Untold Secrets
It's a Saturday morning, and Dad is at his desk in a makeshift office area in the corner of the downstairs den at our house in New Jersey. From the desk, he can see across the room to the console TV in its dark wood cabinet. He's preparing pink lined order forms in triplicate for the pharmaceutical company he works for, holding a pen and trying not to get carbon paper ink on his fingers. The TV is on low, but he can still hear the dialogue: "Bond, James Bond." My father was obsessed with spy movies and novels.
I am helping him with the paperwork. I’ve got a little set up on the orange upholstered couch across from the TV (later in the century you’d call the couch design “Mid-Century Modern” and it would probably be a vintage eBay find). He has shown me what information needs to go in each column and I am concentrating on the numbers. I am about nine years old.
He tells me about the time he was interrogating a man that had been brought in. They were in Stuttgart, Germany. His responsibility was to read the prisoner’s file, evaluate it, and ask the prisoner questions to determine whether or not they should be let go.
Dad tells me that before he got to Stuttgart, he had traveled back to his hometown in Czechoslovakia to look around, and he also went to the city of Prague, where he had worked in a pharmaceutical firm before the war broke out. He wanted to see if any of his co-workers had survived the German occupation. They told him that the president of the firm had been murdered by the Gestapo – a turncoat clerk from the company, whom they’d all worked alongside. “Oh my gosh,” I said, the paperwork forgotten, “How awful that it was someone you knew!”
The prisoner in front of him is nervous, sweating, eyes darting back and forth. Dad looks up at the man, and back down at the file as he reads through the details of the dossier. Dad and his team of spooks have been trained in interrogation tactics, and now he is following protocol, about to employ some questioning techniques he has used before. Suddenly, it clicks, and he looks up slowly at the prisoner and makes eye contact.
He speaks to the prisoner in fluent German. “Weren’t you in Prague on Monday, September 8, 1941?” The prisoner says nothing. “You were in the fruit market in the Old Town of Prague on Na Přikopě Street at 11:00 a.m.” Dad is staring at the man. “You pulled out a gun and shot the president of the company you worked for. In broad daylight. And then you ran away into the crowd.”
This was Dad’s former co-worker! Of course, like all the other Nazi prisoners, the man denied everything. There wasn’t any proof. No street security cameras on every traffic light like today.
“Oooh,” I gasped, riveted. “What did you do?” “There wasn’t much I could do,” Dad said. “I wrote up my report so the information could be evaluated by our commander. I might have stuck it at the bottom of the pile though, so it would take a long time before they read it.”
“Later, my spies in the jail where the Germans were being held overheard the prisoner talking to other captured Nazis.” “Wait,” I said, “you had your own spies?” Dad smiled. “They told me the man said: ‘those Gestapo Americans – they know everything. They know every detail of our lives. You’d better watch out.’”
Dad’s eyes crinkled a bit as he related his tale, a sly grin forming. When people tell you something incredible, they always laugh, as if they too can’t quite believe it. These were the stories of his service as a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. Army during World War II, when Dad was part of an elite corps of interpreters and interrogators sent into the European Theatre of Operations to question the surrendered German troops about war crimes. I could see he was proud of his accomplishments. He was all of 26 when he joined the army intelligence corps in the middle of a world at war. He didn’t share many details, but these revealing stories wove their way into the narrative of my childhood.
The stories themselves are full of plot holes. When I recall them, I have to question whether they are factual, or embellished memories, perhaps whitewashed or censored. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of a saga, with the pieces jumbled in a box of memories. I’ve overturned them one at a time and saw where they fit together, starting with the edges and working my way through the middle until the full picture emerged – even though there are still a few pieces missing. Over the years, I’ve gathered what few documents I could find, wrote down my own memories in journals, took notes on first- and second-hand accounts from others in the family, referred to stories and lore my mother heard and relayed, and conducted research on WWII history and my family genealogy to understand the timelines and context – because you can find anything on the internet if you dig for it.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a multinational constitutional monarchy, formed in 1867, encompassing much of Central Europe in a 700,000 sq km region. Among the 52 million people living in the empire were diverse ethnic groups including Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, and Romanians. On the surface, it would seem that it functioned in a similar manner to today's European Union, but it had a dual monarchy as its leadership. Despite being one political entity, the empire had internal borders between the different regions, and did not permit unrestricted travel. People were separated by cultural and language differences, ethnicity and social classes, leading to social and economic tensions that brought on the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was fraught with political instability and the monarchy collapsed and broke apart as WWI ended in 1918. By October 28, 1918, Czechoslovakia formed an independent government, and the republics of Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and Italy were operating as autonomous nation-states. Then, in 1921, following the Soviet-Ukrainian War, the borders shifted yet again and the eastern territories of Ukraine became part of the USSR; the whole western Ukraine was absorbed by Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.
Previously, while under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, residents of the regions would have been considered Austrian citizens, but in the interwar period, their nationality and identity would be based on citizenship by descent and the nationality of one’s parents (namely their father). Known as Jus sanguinis, or “the right of blood,” in such a manner, citizenship would flow from generation to generation regardless of geography, a determination that would play a large role in Jewish identity (i.e., The Nuremburg Laws) and the anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews under the stringent regime when Germany took over Europe.
Moravská-Ostrava was an industrial town located in the northeastern part of Czechoslovakia on the banks of the Ostravice River, close to the Polish border. It had a thriving Jewish community during the 1920-1930s, with the third-largest Jewish population in the country (after Prague and Brno). In fact, this small city served as the regional headquarters for the World Zionist Organization, HeHalutz, and other Zionist youth groups.
Freddy (Ferdinand or Ferdi while he was a boy) was the fourth child of this distinguished family of five children. He had two older brothers, Mendel and Hersch, an older sister Ana, and a younger sister, Kateřina (or Kate, who was later also known as Zvia.)
The Steinbrechers all together in 1931. Ferdinand would have been 13. This could have been a gathering for my father’s bar mitzvah. First row L to R: Ferdinand, Moses, Ettel, Kateřina; Second row L to R: Mendel, Ana, Hersch. Photo from author’s collection.
I did not know my grandparents, Moses and Ettel Steinbrecher, but their faces were omnipresent in my childhood home, peering out from a pair of sepia-toned photographs in a hinged double frame that was set upon the bookshelf in the den where my father could see them from his workspace.
I thought my grandparents were Austrian. However, I now know that was only by virtue of the region encompassed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On Dad's birth certificate that I found among his papers (an old tattered copy, written in Czech, with a separate English translation that had been notarized and then signed by my father in 1962), it says Moses, born in 1880 (né Moische, or Mojžíš in Czech), was from Wiznitz, and Ettel (née Beer) was from Cieszanów. Ettel was born in 1881. The town of Cieszanów was in Galicia, in the Austrian Empire (prior to WWI) or Poland between the wars. Wiznitz (or Vyzhnytsia) was a small city located in the crown land of Bukovina, in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, in what would become the Ukraine (and then Poland).
I also found a transcription of my grandparents' Marriage Registry Certificate (amazingly digitized in a searchable online database) that added more details and clues to my family history, but also tilted towards confusion when trying to decipher familial names and locations. It's written in German and was filed with Israelite Registry Office in Wiznitz. An English translation says the wedding ceremony between Moses and Ettel took place on July 7, 1907, in Wiznitz, but that Moses was born in nearby Kobaky (these are small villages about 10 miles apart). It does not list his father’s name but says his mother (my great-grandmother Steinbrecher – whose maiden name I knew to be Zirl) was from Jablonitza Lecki, also in Bukovina. Interestingly, Jablonitza, and other surrounding small villages, could not afford their own rabbi, so they partnered with the larger Jewish community in their area and used the services of a rabbi from Wiznitz (the Witzniter Rebbe). On the maternal side, Ettel parents (my other great-grandparents) Chaje (née Prosser) and Feinisch Beer were from Cieszanów, but were living in a place called Lukawetz (or Lukavec) probably in what is now Romania.
Moses and Ettel Steinbrecher’s marriage certificate filed in 1907 in Wiznitz
According to the marriage document, Moses and his family were also living in Lukawetz (a curiously popular place in 1907), and this could be the rendezvous point for the two young people finding each other. [Later document finds, however, would confound this information, and paint a different picture.] Moses and Ettel were 27 and 26 years old when they were wed. Was there a matchmaker or marriage broker, like Yente in Fiddler on the Roof, who introduced Moses (who would become a tailor like the character Motel Kamzoil) to Ettel in their little shtetl in 1907? Or perhaps the itinerant Wizniter Rebbe doubled as the family matchmaker? The village of Lukawetz straddled the historical region of Bukovina with Romania first occupying Bukowina when Austria-Hungary collapsed in 1918, and Ukraine taking ownership in 1947 at the end of World War II. So, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents before them, were an amalgamation of Austrian, Galician, Bukovinian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Romanian. Familial lines took roots in soil in many lands; their interaction with each other, and their connections to the world were multi-lingual, depending on geography. German, Austrian, Polish, Romanian, Czech, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English were my family’s languages of communication.
Despite their Central European roots, the Steinbrecher and Beer families were no strangers to America. At some point in the late 1890s - 1900s, both family groups immigrated to America with their whole mishpocha and wound up in New York City. This was a common path for Jewish immigrants during the latter half of the 19th Century. European families would have departed from the Port of Hamburg on the Elbe River in Germany, which was Central Europe's main hub for transatlantic passenger and freight travel. They would arrive in North America via a Canadian port like Halifax in Nova Scotia, or directly to New York's Ellis Island, and make their way to the Lower East Side in New York City, or perhaps to the borough of Brooklyn, where they would immerse themselves in a Jewish world on a new continent. Jewish immigrants settling in New York discovered there were already established synagogues, shops, libraries – a tight-knit Jewish enclave where people spoke their languages and shared their culture. They could find work in the garment industry or other trades, and worship in local shuls, forging vital connections essential to forming a new Jewish community in America. I could imagine a game of “Jewish Geography” set on American soil, connecting the human dots ala "six degrees of separation," where the families would learn that Ettel Beer's mother Chaje's friend from shul was from Kuty and knew Moses Steinbrecher's mother's rabbi, the Wiznitzer Rebbe from Jablonitza. “Oy gevlat, Chaje, Moses would be perfect for Ettel! They should meet.”
