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.

“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

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.

Excerpted from Arnošt Holzer’s June 20, 1941 letter from Prague, in Nazi-occupied German territory, to Long Beach, California to his only child, Osvald “Valdik” Holzer.

Valdik, the next month you will celebrate your thirtieth birthday. This is a milestone in everyone’s life. You will celebrate it away from us so our thoughts will be with you . . . Ruth will certainly remember the day nicely and will, at least in part, make up to you for what we cannot do for you.

Unfortunately, a bad fate forces us to spend several years of your life without you. You know how we loved being with you and that we now must miss what was the most beautiful thing in our life and, in fact, for so long the purpose of our lives. Only the hope that the day will come when we can hug you again gives us the strength to bear all the hardship that we must.

A note added to the letter by Valdik’s mother, Olga:

I read what your dad wrote, and it was as if he wrote my thoughts from my soul exactly. You know best what you mean to us, and with such a festive day coming, I am always with you in my mind. I join the wish of your father and wish you lots of good luck and all the success in life for your next thirty years.

One year later Valdik’s parents Arnošt and Olga perished in a Nazi death camp, likely Sobibor in Poland.

Joanie Holzer Schirm

www.joanieschirm.com

MY DEAR BOY publication by Potomac Books in early 2019.   Sign up www.joanieschirm.com for Author Alerts.

My ‘free’ time spent with family history research almost always uncovers some ‘a-ha’ moment.  About two years ago a man named James in Tennessee read my first book, Adventurers Against Their Will. While dabbling in his own family history, James discovered we shared a relative: Ferdinand William Breth.  For me, Ferdinand Breth lives eternally in my dad’s old WWII letter collection.  Known to my Bohemian father as “Uncle Bill,” Ferdinand Breth is for me a first cousin twice removed from the Czech lands of my paternal heritage. Or to paint a picture from my twisted tree:  Ferdinand’s mother Teresie was my great grandfather Alois’ sister.

Uncle Bill, a chemist, living in Pennsylvania in 1941, helped my dad both financially and emotionally when my father and mother arrived in America from China. Uncle Bill’s letters to my father during 1941, before the US entered World War II, were especially intriguing. They detail Uncle Bill’s contact with desperate Jewish relatives in the Czech lands and his attempts to pay monies to bring them to safety.  In all cases, he failed as the Nazis tightened their hold and began to deport them to concentration camps. Uncle Bill’s heartbreaking letters detail his suspicion that the Nazis were extorting the Jews of the money that U.S. relatives sent to facilitate escape. Sadly, none of the relatives Uncle Bill names in the letters were able to leave, and all perished in the Holocaust.

James’ niece Heather has the genealogy bug as I do and we’ve shared information. Over time, she and James have photocopied a meticulous diary kept by Uncle Bill. All entries involving people, places, photographs, or other noteworthy things are cross-referenced in ten-year indexes (Deciniums).  The document will be preserved by a museum in Baltimore.  Since several of the entries involved my father, James shared them with me including recently this one with a photo of my dad I’d never seen before from my parents’ time in California (1941-42).

Ferdinand Breth “Uncle Bill” October 1941 entry into his diary regarding Valdik Holzer

International Human Rights Day

For the past sixty-eight years, the world has celebrated the December 10^th anniversary of the 1945 United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With the fresh recognition of what humans can do to one another following the horrific evidence of the Holocaust, the historic UN act promoted the publicizing of the Declaration text. It reads: “to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories.” Now in 438 different languages and dialects, the document holds the Guinness World Record for being the most translated document in the world.

And yet, even with strong Constitutional protections in America, in a 2015 United Nations report, the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out cases of criminal justice, national security, immigration policy and social and economic rights violations. Compared to other liberal democracies, the ACLU reported the US has comparatively a “poor record of upholding basic rights.”

Human rights are not simply a privilege. As a human being, these are certain fundamental rights you should not be denied. Here are ten of the most well-known of the thirty universal rights contained in the UN document. They include the right to trial, the right to a nationality, the right to privacy, the right to peaceful public assembly, the right to own property, the right to education, freedom of expression, freedom from slavery, the right to seek asylum and the right to get married and start a family.

When I think of the importance of protecting human dignity for the whole human family, my mind always plays the lyrics from John Lennon’s song: Imagine.  Look up the words and see how you feel about it. This shouldn’t be such a tough challenge, but injustices continue to play out in America and around the world.

