts related to immigrants coming to America, legally or illegally.

The good news, if one cares to look for it, is truth now comes from the touch of a finger on a search engine. When you carefully seek reputable sources, often the best are from credible US government reports detailing many years of facts. This report from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) issued February 8, 2018, is very helpful for understanding statistics on immigrants and immigration to the USA.  https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states#Numbers

As widely stated, we all have a family migration story. Even ‘native’ American Indians arrived here from somewhere beyond the lands of what is now America. Thus, we are all immigrants and therefore ‘the other.’ Even before there was the United States, my mother’s lineage on her paternal side arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York City) in 1658 on the ship de Bruynvis (Brownfish). A later direct descendent during the Revolutionary war was the brave patriot Captain Daniel Bray. Bray was assigned the task of gathering the boats for the difficult task of General George Washington’s famous Delaware River crossing on Christmas night, 1776.  Since then, we’ve had a family tradition of saving the nation.

On my dad’s side, I’m the first generation. A distinction I have solely because my dad managed to escape the deadly wrath of the Nazis. Eventually, Dad settled in the United States of America in sunny Florida, his pride in becoming a naturalized citizen always recalled with high emotion and appreciation.

Today’s unwarranted fear mongering about migrants undermines our nation’s solidarity from within and attacks the entire fabric which has made our country the envy of the world, until maybe now. The constant attacks serve no purpose but to erode our promise for future generations.

So this brings me back to our family tradition of saving the nation.  Join me. Speak up for the value of immigrants in American life. Sure our country should always strive to make our modern immigration system work more efficiently as we strive to be a compassionate and just country of opportunity for those lucky enough to call it home.

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Revolutionary war patriot who gathered the boats for General George Washington to cross the Delaware, Dec. 1776

MY DEAR BOY: A World War II Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation

March, 2019 publication by Potomac Books