A curious little tidbit of timing, practically hidden on the second pages of Moses's and Ettel's identity cards (that I discovered in the same place as the marriage document) set off a chain reaction of questions and imagined scenarios, throwing some of my theories out the window. When asked for previous places he lived before applying for his identity card, Moses listed: 1880-1898 born/lived in Kobaky, Poland; 1898-1914 lived in New York City, America; 1914-1916 Lucavec, Romania; and 1916-1939 Moravská-Ostrava. Ettel listed: 1881-1899 born/lived in Cieszanów Poland; 1899-1905 lived in New York City; 1905-1916 Lucavec, Romania; and 1916-1939 Moravská-Ostrava.
If the identity card information is more accurate than the marriage certificate, it would seem that my grandparents, Moses and Ettel, accompanied their parents to New York when they were each 18 years old and lived in the United States into young adulthood. Perhaps they picked up the tailoring trade they would bring to Czechoslovaia by apprenticing in their adopted American Jewish community. Where did they actually meet? Maybe not in a little Ukrainian shtetl – but rather in The Big Apple.
Thumbing through one of my old journals where I'd taken some notes on stories my father told me; I came across a folded-up copy of the eulogy that our Cantor read at my Dad's funeral in 1990. My mother had shared family details for Cantor Lippitz to include in her oration: "Freddy's maternal and paternal grandparents met and married while visiting family in Brooklyn." My mother would not have known the facts of their wedding location confirmed by the marriage certificate.
Freddy's maternal and paternal grandparents met and married while visiting family in Brooklyn.
Moses kept a New York address for 16 years, while Ettel stayed just 6 years, returning to Europe with her mother. Her father, Feinisch (or maybe spelled Foire) Beer, stayed in New York on that early journey to find housing. His New York City address is included on an Ellis Island manifest when Chaje returned to New York in 1911 with her younger children, reunited with her husband, and stayed there permanently. Ettel and Moses must have become engaged in America. Did they carry on a long-distance romance until Moses could come back to Poland to marry Ettel in 1907?
Shortly after the wedding date in 1907, some immediate family members returned to America. Moses Steinbrecher's brothers Rachmeil and Meyer, along with his sisters Miriam and Sarah settled in New York City and became naturalized Americans.
The Steinbrecher family depicting 4 generations for the purpose of this tale; the family generations continue.
The newlyweds Moses and Ettel set up house in Ettel's mother’s community in Lukawetz, Romania. Their first child, Ana, was born in 1910, followed by Mendel in 1911, and Hersch in 1915. The Steinbrechers were a dual-continent couple, and continued to travel back and forth between North America and Europe. They left Romania and settled down in Moravská-Ostrava, Czechoslovakia in 1916, perhaps when Russian forces were advancing into the crown lands as World War I was still raging. My father, Ferdinand, was born in Czechoslovakia in 1918, and Kateřina (Kate) was born there in 1926.
Dad and his brothers, Mendel and Hersch, had become members of the Zionist Blau-Weiss organization (today called T’chalet Lavan El Al, which is based in Israel). In those days, the “Blue-and-White” society was the social Zionist movement for Jewish young people. Blau-Weiss emphasized physical fitness through pioneering, hiking in nature, and exercising; studying and sharing Jewish heritage; and the pursuit of a Jewish state. The three brothers went to a summer camp for the Blau-Weiss youth movement in Ostrava in the early 1930s, where their lives first intersected with a young man named Teddy Kollek, who was not only their camp counselor, but also would become a life-long friend and mentor. Kollek was influential in cultivating the Zionist spirit among the brothers. He had also become involved with the HeHalutz movement in Czechoslovakia, Germany, and England. Decades later (in 1965), Kollek would become the mayor of Jerusalem, Israel, and would be recognized as a visionary world leader.
Teddy Kollek was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in 1911, the same year Mendel was born.) Kollek had moved to Vienna with his family, all of whom embraced the burgeoning Zionist movement, and where he had originally become active in the T’chalet Lavan; the Kollek family made Aliyah to Palestine (then called British Mandatory Palestine) in 1934. Three years later, in July 1937, Kollek became one of the founders of the Kibbutz Ein Gev, located on Lake Kinneret on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. The original settlers of Ein Gev were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, and the Baltic countries.
Teddy Kollek (2nd from the right) with the original settlers at Ein Gev in Palestine, circa 1937.
Leafing through one of my father’s old family photo albums with him when I was in my teens, I had come across a black and white picture of his eldest sister, Ana, and was struck by our doppelganger resemblance. I had held onto the photo and would often wonder about this aunt I’d never know. Where was she in the photo; what was she like; would I have found a kinship with her immediately, as I would later come to know my father’s younger sister, my Aunt Kate?
In the photograph, Ana is a young woman of maybe 24. She is wearing a pretty, light-colored knit dress, indicative of the fashions of the time period (probably in 1934). She is wearing pearls, and her hair is coiffed. She is holding a small, fancy dog. She is standing in front of what looks like a hotel or restaurant. The people behind her are sitting at tables by the building, and they too, are fancy and elegant.
I could see a sign on the building – a word: Kavarna. I didn’t know what it meant, but if I could find out the meaning, it might tell me about the location. I closely cropped the word and put it into a Google photo search. It told me that Kavarna meant “café” in Czech. Now I knew that the photo was taken in Czechoslovakia. I researched “where did wealthy Czechs go for holidays in the 1930s” and found out they went to soak in the thermal springs at the riverside spa town of Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) on the Telpá River near the German border, in an area that would later be called the Sudetenland.
When I researched the spa town, I discovered that there was posh hotel there called The Grandhotel Pupp, a hugely popular spot for Czechs to take in the waters and socialize with other well-to-do Czechs and Austrians. I brought up a photo of the hotel taken with the same angle as the one where my aunt was standing, and the photos matched. Ana was indeed at The Grandhotel Pupp in 1934. They would never be able to go on holiday there again. The hotel was seized by the Germans during the war when the Third Reich annexed the Sudetenland in 1938. It would only return to its original splendor decades later. And it wasn’t until the fall of modern Communism in 1989, that the original name Grandhotel Pupp was restored. Today, the hotel is the home of a major European film festival attended by worldwide celebrities.
My Aunt Ana didn’t live past her 32nd birthday. But for that one moment, in that photo, she was a glamorous Czech at The Grandhotel Pupp, holding her puppy, and enjoying a life that would never be again.
Ana Steinbrecher (and pup) at The Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) circa 1934. Inset photo from author’s collection.
In the early 1930’s, both of Dad’s sisters, Ana and Kate, were still living at home. Ana was working with her parents at the tailor shop; Kate was still in elementary school. Dad’s oldest brother, Mendel, had completed his law degree at the University of Prague, and had become an attorney. The next brother, Hersch, was becoming a Zionist and wanted to join Teddy Kollek’s newly formed kibbutz in the just-forming Jewish state.
Under the dictatorship of Adolph Hitler, Nazi Germany would partially annex the rest of the Czech lands as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, dissolving the Czech government into a puppet of the Third Reich and rendering everyone’s citizenship null and void. Anti-Semitism was rampant with stringent anti-Jewish laws put in place and imposed by the Protectorate Administration. Jews were stripped of their employment and property, subject to forced labor and discriminatory regulations. Jews were prohibited from practicing certain professions including law, education, medicine, pharmacology, and publishing. Jews were barred from owning property and businesses. And many Jews were evicted from their homes, concentrated into substandard housing, and forced to emigrate out of the country. The Germans initially simply wanted to rid the occupied lands of Jews – before they ultimately decided to exterminate them.
While many Czechs did not want to believe in the inevitable dissolution of their country, the danger signs for Jews in Czechoslovakia were already brewing a year earlier with news of Hitler’s rise to power. From March 11-13, 1938, the German troops entered Austria (The Anschluss) and incorporated it into the German Reich. On September 30, 1938, the Germans signed the Munich Agreement, which allowed Hitler to annex the Sudetenland at the northern border. Everyone doubted the treaty would hold. True to predictions, six months later, Hitler violated the treaty, and the Protectorate was put in place in March 1939. The anti-Semitic measures everyone had seen enforced in Germany and Austria would begin to take effect in Czechoslovakia, It was no longer safe for any Jews to stay in Czechoslovakia, and Jewish Czechs, Austrians, Germans, and Poles were making plans to flee Nazi persecution and escape Europe before it was too late. They could not ignore it. When would it become personal?
In December 1938, it hit home: my grandfather, Moses Steinbrecher, was arrested at their house and “expelled by the local authority as an unwelcome foreigner.” He was “deported” from Moravská-Ostrava to the Polish border as part of the German PolenAktion (“Polish Action”), a sweeping movement to remove Czechs, Poles, and others from the Bohemian lands. Moses Steinbrecher was not Czech; Ukrainian somewhat by birth and descent; perhaps Polish (according to his soon-to-be-null passport); and indisputably 100-percent Jewish. But he was most certainly NOT German, and he was targeted as a Jewish male head-of-household in the community-wide raid.
While he was not killed instantly by the Gestapo at the border, his luck this time would only be temporary. A letter from the Acting Police Director of the Police Precinct in Moravská-Ostrava (that I discovered in a database search) reveals that Moses Steinbrecher had been “deported by the local authorities as an unwelcome foreigner in December 1938.” But “since he was the owner of a larger house and a shop run by his wife, he was allowed to return home,” with the caveat that the Germans would tolerate his stay in Moravská-Ostrava for six months in order for him to sell the house and business, and then leave the country. The letter states that “after settling his family affairs, he would move to either England or Palestine.” By the end of August, the next year, in 1939, Moses would sell the house and liquidate the shop. The family would move to Prague, and hoped to emigrate abroad from there.