By telling true stories from my family history which includes injustices that caused the loss of life of family and friends, property, and homeland, I’ll never stop working for the protection of human dignity and rights. The path to the goal is education – of the young and old.

Learn more about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf

http://www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_en_web.pdf

For more about what’s happening around the world about deterioration of Human Rights:

http://www.voanews.com/a/alarming-deterioration-of-human-rights-worldwide/3617235.html

Ann Scott, Florida First Lady with Joanie Schirm

January 26, 2015: On a perfect sunny day, with music, dance, drama, and book character impersonations, students, staff and dignitaries from Orange County, Florida’s Timber Creek High School kicked off Celebrate Literacy Week, Florida!  Florida Department of Education’s annual event celebrates the tremendous success Florida’s students have accomplished over the past decade. Recognizing “reading accelerates success”, FDOE’s Just Read Florida staff created an environment of magic when hundreds of students in attendance silently read from their books as the Timber Creek Orchestra performed. Their five minute reading was all a part of the Million Minute Marathon goal of 36 million minutes of reading statewide!   As a part of the FDOE 2015 Celebrate Literacy Week Recommended Reading List for Grades 9-12, Adventurers Against Their Will is now in the hands of Florida’s First Lady, Mrs. Ann Scott.

Celebrate Literacy Week, Florida! is a week-long celebration from Jan. 26 – 30, 2015, geared toward raising awareness for literacy programs and projects offered by the Department of Education’s Just Read, Florida! office, and its partner agencies and organizations. The week’s events are made possible by these participating sponsors: Florida Lottery; National Geographic; Dairy Council of Florida, a Division of Florida Dairy Farmers; Scholastic; Florida Department of Health; Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles and the Kennedy Space Center. The Department of Education actively works with community groups and volunteers throughout the state to make reading a priority in students’ lives. For more information about Just Read, Florida!, visit www.justreadflorida.com.

Inspiration for my fateful journey

When you’re an author of nonfiction, reader feedback inspires when you learn you’ve touched a personal chord within someone’s life.   Lately, a couple of heartwarming book reviews of Adventurers Against Their Will, remind me the day-in, day-out grueling research and study is well worth this fateful writing journey.

From Judith Lavitt in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada:

“I was born in Shanghai in 1941 to Jews that had managed to escape the horrors of Europe. My parents were one of the lucky ones in that they were able to leave when they did. They were on the last ship to get out by way of Genoa, Italy on the Conte Verde.  Pavel Kraus, a cousin of Joanie’s she includes in her book, was on this ship along with my parents (Abraham , Adi and Liselotte nee: Stein, Schaffer). Learning this fact alone made me want to continue learning more and more. This book gave me a better understanding of what my parents must have gone through in order to find a haven in Shanghai. As difficult as life was, they were much better off than the people who they left behind.   Shanghai was the only port in the entire word that would accept people without papers. These letters helped me to understand better what went on. After the war my parents as many others wanted the memories to fade so they never spoke about this time in their lives.

My grandparents along with aunts, uncle and cousins all felt that they would be safe staying in Germany. They had lived in Germany for a few hundred years and felt they were Jewish, but German first. They were a well-established family.  Could these horrors be true? Only my parents and one brother survived.

We left Shanghai and arrived in San Francisco on July 22. My brother Bert was born as an American on the 23. At that time no two people in our family had been born in the same country. We left by train for Winnipeg, when Bert was six weeks old.  Life has been good after such a bleak start.

I think this book should be a very important reading for the young. It could happen again.”

From Charles Ota Heller, Annapolis, Maryland, USA: 

“As a Holocaust Survivor–one of Czechoslovakia’s “hidden children” during World War II–I was intrigued when I found out about this book. What I discovered inside the covers of “Adventurers Against Their Will” was a series of remarkable stories. Author Joanie Holzer Schirm discovered an amazing gift left by her father: brightly-painted Chinese boxes which contained a treasure trove of letters. They are letters to and from her father’s friends and family–those who escaped Czechoslovakia from the Nazis and scattered around the world, as well as those who stayed behind and eventually perished at the hands of the Germans. It is one thing to be in possession of such correspondence and to have had the benefit of one’s father’s stories. It is another to write an interesting, coherent, dramatic, exciting story which keeps the reader turning pages.

