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) 

Joanie Holzer Schirm

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 

In these times of considerable uncertainty, one thing is sure. We all recognize the importance of education when seeking to end prejudice and discrimination while inspiring a more caring and respectful world.

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

Echoes & Reflections utilizes unparalleled expertise and resources from three world leaders in Holocaust education: ADL, USC Shoah Foundation, and Yad Vashem. Echoes & Reflections is a leading Holocaust education program for middle and high school teachers. They deliver comprehensive digital resources and professional development programs that provide educators with opportunities to discover powerful resources for teaching about the Holocaust, to practice educational approaches and effective strategies, and to collaborate with colleagues.

For the past two decades, Joanie Holzer Schirm has served as the curator of the Holzer Collection. It was described in 2008 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Director Henry Mayer as “one of the most extensive personal World War II letter collections seen in years.” The assemblage, saved by her Czech Jewish father, “Valdik” Holzer, after the Nazis forcibly displaced him, causing Holzer to traverse across five continents, transformed his daughter into an archivist. She became a global researcher, an amateur genealogist, award-winning nonfiction author, and sought after speaker.

Schirm’s first book, Adventurers Against Their Will, earned a cover testimonial from former U. S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, won the Global eBook Award for Best Biography, and is referenced in the Essentials of Holocaust Education edited by Samuel Totten and Stephen Feinberg. Her second book, My  Dear Boy, (Potomac Books, 2019), is a Foreword Reviews Indies Book of the Year Award Autobiography/Memoir finalist.

The over four hundred letters by seventy-eight writers at the heart of the Holzer Collection join with personal diaries, documents, hundreds of old photographs, art, and vintage film, providing primary sources that bring the period to life. Schirm recognizes the importance of sharing the primary sources as individual narratives. For her book readers, educators, and students, the letters deliver personalized experiences that echo the injustices and unrest of today.

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

• 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.

Echoes & Reflections is able to partner with Joanie Schirm and your schools or organization to deliver an online professional development program on the experiences of refugees during the Holocaust and today. For more information and to schedule a free program, please contact Jesse Tannetta, jtannetta@adl.org.

Joanie Holzer Schirm www.joanieschirm.com welcomes emails to joanie.schirm@gmail.com . In addition to her work as a writer, speaker, and citizen of the world, Schirm serves on the Leadership Steering Committee for the creation of a new Holocaust museum and education center in downtown Orlando, FL, U.S.A.

Use of a theatrical play, My Dear Girl, written by award-winning playwright John Mark Jernigan for the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida is available after required use permission for reenactment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2vmGRTM2qU

Teacher comments:

Jennifer L. Goss, M.A., N.B.C.T

Social Studies Teacher at Staunton High School (V.A.)

Echoes & Reflections Facilitator

U.S.H.M.M. Teacher Fellow ’10:

“Using the resources associated with My Dear Boy and Adventurers Against Their Will helped to further humanize the story of the Holocaust with my students. I greatly appreciated how well it tied into the existing resources I use with my students, such as Echoes & Reflections. The stories and letters complimented many of the testimonies I had already used in class, most of which are now part of the study guide created for the resources. My students especially appreciated the “normalcy” of the exchanges. One letter to Valdik speaks of the palm trees of Southern California, a student asked me – well, how did he know about them? That sparked a great discussion! It was also valuable to show students the primary mode of communication during this time period, which is so different than what we have today.”

Kimberly Klett

English and Holocaust Studies Teacher at Dobson High School, Mesa, AZ

Echoes & Reflections Trainer

USHMM Museum Teacher Fellow (’03):

“I use the packet of selected letters from Adventurers Against Their Will with students alongside the U.S.H.M.M. activity “Why Didn’t They Just Leave?”  Students look at the requirements to leave Nazi Germany and the requirements to get into the U.S. at the time.  Then, they read the letters in the packet and see how Valdik and his friends dealt with this in their emigrations.  By the end of the activity, students no longer ask why the Jews didn’t just leave because they see how difficult it was to do so, and see the outcomes for those who are able to.  We also utilize visual history testimonies from Echoes & Reflections, such as Esther Clifford, allowing students to hear the voices of survivors who tried to get out of Germany. After learning more about Valdik’s story, students look at letters from his parents, from My Dear Boy, and discuss the few choices available to those who were unable to escape.  Students are able to experience the power of the written word and of letter writing, and really feel they get to know the “characters” they are reading from.”

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 

In 2018, I connected with a Chinese born gentleman, Jim Fang, now a Canadian citizen, who is planning a Toronto museum dedicated to previous Christian missionary work in China. Jim was born in Yochow (now Yueyang) , Hunan Province, where one of the oldest American missions was established. During his research, Jim uncovered he was born in the same place as my mother, Ruth Alice (nee Lequear) Holzer was born in 1916.

By the time I met Jim, for several years he’d been buying memorabilia to fill his museum from across the global internet.  After a Google search, locating my author website, Jim contacted me via email saying his collection may include stories and photos of my maternal grandfather, Horace Lequear. He offered to email copies of the materials, and sure enough, with goosebumps erupting on my arm, I saw my grandfather’s face in the photos. Soon, I was reading my grandfather’s words describing his mission work and the people he worked with from 1906-1926 in the mission fields.

Shortly after, Jim and his wife visited our home, where we discussed information of common interest. We’ve corresponded ever since, including a note this week showing his kind soul.

Dear Joanie, I am so glad to hear the publishing of your new book about your father. Congratulations! In June, I saw a letter of 1941 for sale. It was sent to Mr. & Mrs. Leo Lilling in Shanghai. When I searched more information about Leo Lilling, I found that he was mentioned in your earlier book (https://joanieschirm.com/honoring-un-world-refugee-day-june-20th-74-years-hence-my-dads-journey-as-a-refugee/). So, I bought the letter although I could not read the letter – it is in German. The letter was from A. Stern in Seattle, Wash., sent to Leo but was returned to the sender due to service suspended because of the war. I am attaching the letter here and hope it is useful for you in some way.

Now, I’m in search of a German translator as I hope to learn more about Leo Lilling’s life after he and my father went separate ways in early 1941.  My dad sailed from Shanghai to Los Angeles with my Mom.  Leo stayed behind, hoping to keep his prosperous export business intact. After Pearl Harbour brought America into WWII, I suspect that was no longer the case, and I wonder if the letters will shed any light on Leo’s situation just before the outbreak of war.

As for me and my writing journey-learned advice:  Always remember. In today’s world, kindness is not an action most expect. The world becomes a kinder place when you’re kind.

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

Driven by his father’s last wish that “your profession of curing doesn’t just become a source of wealth for you, that you yourself become a benefactor to the suffering humanity,” Dad walked that walk in his service to Florida Tech and the community at large.

The world has changed momentously in the 80 years since my father was driven from his Czech homeland, followed by the loss of forty-four relatives in the Holocaust, including his parents. Social fragmentation may be part of what has caused a rise in hate, antisemitism, and extremism.  But the core value of taking responsibility to care for one another remains a simple remedy to complex questions that face us daily across the globe.  Do unto others…

Learn from the past. Build a better future.

Help us build a new Orlando museum:  Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity 

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