From the Police Headquarters in Prague
“Mojžíš Steinbrecher was deported by the local authorities as an unwelcome foreigner in December 1938 under No. B.O. 25.548/38. Since he was the owner of a larger house and a shop run by his wife, his stay here was tolerated due to the sale of the house and liquidation of the shop. In addition, he claimed that after settling his family affairs, he would move to either England or Palestine. He has already sold the house and the shop and left with his family for Prague, from where he intends to move abroad…”
With the laws against Jews already set in motion, prohibiting Jews from their professions, Mendel could no longer practice law. Since physicians and pharmacists could no longer practice, Ferdinand was afraid to stay at the pharmaceutical company in Prague. Collectively, the family was worried sick about Moses and then were relieved when he was allowed to return. Everyone in the family would need an exit strategy, and they began the process of investigating where they could immigrate and obtaining the necessary documents.
Most countries were refusing to admit more refugees. U.S. immigration laws and quotas had been in place since 1924; the U.S. and Great Britain were unwilling to ease their immigration restrictions. Travel restrictions were already being enforced, and the number of visas granted from destination countries was strictly controlled. Great Britain was overseeing Mandatory Palestine and limiting immigration numbers. However, there were some loopholes that gave leeway to students, women who married Palestinians, and tourists who let their visas lapse. But, in most cases, illegal immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine was the only path for many desperate for asylum.
I put my father’s original name, “Ferdinand Steinbrecher” into a Holocaust Survivors & Victims database search through The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and his name, and Mendel’s, came up on several refugee lists, including The British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), which later was called The Czech Refugee Trust Fund (CRTF). These organizations made arrangements and allocated funds for refugees from Czechoslovakia to travel to Britain. The BCRC helped to bring 3,500 refugees from Czechoslovakia to the U.K. between October 1936 and March 1939. That would point to Dad and Mendel applying for refugee status through the BCRC and receiving assistance to immigrate to England.
The brothers’ friend Teddy Kollek had already been sent to England in 1938 to work on educational missions for HeHalutz, an umbrella organization of the pioneering Zionist youth movements. Now, on the cusp of World War II, Kollek was working with the government and Alyiah departments of the Jewish Agency in London on Jewish immigration efforts. The Jewish Agency, the largest Jewish non-profit organization in the world, was established in 1929 as the operative branch of the World Zionist Organization. Then known as The Jewish Agency for Palestine, (and later recognized as the primary organization for facilitating the immigration (Aliyah) of Jews into Israel), it had wide reach, with offices throughout Europe. Kollek was working tirelessly to aid Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, facilitating the rescue of young people from Germany and German-occupied countries, and helping to organize the clandestine immigration of Jews to Palestine (informally known by the code name “Aliyah Bet”), with some 141 voyages on secured ships. In 1939, through an unlikely liaison with Adolph Eichmann (a key figure in the Nazi regime), Kollek even succeeded in negotiating the release of 3,000 Jewish youth from concentration camps and transporting them to England for agricultural training.
There are connections between the BCRC and The Jewish Agency – hands working behind the scenes. Somehow arrangements are put together – and there’s a family in England who will give my father an “affidavit of support,” so Dad and Mendel would be going to England together.
However, nothing was in place yet to ensure their parents and sisters would be able to emigrate. Moses, Ettel, and Ana, held foreign passports; while Kate was still a minor child and would fall under her parents’ documentation. The war was imminent. My grandparents did not want to believe their country would be taken over completely – they did not want to leave their neighborhood, their business, or their homeland. No one could truly foresee the horrors of the Holocaust to come.
Dad and Mendel came back home to Moravská-Ostrava sometime in late 1938 to work on obtaining their travel documents, passports, visas, train tickets, and figuring out transportation logistics. Nothing happened quickly in the late 1930s like it does now in the 21st Century. And it would be a long journey to England from their homeland in Czechoslovakia – more than 1,000 miles. As the philosopher Lao Tzu is credited with saying, “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” This could not possibly be an easy trip to navigate.
The Steinbrecher family in their kitchen in Moravská-Ostrava, probably for the last time, in February 1939. L to R: Mendel, Moses, Ferdinand, Kate, Ettel, Ana. Photo from author’s collection.
I wondered about the photo, and who could have taken the picture. The older brother in the photo has to be Mendel (even though he and Hersch looked similar at this age). Hersch had already left for Palestine – he must have made Aliyah in late 1937, or early 1938, to join Kollek shortly after Ein Gev was established. Then I realized that my father took the picture. He was the family photographer, as he would be for our family when I was a child. Dad had a Leica camera (that made it through the war years, and his emigration to America) and he would perch the camera on a tripod, set a timer, and jump into the scene. He did this all the time when we were little. He wouldn’t have noticed the sunlight when he posed the group for the picture. You would only see that later, when the film was developed in a darkroom, and the photo was printed from the negative in a lab.
I posted the photo on a vintage photo restoration Facebook group to try to gain some clarity in the image, and it came back with a bit more facial definition than the original. What is clear is the somber tone and muted smiles on their faces. Everyone knew their world was coming apart.
If you were filming this scene, I imagined what you would see if you “pulled-back in dolly shot” to reveal the larger context and the full scope of the moment: a capture of “moving – but forever.” Ferdinand and Mendel are not the only ones leaving home. The house is already sold. There are boxes of belongings, household items like dishes and knick-knacks in disarray and in a state of packing, suitcases filled, empty shelves, pictures taken off the walls.
This is the tipping point – the pivotal moment from which there is no turning back. Like the moment (some 76 years later) when our designer ripped up the linoleum to see what was underneath before we re-did the kitchen in our house in Livingston – before we sold it (mundane, I know), or when I put my car on a carrier and shipped it across the country before I left New Jersey forever, or the scene from the Shawshank Redemption where Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, tells Morgan Freeman as Red, where he has pre-set a hidden box under a strange rock beneath an old oak tree in Buxton, Maine, while he tells him where he’d go in Mexico if he gets out of prison.
I wondered who would have buried the silver? Dad and Mendel silently grab their warm jackets, and my grandfather, Moses, pulls on his overcoat and hat. The three of them take the box outside at nightfall and go over to their neighbor’s house. The Gentile family next door has offered to let them bury the box in his yard. He is waiting for them with a lantern and a shovel. They dig a hole in the ground as if they are digging a grave, and place the box in the hole, each shoveling in bits of dirt like a Jewish burial. Do they say a Kaddish? They tamp the earth back in place and mark the site with a large rock. No one speaks. Dad sees the tears in his father’s eyes as Moses and the neighbor grasp each other’s hands. The Steinbrecher men walk back to their house, and Dad silently counts his steps committing them to memory. Will they ever be able to retrieve these physical pieces of their family legacy? My father presses back on the emotions and sentiments welling up for him as well and tamps them back down like the grass over the gravesite that contains their valuables beneath the sediments of the earth. Dust to dust. I would rarely see my father display any emotion whatsoever – only a stoic face, fierce and determined when confronting adversity. There were few joyful expressions either, perhaps tucked away forever in that metal box like Pandora’s ills.
I left Czechoslovakia three days before the German occupation and arrived in England on March 10, 1939.
What route could Ferdinand and Mendel have traveled on or about Thursday, March 9, 1939? There were few possibilities. Czechoslovakia was essentially embedded in the middle of the Third Reich. They could not simply travel a straight line to their destination. West would have taken them into Nazi Germany, crossing the border at the already-annexed Sudetenland; south would mean entering into the now German-annexed Austria. Their only way out was east, by train into Poland towards Krakow. From Poland, they could make their way south through Hungary, west into Italy, and France, where they’d finally be able to follow a route north through Paris, cross the English Channel from Calais to Dover by ferry, and arrive in England. That’s almost 1,200 miles by train (at minimum 36 hours of travel, but in the late 1930s, surely it took much more time) – and it’s not like you could just hop on a train and sit back for the ride. There would have been numerous connections between routes in each country, dangerous border crossings, passport and visa inspections along the way – not to mention language and communications barriers. Oh my! It must have taken days to accomplish the journey.
Freddy and Mendel’s journey from Czechoslovakia to England
One day, while traveling through the English countryside, I accidentally met the owner of some chemical plants, who offered me a job. I remained in this man’s employ until my departure for the U.S. to join a host of relatives there.
There are big gaps here. The autobiography only hints at the chronology that would unfold and omits much of the juicy parts of the story Dad told us over the years. The whole story is more complicated, often vague, and contradictory – maybe too controversial for public consumption by an employer.
The reference to living with the dentist and Dad learning English does not turn up again in other accounts, so it makes me question its validity and whether or not it happened that way. I’d venture that my father already may have had some English skills since his maternal and paternal grandparents were living in the U.S. and his parents either went to visit them or were communicating with them. They all may have started to speak some English. How long did Dad live with the dentist in order to learn English thoroughly and become fluent? A few months? Six? A year? Who was the dentist? Was he bilingual with German or Czech background?
And where was this English countryside where Dad met the owner of the chemical plant? According to my Uncle Azia (who would later become Kate’s husband), Freddy “worked for a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Welwyn Garden City,” in Hertfordshire, 25 miles north of London. Was Freddy simply out for a hike in the gardens, randomly practicing his English with a fellow walker, and serendipitously bumped into the owner of a pharma company – the very industry he was trying to get into? Welwyn Garden City was home to several major pharmaceutical companies. An inexplicable coincidence, perhaps.
My Holocaust Museum database search also put Dad’s name (and Mendel’s) on a list of Czech refugees who went to “David Eder Farm” in Harrietsham near Maidstone, Kent in England. This was one of several training farms organized in Britain to help young Jews escape the Nazis and train to be future pioneers in the kibbutz movement. The farm (with ties to the Jewish Agency) was run by the HeHalutz organization in Britain, and granted temporary visas so the youths could find refuge. Arriving in England as a refugee, Dad would need a place to stay, and paperwork to allow him to work in a foreign country, so the farm as a landing place (and stepping off point for his future travels) is plausible. The dentist or farm family and the chemical plant [or maybe pharmaceutical] employer will remain unanswered questions – missing puzzle pieces.
There was still some limited egress through forced emigration that the Nazis implemented to reduce the Jewish population. There were also programs in place to aid children, and travel papers that could be bought for the right price through underground channels.
I remembered stories from my family lore that the family was desperately trying to escape Czechoslovakia and were trying to obtain the necessary paperwork to flee the country. I also knew that at some point my grandparents, Moses and Ettel, and their two daughters left Moravská-Ostrava and went to Prague. The letter from the Police Precinct after Moses was deported, confirmed that the family had gone to Prague. And according to my Uncle Azia, the family had gone to Prague because it would be easier for them. But my hazy recollections were that actually they may have been forced to leave and may have been deported. Was this a “deportation” scare tactic like sending Moses to the Polish border or a ticket to a “final solution” as in a concentration camp?