Ms. Schirm does this beautifully. With so many individual tales, so many characters, and so many places, it would be easy for the reader to become confused. But, she uses skillfully a “Dramatis Personae” at the beginning of each chapter, along with a timeline at the end of the book, both of which allow the reader to remain engaged and informed. I know from personal experience how difficult it is, when writing such a book, to mix personal stories with historical events. The author does this masterfully, writing with emotion and feeling–informing, educating, and creating suspense. “Adventurers Against Their Will” is a must-read. It is for anyone who embraces inspirational stories of people who expect to lead ordinary, happy, lives, but end up having to overcome hardships and calamities thrust upon them by forces of evil.”

The photo is of my father’s 1939 ship ticket from Marseilles to Shanghai – his place of safe refuge until early 1941 when he made his way to America.   The high drama I write about in my books can’t be made up. These two book reviewers also lived early lives filled with life-threatening danger. Luckily, as with these two reviewers, the stories I write about end with rebuilt lives in a civilized society. May we remember civilized societies, as was Germany’s in the early 1930’s, are often fragile.  We must never forget the importance of honoring our differences and championing human rights.   

Imagine meeting someone through their seventy year-old letters – not addressed to you but to your father- who by the time you read the letters had passed away.  Through the letter writer’s own intimate 1940’s words, you meet this person as a young man; a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague in Shanghai, China. You learn just a small slice of his life story and you yearn to know more.

Now imagine that this man becomes your friend, your confidante, sharing stories after seven decades. He speaks to you as if you are his peer because you, through the old letters your dad saved, know his friends as well as this letter writer did long ago, during the worst moments of his life. You learn this man nabbed the “most dangerous man in Europe” after WWII ended.

This surreal experience happened to me in 2010, when I found the man I knew as Pavel Kraus. Pavel, later in America known as “Paul”, was my dad’s cousin-by-marriage.  My dad’s Uncle Rudolf Winternitz’s sister was Paul’s mother. In 1944, Paul’s mother and father and Rudolf and wife Olga died in Auschwitz.  My father’s parents perished in 1942 at Sobibor death camp.  In 2010, I was on a journey of putting all these pieces of family history together when I found Paul.

My Czech-American dad, Oswald Holzer, hid four-hundred WWII-era letters away when the war ended.  They stayed hidden until he died.  After they were found, I had them translated and went in search of seven of the seventy-eight writers.   I located Paul in Chicago and we met at his apartment just after his 91^st birthday.

At that meeting, as Paul shared details of his life over the seventy years that passed since he wrote to my dad, Paul became my friend.  We sat on his couch, laughing and crying as we looked at old photos and documents.  There on a hot summer day, Paul and I talked as buddies from the old days. I discovered he had much to share, including some stories his adult children knew little about.  Soon after our meeting, when he captured my heart, Paul became a featured character in my book, Adventurers Against Their Will.

Paul Kraus led an extraordinary life – as a European Jewish refugee, later as a brave US Soldier, a high ranking executive in the bourbon industry, and a father of three children.  He also was simply a man who, against all odds, lived life to its fullest until almost the day he died at 95 years old – September 22, 2014.  The Chicago Sun-Times article summarizes much that defined this extraordinary life.  I will miss my friend, Paul Kraus.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/obituaries/30222106-418/paul-kraus-wwii-gi-who-nabbed-most-dangerous-man-in-europe-dies-at-95.html

As an author who started to write books after six decades of ‘not’ writing books, I’m a good example to think about when you want to step off the sidewalk, turn a new corner, and follow your dreams.  I’m proof that each day offers the opportunity to get ready for your next nonfiction chapter in life.  Start now by getting your next cup of coffee at a different café. Write me a note if you want to know more about how to go about becoming a writer “later in life.”  It’s an epic saga but still fun.

With English to Czech translation by Jana Gigov, TRITON publishing house brings to life on September 1, 2014 the WWII stories of my father and his Prague friends. Adventurers Against Their Will – published in my dad’s native tongue – is a dream come true! Unlike any other, these stories of forcibly displaced persons just before and during WWII remind us to be guardians of human rights and dignity.

From TRITON, please order the print version of the 2013 Global Ebook Award Winner for Best Biography for your Czech-speaking friends! http://www.tridistri.cz/dobrodruhyprotisvevuli

For the English version, go to www.joanieschirm.local/order-books/

Next, go get your coffee.