As I explored what was happening at the beginning of 1939 when the German occupation began, I found an article about transports that laid out details and gave a comprehensive explanation of deportation. I understood that at this early stage, the Steinbrecher family must have been forced to move to Prague, from where they could obtain visas and travel documents, but weren’t technically deported yet – that term would come into play much later. [By the end of 1942, the majority of the Jewish population from the Protectorate would be deported to the Theresienstadt “camp-ghetto” – more than 61,000 men, women, and children.]
In the process, I discovered I had landed on a website from the Institut Terezínské Iniciativy (the Terezin Institute Initiative), a Holocaust educational site with connections to the Jewish Museum in Prague. On a sister site with Holocaust archives (holocaust.cz), there was a link for a “Victim’s Database” beckoning me to plug in a search. I put in my family name “Steinbrecher” as the search term and clicked “enter.” It brought up three records for Moses, Ettel, and Ana, with their photographs, and 21 digitized documents. There were handwritten and signed correspondence from each one of them; applications for identity documents; alien residency permits; personal affidavits; relocation and employment details; requests for travel authorization; required back-up documents like the marriage certificate; and replies from authorities as the documentation efforts progressed. I could not believe what I stumbled upon. I stared at the screen with goose bumps raising the hairs on my arms.
This is the paperwork.
I found it – utterly by chance. I didn’t even know it existed except in concept. And I would never have known where to begin look for it. But here it was together, in one place: beautifully digitized scans of documents and correspondence from 1938-1942 that the German’s kept on record. It’s a stunning find – a virtual treasure trove of information and the heartbreaking paper trail with details of my family’s attempt to escape Nazi persecution.
This is the paperwork: a treasure trove of 21 documents mapping the heartbreaking paper trail of my family’s attempt to escape Nazi persecution.
Of course, all the documents are written in Czech or German, and I had to find a way to translate them. Google Translate gave questionable results, but enough to understand what I was looking at; a Genealogical Translation Facebook Group helped with German to English comprehension; another Jewish Geneaolgy Portal Facebook group and a Czech Bohemian Ancestry Genealogy group helped with other translations from Czech, so I could piece together the progression of their attempt and understand the handwritten messages in complicated Czech cursive writing, with it’s multi-accented words.
As I began to delve into the cache of documents, my initial glee tempered to frustration over some ambiguous details and dates – more information doesn’t necessarily mean answered questions. I think I wound up with extra puzzle pieces from another set.
Moses, Ettel, Ana, and Kate moved from the family home in Moravská-Ostrava into a small apartment at Prague VII, U Kaplićky 17 in Prague. They must have left Moravská-Ostrava a couple of months after the March 15, 1939 occupation. The chronology of the documents begins in June, but some of their applications must have been filed in April and May, because they are receiving replies from the local authorities.
The first group in the correspondence takes place during June – August 1939.
On June 13, 1939, Ana Steinbecher wrote a personal letter to the Regional Office in Prague requesting a new passport “valid for all countries outside of the USA.” She wrote that she had “no possibilities for livelihood and intend[ed] to emigrate abroad.” She submitted her most recent passport, which showed her birthplace was Lucavec, Rumunsko (Romania).
Moses received a telegram written June 28, 1939 from the Central Office for Refugees at Bloomsbury House in London, following up on the status of “work permits.” The letter was addressed to the Dykova Street house in Moravská-Ostrava (before they moved).
Dear Mr. Steinbrecher, we are committed to dealing with your job placement as urgently as possible and hope to provide you with further information on the status of your matter shortly.
On July 4, 1939, Moses heard from The Palestine Office (of The Jewish Agency)
We refer to your visit to us and inform you that family certificates are processed in Palestine. We have forwarded your application via the English Embassy to the Palestine Government and we have called on your son, Hersch Steinbrecher, in Bethlehem to provide the government with the necessary documents. Your son must prove that he can support you after which a Category D Certificate will be issued by the Palestinian Government. We are waiting for the decision of the Palestinian government and we ask you to make your son act quickly as well. As soon as we receive a reply we will inform you immediately.
Next, on July 11, 1939, Moses wrote a personal request to the Provincial Office in Prague requesting a passport for himself, his wife, and his daughter, Kateřina. The letter came from the Prague apartment at Kaplićky Street, so likely they were already moved in by July. A very kind and helpful native Czech speaker, based in Czechoslovakia, responded to my post in the Czech Bohemian Ancestry Genealogy group and translated the letter word-for-word:
11 July 1939
To The Provincial Office in Prague
I kindly request that you issue a temporary passport for emigration purposes to European and non-European countries other than the USA. At the same time, I request that you issue passports for my wife Ettel (née Beerová) born 14 June 1881 in Cieszanów, Cieszanów district, Poland, as well as for my daughter Kateřina born 14 Apr. 1926 in Moravská-Ostrava. I myself was born 20 Dec. 1880 in Kobaki, Poland, which was my previous citizenship. I did renounce my Polish citizenship, however. I am a member of the Jewish faith, and thus require the aforementioned temporary travel passport, such that I may emigrate. Many thanks in advance and with the utmost respect, Mojžíš Steinbrecher.
Mojžíš Steinbrecher’s letter to the Provincial Office in Prague requesting temporary passports for emigration for himself, Ettel, and daughter Kateřina.
After posting the translation, the man commented “the Czech is eloquent and beautifully written.” This instantly brought me to tears, thinking what a huge loss for me and my family that we never got to meet Moses Steinbrecher. My grandfather, who I would only know through his photograph, was eloquent, worldly, and erudite. I know I would have loved him as I came to treasure the moments I had with my father’s siblings and their spouses – my aunts and uncles I would meet throughout my life. I’m certain I would have loved this set of grandparents as much as I adored my mother’s parents – the only living grandparents I had.
On July 14, 1939, Moses received a follow-up memo from the Police Directorate, documenting the Residence Permit application, and requesting the required back up documents (passports, home certificate, nationality, certified letters, Certificate of Citizenship, the marriage certificate, and the official document of nationality.)
There was a separate document with a list of all the Steinbrecher family members, listing all of their children, their birthdates, and birth places.
That same day (July 14, 1939), Moses received a telegram (in German) from the Central Office for Refugees in London, letting him know they had lined up work for him in a household position with Tamarisk Cottage in the village of Angmering-on-Sea in Sussex, England. They were awaiting approval of his work permits. This was a holiday resort area in Sussex overlooking the English Channel, and about 60 miles south of London – a starting place from which Moses would have been able to make a living and provide for his family as they settled into life in the U.K. This seems the likely destination for the family once they would receive the approvals for emigration.
We are very pleased to inform you that you have been hired for a household position, and that we have submitted your work permit. We ask to you contact your employer directly and will contact you again as soon as we have received information from the local authorities. Mr. Ralph Leisevach, Tamarisk Cottage, Homeland Avenue, Angmering-on-Sea, Sussex.
Telegram (in German) from the Central Office for Refugees in London lining up work for Moses Steinbrecher in Sussex, England
On July 28, 1939, writing from the Prague Kaplićky apartment, Moses wrote to the Land Office Through the Police Headquarters in Prague (this is already under the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) to apply for a “Residence Permit in the Local State Territory Without a Passport” (i.e., resident alien document). He stated that he is “married, penniless. I had a tailor shop in Moravská-Ostrava which I sold, and I intend to move abroad. I would also like the Residence Permit without a Passport to apply to my wife Ettel and my daughter Kateřina as the same time.
Ana applied for the same document separately, since she was a 29-year-old adult.
A letter came from The Police Directorate in Prague on August 1, 1939, and informed Moses that his application for “Residence Permits Without Passports” were received. The letter (maybe incorrectly translated) said he “sold his shop and moved to Prague on March 15, 1939, where he has lived since.” It seems unlikely that the family had moved as early as March. It also said that Moses, Ettel, and Kateřina held Polish passports, which now were invalid and were not extended as they were still living outside the Polish National Territory. Their applications for “Residence Permits” and “Residence Permits Without a Passport” would be submitted to the local authorities.
On August 21, 1939, The Provincial Office in Prague wrote that they were still disputing Moses’s Polish Passport eligibility. They had still not granted his or Ettel’s new passport, nor Ana’s.
Lastly, in this initial group of documents, a letter came on August 24, 1939, from The Provincial Office through The Police Headquarters noting that Ana had requested her “Residence Permit at the Local Territory Without a Passport.” Approval was still pending.
Now all the documentation had been submitted, and the waiting game began.
Of course! How else would people have been communicating during the 1930s and 1940s as the world was on the brink of war? There were regularly scheduled radio broadcasts, newspapers, news reels, and telegraph services, occasional terse personal telegrams that would have been expensive, and the rarest of phone calls. (Text messaging wasn’t even a glimmer in someone’s cyber brain yet.) Everyone one was connecting in some way to share news and discuss plans. Most certainly, old fashioned letter writing was the key to reaching out. It was also slow and meandering and often left unanswered questions and could easily get lost.
As a child, I even had my own stamp collection in a bright red and white binder with colorful pictures of stamps on the cover and I emulated my Dad by pasting my stamps on the pages. When Mom and I were clearing out the Livingston, N.J. house before putting it on the market, we sold my father's stamp collection for $100 to an antique stamp dealer at a store in Summit, N.J. In hindsight, I should have kept it. Now I wonder what tales the post marks would have told. A trail of correspondence around the world with a map of the journey this family traveled from one country to another – from their homeland in Czechoslovakia – with arrows shooting off in different directions across three continents and thousands of miles, the family scattered but still trying to keep in touch.
Dearest Máma a Táta,
I do not know if this letter will ever reach you and the girls, but I want you to know I miss you terribly. Mendel and I have arrived in the U.K., and he has entered his university program. I have come to the home of Dr. and Mrs. Levy (the dentist and his family, that the BCRC arranged for me to stay with), and they have welcomed me. I am learning English, and it is going well. I’ve been practicing conversations with everyone I meet, and I feel confident I will be fluent soon. I was fortunate to meet Dr. Levy’s neighbor, a Mr. Simon, who coincidentally owns a chemical company. He has offered me a job working at one of his manufacturing plants. Mendel was very interested to learn of my employ because, as you know, he will be studying organic chemistry. We are very worried about all of you. Have you received your new passports and identity cards yet? Have you had any success in obtaining visas? There are still ways for you and the girls to come to safety. We will find a way to help you leave the country. Please let us know how you and the girls are doing.
All my love, Ferdi
Dearest Ferdi,
My life on the kibbutz is going well. We have learned so much from Teddy's leadership. He has gone to Great Britain and will soon be in London. Please contact him. We must move quickly to remove Kate from Czechoslovakia. She cannot stay there. She could come to you in England, or maybe she can come here to Palestine, and I will take care of her. As you know, I’ve been in contact with The Palestine Office working on the Aliyah paperwork for Máma, Táta, and Ana. I could try to secure an Aliyah certificate for Kate as well.
Always, your brother Hersch
Ein Gev
Dad’s young sister, [my Aunt Kate], was pulled out of Czechoslovakia and traveled on the last children’s boat to leave Europe and she went to Palestine.
This is a hazy, questionable account I heard numerous times, repeated in some form or another by my dad, my mother, my first cousin, Michelle (Kate’s younger daughter), my Uncle Azia (Kate’s husband), my Aunt Doreen (Mendel’s wife) and other family members. (Our family’s oral history is a game of long-distance telephone played out across the continents.) If you examine the statement, there are numerous steps that had to have happened in order for Kate to get from point A (Czechoslovakia) to point B (Palestine). For one thing, Czechoslovakia does not have any seaport access.
How exactly did she get to Palestine?
Suddenly, I remembered that my Aunt Kate did not travel alone. She was with another girl her age. I also remembered hearing that the girl’s family would later own the prestigious Dan Hotels in Israel. Pulling memory out of a hat is a magic trick. I looked up the Dan Hotels Group and learned that they were founded by brothers, Yekutiel and Samuel (known as “Samo”) Federmann. Samuel Federmann was married to a Ruth Steckelmacher, and she was from Prostějov, a town in the Moravian section of Czechoslovakia. The name Federmann rang a distant memory bell. This had to be Aunt Kate’s travel companion. When I researched Ruth Federmann, I discovered that as a prominent hotelier, in her 80s, she had given numerous on-camera oral history interviews relating the courageous story of her escape as a child from Czechoslovakia as a refugee.
In her narrative for the Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive (on February 13, 2008), Ruth Federmann describes how her mother had arranged for her to be on a Kindertransport that would take her by train from Czechoslovakia to England. The Czech Kindertransport movement, a private initiative of a 29-year-old British stockbroker and humanitarian named Nicholas Winton (who would later be called the British Schindler), began in December 1938 and would continue for the next 9 months into 1939. Winton organized train transports that would ultimately take 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia and bring them to Great Britain, where they would stay with foster families. The eighth transport left Czechoslovakia on August 2, and the next train – the ninth – was scheduled to depart on Friday, September 1, 1939, carrying the largest group of children. Ruth was supposed to board the ninth train.
The families have secured the proper travel documents and have brought their 250 children to Prague Wilson railway station. They are prepared to say a tearful goodbye to their young loved ones, with only vague promises that they might actually see each other again one day. But this is the very day Germany invaded Poland, closing the border, and stepping immediately into the start of World War II in Europe. The train is canceled and of the 250 children on the transport, few survived the Holocaust.
The interviewer (Dr. Sidney Bolkosky, Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, who created the oral history archive) asks Federmann: “tell me your story about how you discovered that you were the only survivor of that last [Winton] train?”
Ruth Federmann tells the interviewer, “No…there was another girl…but she’s in a kibbutz, so I don’t know where she went.”
This is my Aunt Kate.
Neither my Aunt Kate nor Ruth Federmann would be going to England. With the September 1st Winton train canceled, there must be a scramble to make other arrangements to get the girls out of Czechoslovakia.
“No…there was another girl…but she’s in a kibbutz, so I don’t know where she went.”
Ruth Federmann
In a book about Nicholas Winton and the children he saved (entitled If It’s Not Impossible: The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton, written by his daughter, Barbara Winton), the author relates Ruth Federmann’s testimony of what happened that day. “She told of receiving an early call from her aunt to say the train would not be leaving but of making the trip anyway with her mother by taxi to Wilson station, where they were turned away at the entrance by German soldiers.” The children were sent back to their homes or lodgings.
I was curious how my family, the Steinbrechers, and Ruth’s family, the Steckelmachers, might have crossed paths and put the two girls, Kate and Ruth, together on the Winton train, and then what alternative arrangements would they be negotiating? How could the girls make it to Palestine?
In Federmann’s oral history narrative from the University of Michigan Voice/Vision Archive (which jumps around in time) the interviewer asks Ruth: “do you have any memories from before the war, in Prague, when you were a child?” Federmann tells him that even early during the German occupation in 1939, she still attended summer camp – for the Blau-Weiss, Zionist Socialist Movement – where “I met some Jewish children.” Well of course – the two families would have connected through their Jewish community in Czechoslovakia. Another instance of Jewish Geography: the World War II Edition. Everyone knew everyone. And evidently everyone went to that summer camp.
Both sets of parents would have been rationalizing that the children would go to England and get a good education. But the next logical destination would be Palestine. Another aunt of Ruth Federmann (her mother’s sister), was already in Palestine, living in what would become Tel Aviv, and my Uncle Hersch was in Ein Gev on the kibbutz. The two girls would be welcomed by relatives on the other side of their journey to safety. Ruth’s family secured a certificate for Palestine; Hersch also was able to get Kate a passport certificate to Palestine. They have the necessary entry permits. Now, how would they get there?
My dear friend Teddy,
My brother Hersch has written fondly of his life in Palestine and how you have been such a good friend and inspiration. He tells me you are coming to London to work with refugees. We have been trying to get my younger sister, Kate, out of Czechoslovakia. She was due to depart on a Kindertransport to England arranged by Nicholas Winton. But now that the Germans have invaded Poland, the border is closed, and that route is cut off. No further trains will be taking children out of Czechoslovakia to the U.K. We are desperate to find another way before it is too late. Can you help?
Yours, Ferdi
Dear Ferdi,
The Jewish Agency in London will be your best bet in making alternate immigration arrangements for your sister. You can reach out to my colleagues there. Please keep me apprised.
Your friend, Teddy
Federmann’s oral history sheds light on the next step, and the “how” of the travel logistics. The interviewer asks “how long was it before you began to make plans to come to Palestine [after the Winton train was canceled]?” She says, “I went on the 27th of November to Palestine. I arrived on the 4th of December.” She says, “We took a train to Trieste…and we went to the Sochnut.”
“In Trieste, we were two days, and I remember that we went up a hill, we to an office of the Sochnut, where we got the permission to go to Palestine. So, the Sochnut. Ask Google what the Sochnut is.” I looked it up. The “Sochnut” was The Jewish Agency (Ha Sochnut Ha Yuhudit L’Eretz Yisrael).
The Sochnut – The Jewish Agency – had offices throughout Europe, and The Palestine Office of the Jewish Agency was in Trieste, Italy. That office played a role in distributing Aliyah certificates and arranging transportation.
Everyone was working on passage for the girls: Moses and Ettel in Prague; Dad in London; Hersch at the other end in Palestine; Kollek behind the scenes. Jewish Agency staffers in Italy facilitated the local transportation (i.e., a train from Prague to Trieste, Italy) and got Kate and Ruth (along with a group of about 180 children 5-12 years old) to a ship departing from Trieste and sailing to Palestine. This was the Trieste/Jaffa route that Hersch would have traveled in late 1937/early 1938. Kate Steinbrecher and Ruth (Steckelmacher) Federmann arrived in Palestine on December 4, 1939. Hersch met Kate and brought her to Ein Gev. Ruth’s relatives brought her to Tel Aviv.
Dear Ferdi,
Our dear sister is safe with me. I met Kate at the ship that came from Italy. She is tired from the journey and scared after being separated from our parents. Her travel companion Ruth was met by her cousins and has gone to Tel Aviv. We will enroll Kate in the school at the kibbutz after an ulpan [an immersive language school for immigrants to Israel] for her to become more proficient in Hebrew, and then she will continue her education here.
All my love, Hersch
Kate went to school on the kibbutz, Ein Gev, and then attended a boarding school in Haifa, supported by a Jewish charity. While in Palestine, Kate chose a Hebrew name, “Zvia” symbolizing beauty and grace. When she was 16, she married a citizen, a tactic for illegal immigrants to be able to stay in Palestine, despite not having residency papers. At some point the marriage was annulled. She stayed in Palestine during the war years, and later moved to England in 1946, where she reconnected with her brother Mendel in Leeds, and continued her schooling. Hersch met his future wife, Ada, on the kibbutz and they had their two daughters, my cousins, Dalia, and Esther, while still in Palestine. (Palestine became the State of Israel on May 14, 1948.)
Getting to Kate to safety in Palestine had been the first step – a goal accomplished, albeit only a momentary bit of relief. As for my father in England, he was now focused on the war effort, rather than working for the chemical company. For months he had been corresponding back and forth with Teddy Kollek who now reached out with a plan to bring my father to London.
Dear Ferdi,
Please come to London and join me at the Jewish Agency. I hear you have become fluent in English. I need someone with your multiple language skills and tenacity to help me bring refugees to safety.
All my best, Teddy
While he was helping strangers with their refugee journeys, Dad was doing all he could for his family still in Czechoslovakia – a desperate effort to save them. Between March 1939 and October 1941 some Jews were still able to emigrate in limited numbers. In early 1940, the British Parliamentary Committee on Refugees was trying to bring more refugees from the Bohemian lands to England via illegal immigration transports.
In Prague, my grandfather, Moses, was continuing to submit applications for visas abroad. The U.S. seemed closed to accepting any refugees at this time. Through a resource at the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), a Holocaust search aggregator site connected to other search websites, when I keyed in “Steinbrecher,” it brought up a surprise visa application. On May 7, 1940, Moses Steinbrecher had submitted applications for visas to Portugal for himself, Ettel, and Ana. This was a “visa application process to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Moses Steinbrecher “of Polish Nationality,” bound for Portugal.” Why Portugal, I wondered?
For one thing, Portugal was a neutral country with a southern port, from which they could sail to England. For another, there was an effort underway by the Portuguese diplomat Aristedes de Sousa Mendes to quickly rubberstamp visas for 30,000 Czech refugees who were desperate to escape Czechoslovakia. Against his government’s orders, de Sousa Mendes issued visas to a significant number of Czech Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, allowing them to escape to Portugal, and ultimately to safety in other countries. De Sousa Mendes was recognized by Israel as one of “Righteous Among Nations” for his act of defiance. Unfortunately, for Moses, Ettel, and Ana, their applications for visas were denied.
Visa application process to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Moses Steinbrecher, of Polish nationality, bound for Portugal. Visa refused. Visa application process to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Ethel Steinbrecher, of Polish nationality, bound for Portugal. Visa refused. Visa application process to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Anni Steinbrecher, of unidentified nationality, bound for Portugal. Visa refused.
Visa applications to Portugal denied
By May 27, 1940, Moses, Ettel, and Ana finally received their new identity cards (“Residence Permit Without a Passport”) at their apartment in Prague (an unexpected byproduct being the revelation of the curious timeline of Moses and Ettel’s young adulthood stays in New York City). These were their identity documents for legal movement within the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The passports for travel outside the Protectorate, so they could emigrate, were still pending approval. And, there was still no communication about visas to either Palestine or the U.K., although England remained the most-likely escape route. There would be a nearly two-year timeframe from the last correspondence and applications Moses filed to the ultimate outcome. The clock was ticking on an approval time-bomb. What more could they do?
That fall, the living conditions for Jews in the capital city of Prague continued to deteriorate. A decree from the SS Central Office for Jewish Emigration entitled, “The New Regulations for Jewish Renters in Prague,” issued on Friday, September 13, 1940, said: “Jews in Prague are no longer permitted to rent vacant residential properties.” Moses, Ettel, and Ana were fortunate to be able to stay put in the Kaplićky apartment, but this meant that other Jewish families could move in with them, crowding multiple households into already cramped quarters. This redefinition of housing in the Protectorate was a particularly ominous step in forcing Jews into a “ghetto without walls.”
By the next September 1941, Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were ordered by the Reich authorities to wear a yellow Star of David sewn on their clothes, with the word Jude (Jew in German) emblazoned on the anti-Semitic badge. They were already living in an elevated state of fear. Now, the addition of the demoralizing Jude symbol proclaimed their ostracization, and punctuated the gradual elimination of all of their rights.
On November 24, 1941, the Nazis established a ghetto-transit camp/prison (i.e., Concentration Camp) in the town of Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech). The town of Terezín, located 43 miles north of Prague, originally had been a military fortress built in 1780. Now Theresienstadt would be used as a temporary holding place for Jews, as the Germans continued to deport them further east to other concentration camps. Two months later, on January 9, 1942, the first transport of Czech Jews left Theresienstadt for other ghettos.
My dear boy, Ferdi,
We are still awaiting approval on our passports and visas so we can be reunited with you in England. There has been no news or communication and we are feeling heartbroken. I am trying to remain strong for Máma and Ana, but we are losing hope. We learned that our neighbors were just sent to Terezín and I’m afraid we will be next. I fear we will never escape this fate. Is there anything you or your contacts in London can do to help us?
All my love to you, Mendel, Hersch, and Zvia
Táta
On a parallel track, Dad would have been spearheading travel arrangements for his parents through the Jewish underground with Kollek’s help. They had all been exchanging correspondence, and it seemed like all the necessary documents had been completed and submitted. The paperwork was on its way for authorization and it should have been signed off by the Germans in the Protectorate by now.
But in London, Dad received the devastating news: there was a miscommunication or misrouting, and according to our family story: “the paperwork with the authorization for the family to travel somehow went to The Hague in the Netherlands.” By the 1940s, The Hague was under German occupation and was the center of German rule in the Netherlands. It isn’t clear why the paperwork would have been sent there. This remains a missing puzzle piece.
“The paperwork with the authorization for the family to travel somehow went to The Hague in the Netherlands.”
At the Jewish Agency in London, no one could track it down, or learn what happened in order to move the authorization along. It was too late. Dad was powerless in trying to reach the authorities, and he could not help to get his parents and sister out of Czechoslovakia in time. The family was doomed.
In mid-1942, my father’s parents, Moses and Ettel, and his sister, Ana, were deported from Prague to Theresienstadt. Dad received word from the German Red Cross that they had been removed from the Prague apartment and loaded on a transport. There was no further communication. This was the last anyone knew of their fate. The final ping from a black box at the bottom of the ocean.
Despite continued correspondence and investigation years after World War II had ended, my father, his brothers Hersch and Mendel, and his sister, Kate, would never learn what happened to their parents and eldest sister.
They did not survive the Holocaust.
Neil Pike’s synagogue in Nottingham had two Czech torah scrolls on loan from the Memorial Scrolls Trust (MST) an organization which rescued religious artifacts from occupied Europe. The scrolls had come from synagogues from two Czech communities, Kamenice nad Lipou and Austerlitz (later called Slakov). Pike had been involved with the synagogue’s adoption of the scrolls, along with a group of other congregation members. Then, in a chance meeting in Austerlitz, a surgeon from Liverpool, England, named Eric Strach, who was a Jewish Czech refugee, and whose grandparents came from Austerlitz, met the very woman who had facilitated the torah scroll loan (odd Jewish Geography at work across the continents). Dr. Strach formed a connection with the synagogue in Nottingham, met Neil Pike, and the two men embarked on a mission to educate the community about the newly available Holocaust records. Dr. Strach’s life-long passion for learning about those lost in the Holocaust had been sparked during a personal visit to Theresienstadt after World War II ended, when he lent his medical training to tend to cases of Thyphoid, TB, and malnutrition.
By 1999, all the Steinbrecher siblings had passed away (sadly, they died relatively young), but several of their spouses (my aunts and uncles) were alive, along with other immediate family (my first cousins). Aunt Doreen sent this letter to all the remaining family members:
6th February 1999
Dear Barbara,
I am sending you a copy of this letter which gives the facts from the Nazi records, which have now become available, about the tragic last weeks and death of your grandparents and Freddy’s sister Ana. I have felt a need to know this truth however shocking and sad it is and I think that you may feel the same. I have sent a copy of the letter to all the members of our family that I am in touch with. I hope one day we shall write down the history as far as we know it of this family to whom we owe so much.
Best wishes to you and love,
Doreen
Kegworth Derby, England
I hope one day we shall write down the history as far as we know it of this family to whom we owe so much.
Doreen Stein
Neil Pike collaborated with his friend Dr. Eric Strach in Liverpool to gather the information and then shared it with my Aunt Doreen Stein.
Dear Mrs. Stein,
Together with my friend Eric Strach in Liverpool, we have come up with the tragic details concerning the fate of your family in the old Czechoslovakia.
Moses, Ettel, and Ana Steinbrecher were sent firstly to Prague where they would have been held in an enforced ghetto. Several larger towns were used to house Jews from outlying areas throughout Europe. They were deported from Prague on transport number Aav-C23 on 30.07.1942 to Terezin (Theresienstadt). Of all those transported in this transport (933 persons) only 66 survived – although this is a relatively high figure from all those that I have seen.
They were then sent to Maly Trostenec on transport Aaz-771 on 4.08.1942. Maly Trostenec is a village near Minsk in the then German occupied Russia. They were first taken – presumably by train to Minsk. From there they were taken by truck to Maly Trostenec. The trucks were mobile gas-chambers. When they reached the camp all those inside were dead. The corpses were then taken out by special prisoners [“Sonderkommando” work units] and thrown into deep pits.
What a bloody efficient killing machine!
I am so sorry to bear this sad news, sadly all too familiar. The thing that always gets me is the detail that can be found when looking for individuals. The records that the Nazis kept were staggering. I would guess a date of death of 5th or 6th August 1942.
I took the liberty of saying Kaddish in synagogue for all three on the Shabbat that I found the information.
Regards,
Neil Pike
Nottingham
[A comprehensive online archive was subsequently established for researching information and documentation on Nazi persecution at The Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution, in Arolsen, Germany. In 2007, the archives were first available to researchers; and since 2019, the center uploaded 13 million documents and made them available and searchable online.]
My fortuitous data find at the Institut Terezínské Iniciativy revealed the sad, undeniable tragic end for my relatives: Moses, Ettel, and Ana were murdered.
According to our family lore: In 1943, Dad left England and joined the U.S. Army. He went to America on a military transport with gunboats.
This could have been his mission all along – to immigrate to the United States. Maybe by 1943, whatever temporary visa had been allowing him to stay in England elapsed, or his paperwork to immigrate to the U.S. finally came through. The steps involved with applying for immigration to the U.S. were myriad: registration for a visa waiting list; gathering identification documents; financial disclosures; security checks; securing an American sponsor; proof of transportation; passport documentation; and communication with the U.S. Consulate, to name many. Putting it all together could have easily taken until 1943 to achieve.
Referring back to my father’s own words in his autobiography from the 1960s, he said: “I arrived in the U.S. on November 3, 1943, and registered for the Draft on November 4. I entered the Service in March 1944, and became a U.S. citizen in September, 1946.” Parsing that condensed version, there’s nearly a three-year time period to account for.
I arrived in the U.S. on November 3, 1943, and registered for the Draft on November 4. I entered the Service in March 1944, and became a U.S. citizen in September, 1946.
Dad’s U.S. Army Draft card with his original name Ferdinand Steinbrecher and his new name Freddy S. Zirl, 1943.
Dad’s army Draft registration card lays out more details and flips over some puzzle piece clues: “As of November 5, 1943, Ferdinand Steinbrecher, who had arrived into the U.S. from Canada on November 2, 1943, was listed as a stateless, unemployed, Czech-born individual, living on East 4th Street in New York City, at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Krautheimer.” [This was my Tante Sura or Aunt Sarah, one of my grandfather Moses’s sisters]. Aunt Sarah’s walk-up apartment was at 231 East 4th Street off of Avenue B in the East Village – the heart of the Lower East Side – home to Eastern European Jews and many other immigrant groups.
Aunt Sarah’s apartment in the East Village on the Lower East Side of New York City.
Why would Dad have traveled from England to Canada, in order to get to the U.S.? And what about the “gunboats” – was this a real thing?
It turns out, yes. I found my father’s name on an immigration passenger list as departing from Liverpool, U.K. and traveling by a ship called the SS Bayano to Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was a passenger on an allied convoy ship. The allied convoy system from 1939-1945 were groups of merchant ships carrying vital supplies (including gunboats), and military personnel, that sailed together across the Atlantic Ocean protected by a formation of escort warships. The ON convoys sailed from Liverpool to Halifax (a crucial Allied staging area, primarily serving as a major port for the transatlantic convoys) and were escorted by British, Canadian, and U.S. ships. The ocean voyage took about 3 weeks, departing on October 14, 1943, and arriving in Canada on November 2.
It’s another long journey from Halifax to New York City, involving a long train ride, and a night bus. Probably 30-35 hours of travel, before Dad arrived at Aunt Sarah’s apartment in the East Village in New York City.
He was 25 years old, and finally in the United States. A stateless, unemployed, orphaned, multilingual, Czech refugee. His American relatives embraced and welcomed him.
Next stop, Texas. With some healthcare knowledge in his background, Dad was sent to Camp Barkeley in Abilene, Texas, where the U.S. Army had its training facility for medics. He stayed in Texas for about 3 months as part of the 11th Medical Training Regiment and 52nd Medical Training Battalion. This training lasted 11-12 weeks, including two weeks of basic military training, 3 weeks for basic tactical training, and 6 weeks for technical training, preparing soldiers for service on the battlefield. Successful graduates were assigned to active units.
Dad was awaiting his orders to ship out as an army medic, curious as to where he’d be posted as an English-speaking American soldier. But when the U.S. army learned that my father was fluent in German, Austrian, Czech, – and now – English, they immediately tapped him for the Intelligence Corps as part of the U.S. Military Intelligence Service (MIS). He was going to Maryland – not overseas. Not yet.
Dad related the next move in his military career: “I served initially in the Army Medical Corps, and was subsequently transferred to U.S. Army Intelligence School at Camp Ritchie, in Maryland, because of my knowledge of several foreign languages. I served overseas primarily in the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps and other Intelligence Agencies.”
Approximately 20,000 American soldiers trained at the secretive Military Intelligence Training Center, (familiarly called Camp Ritchie) a 632-acre tract in Cascade, Maryland, where they learned intelligence gathering techniques they would use in the field. Among the soldiers who trained at Camp Ritchie were Jewish refugees from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria, selected for their fluency in multiple languages, especially German, and were recruited for specialized training in interpreting/translating, interrogation, and information analysis. This elite corps would be trained to use their innate communication abilities and understanding of cultural nuances to inform their intelligence efforts, whether interrogating prisoners on the front lines or conducting counterintelligence work in Europe.
Dad entered Camp Ritchie as a Private (German linguist specialty), and with 775 other trainees, enrolled in Class 25 (from November 30, 1944-January 29, 1945).
During the 8-week training cycle, instructors covered a wide range of topics on intelligence, from map reading and communication equipment; to indentifying enemy army organization; to translating and interpreting documents; to writing accurate intelligence reports; to “non-forceful” interrogation techniques when dealing with detainees; to role playing as practice for questioning and talking to prisoners. Soldiers studied detailed information about the enemy, and learned to pose questions that they already knew the answers to – so if a captured prisoner refused to answer, the interrogator could act like he knew everything anyway. The trainees would be using these skills to interrogate enemy soldiers who surrendered, cull information from civilians in the local area, and report intelligence discoveries to military leadership. Once the training was completed satisfactorily, the soldiers were deployed to high profile sites in the European Theatre of Operation.
Fresh out of Military Intelligence Training, Dad and his Class 25 trainees were part of a group of Camp Ritchie graduates, including 40 officers and 45 enlisted men, who deployed to Camp Kilmer, a U.S. Army staging area and transportation hub located at a site between Edison and Piscataway in New Jersey. Dad was going back to Europe. The Army encouraged my father, (and other immigrant soldiers) to change his German-sounding surname so it wouldn’t reveal his ethnicity; to protect him and any family members that might still be alive; and in case he was ever captured by Germans, he wouldn’t be mistaken for a spy instead of a soldier. He chose the surname Zirl, which was his paternal grandmother’s maiden name (and also a mountain in Austria), anglicized his first name Ferdinand to “Freddy,” and used the middle initial “S” to honor his original family name, Steinbrecher. He became Freddy S. Zirl – his new identity as an American soldier.
On March 3, 1945, Freddy S. Zirl, and his Camp Ritchie classmates, embarked on the SS Queen Mary, a luxury liner converted into a troopship, replete with bunks and hammocks instead of comfortable staterooms, and set sail for Gourock, Scotland, arriving in the harbor on March 11, 1945. The SS Queen Mary was a huge and fast vessel and that could carry up to 16,000 men – an entire army division – in one voyage.
The retrofitted luxury liner now the SS Queen Mary sailed from a port in New Jersey in the U.S. to Gourock, Scotland to take troops to the European Theatre of Operations.
By now, Dad was a Technician Fifth Grade, or a Tec 5 (a non-commissioned officer rank of corporal, but with specialized skills, as in his language ability), and a member of a Military Intelligence Interpreter Team (MII Team #465-G). As of April 2, 1945, my father was embedded with the 15th United States Army. Once in Scotland, he met up with his team members, who included a commissioned officer: 1st Lieutenant William A. Venohr (Camp Ritchie Class 15, German-born Protestant – formerly Order of Battle (OB) specialist, 79th Division, and “Interrogation Prisoner of War” (IPW) Team #53, 6th Armored Division, XX Corps); and four enlisted men: Tech Sergeant Richard Moos (Camp Ritchie Class 17, German-born, Jewish); Corporal George S. Carlisle (Camp Ritchie Class 19, American-born, Protestant); Tec 5 Herman Zanders (Camp Ritchie Class 25, German-born, Jewish); and my father, Tec 5 Freddy S. Zirl (Camp Ritchie Class 25, Czech-born, Jewish).
The five-man team traveled the 812-mile route by military jeep from Gourock, Scotland, through France and into Germany, meeting up with the 15th U.S. Army, where the XXII Corps was securing the Ruhr region on the Western Front.
Lieutenant General L. T. Gerow, Commander of the 15th U.S. Army wrote in the History of the Fifteenth United States Army:
“The Fifteenth United States Army was the last Allied army to enter the conflict against Germany, arriving on the Continent during the latter part of December 1944. Yet during the few short months of operations, it met with and solved a host of varied problems in a singularly efficient manner. Its personnel can well be proud of the contribution it made to both the war effort and the preliminary stages of German occupation.”
In early April, 1945, the 15th U.S. Army was conducting operations on two fronts. The 66th Infantry Division was containing German forces in the Lorient-St. Nazaire pocket of France; while the XXII Corps was conducting a “battle of encirclement” in the Ruhr pocket. As a result, German forces surrendered en masse to the U.S. divisions, and nearly 320,000 German troops were taken prisoner, along with 24 generals, opening a path for the Allied forces to reach Berlin. The end of April saw Hitler’s armies defeated, and Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. The war in Europe was coming to an end.
On the Eastern Front, in the Bohemia and Moravia sections of Czechoslovakia, Czech citizens who were members of the Czech resistance movement, rose up to attempt to liberate the city of Prague from German occupation. The violent Prague Uprising lasted from May 5-9, 1945, until Czech and German leaders signed a cease fire agreement, and the Russian Red Army entered the city and secured it under the control of the Soviet Union.
On May 8, 1945, Germany signed the “The German Instrument of Surrender” documents in Berlin, officially ending World War II in Europe. The United States and Great Britain designated May 8 as Victory in Europe (V-E) Day. Towards the end of May, the 15th U.S. Army established a Military government and civil administration in the area, and then turned over control to the French and British in mid-July, 1945.
Dad was now a Technician Fourth Grade (a Tec 4 or specialist rank of Sergeant) and assigned to the 315th Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment as an Intelligence Officer. The 315th unit was under the jurisdiction of the Army’s 970th Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Detachment, which oversaw field intelligence units in eight regions in the U.S. occupation zone. Region I was headquartered in Stuttgart. As part of a counterintelligence team, Dad, and the other agents would begin interrogating the surrendered German troops and civilians, who would be gathered over the next several weeks and held in a makeshift POW encampment in Ludwigsburg.
With a period of downtime before the CIC teams would begin interacting with prisoners, Dad requested leave and arranged with the Army to take a trip back home to Czechoslovakia to learn the fate of his family. He would tell us: “before I got to Stuttgart, I traveled back to my hometown of Moravská-Ostrava to look around, and I went to Prague to see if any of my former co-workers survived the German occupation.” This is a loaded statement, seemingly implausible, given the context of the German surrender and the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Russians, not to mention the perilous and arduous 650-mile journey in front of him.
In a war-time account by Joseph Eaton, a fellow German-Jewish refugee-soldier, who also attended the Camp Ritchie Military Intelligence School where Dad trained, Eaton was able to secure permission (and a driver) to take an Army jeep to travel to Prague and Theresienstadt to investigate the whereabouts of his Jewish family members who had been deported.
Another soldier, Joseph Wechsberg, also a Camp Ritchie grad (from Class 16 about eleven months ahead of my father), who later would become a prolific and renown American writer and journalist after the war, wrote extensively for The New Yorker magazine in 1948, of his personal journey to return to his (and Dad’s) hometown of Moravská-Ostrava. Wechsberg’s account was published in book form with the title, “Homecoming,” in 2013. I ordered the e-reader version of the book and downloaded the short work onto a Kindle so I could read it and see his photographs. He had a camera with him.
Wechsberg wrote that he traveled alone, starting out in Prague, just after V-E Day, and claimed to be the first American soldier to advance across the demarcation line where the Allied armies ceded liberation duties in Czechoslovakia to the Russian’s Red Army. Wechsberg boarded a train heading east to Moravská-Ostrava, equipped with a special official pass from the Czech Prime Minister that gave him carte blanche travel privileges. According to Wechsberg, the trains were shabby, filthy, and slow, making numerous stops and diversions to allow Red Army trains to utilize the tracks. The route, which normally took 6 hours to travel from Prague to Moravská-Ostrava, now would take 20-25 hours, not including delays between stations. On board were Russian soldiers heading back to the Soviet Union; Czechs emerging out of hiding after the cease-fire from heavy bombardment the past three months; and displaced persons released from Concentration Camps, who had just spent time in Allied military hospitals, returning to points east in Poland. Wechsberg got off the train two-thirds of the way into his journey and joined a Russian army road convoy to make the rest of the trip.
Wechsberg finds his family home partially standing, but without a roof. He writes of his overall impression of Moravská-Ostrava, once a city of contrasts that juxtaposed its coal-mining industry with an eccentric, vibrant cultural life, now shabby and filled with poverty: “it seemed grimy as never before. The houses were run down, with the paint washed off the walls. Shattered window-panes, torn-out doors, holes in the roof. The street lamps were broken. The streets were torn up. There were cracks in the asphalt. The sidewalks were full of holes. Everywhere I saw signs of wartime devastation. House walls riddled with machine-gun holes; barricades of cobblestones.”
Wechsberg, who coincidentally had gone to law school at Prague University at the same time as Dad’s brother Mendel, was on a quest to track down his wife’s parents. They had been able to send out a one-line Red Cross telegram two years earlier, noting that they were alive. While Wechsberg’s own parent’s residence was destroyed, the wife’s family home was still standing, and, in fact, both of his in-laws had survived.
Dad had no such communication from his parents and sister, but he has an agenda – a task to do. He is Red, freed from Shawshank, making his way to the hayfield in Buxton, Maine. The sagas of the other soldiers make Dad’s journey home all the more remarkable – and almost unbelievable – yet it happened. He wasn’t a high ranking lieutenant or captain with a driver, nor a journalist with a press pass. At this point, he was a Tec 4 (Sergeant) on the Detached Enlisted Men’s List (DEML) as a counterintelligence agent with the 315th Corps. Yet, somehow, he got the same permission to travel to Czechoslovakia. Solo or with another soldier, by rail or by jeep – whichever way – he was in for a long and winding road trip.
By mid-May, the 15th U.S. Army had been headquartered in a spa town called Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler in northwest Germany, and this would seem the most likely starting point. Dad (and his possible travel companion) loaded up a jeep with gear: an army-issued duffle; an empty sack; provisions, water, and K-rations; some cartons of cigarettes, which soldiers often used for trading like currency in case someone needed help, or if they ran into trouble; and several “jerry” cans for refueling on the road, and set out on a trek from Germany to Moravská-Ostrava.
Dad’s 650-mile road trip from northwestern Germany to his hometown in Moravská-Ostrava, Czechoslovakia
Dad arrives in Moravská-Ostrava, and rides along the Nádražní Třída, the main road heading to center of the city and linking it with the main railway station and tram loop, passing landmarks: the central Masaryk Square; the Old Square with the Church of St. Wenceslas; the Gymnázium where he finished his secondary education; the little brook where he and his brothers stomped across rocks and pretended to be pioneers. But Moravská-Ostrava is a ghost-town, decimated. Curious pedestrians along the roadways eye him suspiciously with his American army uniform as he drives onto his street. He is afraid of what he will find.
Dad pulls up to the house at Ulice Dykova 12 and parks the jeep on the street. His beloved family home is abandoned: the garden hedges are overgrown; the windows are cracked; the front door is ajar. His heart sinks as he looks up at the upper floor. It’s in rubble; it must have been hit by shelling. Nervous, Dad gets out of the jeep and approaches the house. Should he go in? Inside, he finds the interior ransacked and picked clean by vandals. He walks carefully through the empty halls, the floorboards creaking under his feet and stirring up dust. He peers into his childhood bedroom on the main floor, and at the living room where he used to play with his brothers and sisters. In the kitchen, where they sat at the table together that one last day, a few broken plates are on the floor, water drips from the faucet. But besides the pinging of the water droplets onto the sink, there is only an eerie silence. There are ghosts inside. He has to get some air.
He looks across the hedge to the neighbor’s house next door. Miraculously, it is unscathed and intact. He walks over to the yard, also overgrown and covered in tall grass and dry brush. He hesitates – should he knock on the door first, ask permission from his former neighbor to search in the yard? No one answers at the door, so he makes his way around the back of the house. Will he even find the spot? He traces his footfalls, counting out the paces as remembered them – 100 steps – from their home to the unmarked headstone. He doesn’t see it. Was this entire trip for naught?
Did he veer in the wrong direction? Did he take shorter steps that night? Has he miscounted? But, no, no, there it is – a dark patch a foot more in front of him. The smooth, flat stone is covered in lichen and moss after 6 years in situ. He looks about; has he been followed? No one is around – just nosy birds perched above in a tree. A hawk keeping guard. He kneels down on the ground, and with a small trough he has brought along, he begins to dig furiously. He hits the box top with the trough, and now unearths the weathered metal box. He opens up the lid and touches at the cloth covering the items, surprisingly dry after their internment. He opens the empty canvas satchel and then gingerly takes out his family treasures and puts them in the bag. He remains there on the ground for a while, exhausted from the journey, and crushed by the immense weight of his loss – the only evidence of the life they had there.
I can feel this deeply: the enormity of time – 6 years have elapsed since he was here; the indescribable burden of loss; the choking grasp of grief. Of course, the circumstances are utterly different, but it has been 6 years since I last saw my mother alive. 6 years since I left the only place I called home. 6 years since I saw my parents’ graves side by side at the King Solomon Cemetery in Clifton, New Jersey when we laid her to rest. And 34 years since my father left this world. When it comes to grief in numbers, whether it is times one, or times 6 million, the personal magnitude of loss is the same.
He is cautious of staying too long – there could still be Nazis hiding out, dangerous, suspicious locals lurking anywhere, Russians nosy about the presence of an American GI in their midst. Does he stay the night somewhere in Ostrava? Maybe. Dad returns to the jeep with his bag full of memories and drives to Prague, where he spent happier times living with Mendel and working in the city. It’s another 250 miles west.
Dad arrives in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. It is a wounded city, reeling from the May uprising, but the people are ebullient after the resistance. The Czechs are resilient. There is a hopeful spirit, despite the spoils of the war and the sweeping presence of the Red Army, the liberators – there is an energy he can feel. The streets are cluttered with detritus from the recent uprising. He pulls the jeep over to the roadside for a moment and takes out a crude, hand-drawn map from his jacket pocket. He is looking for landmarks to guide him to the section of the city where his parents and sister’s apartment was. He needs to see how they were living. There it is: Prague VII, U Kaplićky 17. It’s a small, dilapidated three-story building with a non-descript façade and a few dirty windows looking toward the street – deserted now, it’s residents long gone. He doesn’t feel the need to go inside, and he sits quietly behind the wheel lost in his thoughts, imagining.
Dad drives slowly through the familiar streets towards the Old Town of Prague, where he used to work. Will anyone he knew then still be alive? He steps inside the building. A former co-worker or two recognizes him. They are shocked to see him. “Oh my God, Ferdi!” They want to tell him what has happened; how the president of the company was murdered 5 years earlier. How strange to be visiting with these people he used to know, in this city he used to call home for a while, so changed by the past 6 years as he is.
What’s next? Does he spend a couple of days in the city? Or does he continue on a painful journey 43 miles north to Theresienstadt, where there could only be more sorrow in learning news of his parents and sister? Maybe he has to see it for himself, bear witness to the tragedy. But maybe he won’t go. He will not find evidence there. This chapter of his life has closed.
Dad made his way back from Prague, crossing the Czech border, now under Allied control, and entering into Stuttgart, Germany, adding another 290-300 miles to his travelogue. He arrived in the town of Ludwigsburg and joined up with his counterintelligence team. The detainees have been corralled in a makeshift prison area (i.e., fields cordoned off with barbed wire), with interrogation tents set up where the teams of interrogators and interpreters will be questioning the surrendered German troops. This is what their intelligence training was made for. Dad picks up a prisoner file and gets to work.
Dad’s post-war tour lasted until June 6, 1946, when he was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army. I was able to obtain my father’s “U.S. Army Enlisted Record and Report of Separation (Honorable Discharge)” through the National Personnel Records Center of the National Archives and Records Administration, which confirms some details of his own wartime service stories. The Honorable Discharge document shows that he departed Europe on May 2, 1946, and arrived back in the U.S. on May 12.
As the war in Europe and the Pacific concluded, the U.S. military began a year-long mobilization (from September 1945-September 1946) to send the 8 million American servicemen and women from every service branch back home. Dubbed “Operation Magic Carpet,” the 360-day enterprise was the largest combined air and sealift ever organized, utilizing all ocean vessels under the U.S. flag or control. Dad would surely have connected with Mendel in England before returning to the U.S.
Dear Mendel,
My tour with the U.S. Army is concluding and I will be traveling back to the States. I am scheduled to depart for New York at the beginning of May. The army transport will follow a route north and I will stop over in England before heading to Scotland to board the ship. I look forward to seeing you again and meeting your new wife, Doreen.
All my love, Ferdi
Mendel met Doreen while she was in medical school. She became a physician, and they settled in Kegworth, Derby, a village outside of Nottingham, where my uncle was teaching at the university. They hand-built their home, and raised three children, my cousins, Robin, Lucy, and Marjorie. In 1946, Kate (now Zvia), left Palestine to join Mendel in Leeds and further her education. She applied to universities, and ultimately attended The London School of Economics, studying both economics and Spanish. By 1949, she met and then married Azia Jaffet, a civil engineer. They settled in London, and had two daughters, my cousins, Michelle and Nadine. Uncle Hersch, with his wife and two daughters, also left Palestine (Israel) and moved to Los Angeles, Calif.
Dad lived with his Aunt Miriam Halpern at 1411 Avenue N in the Midwood neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. until he could start looking for his own place. I would meet the offspring of these relatives when I was a child. Dad would take all of us to Brooklyn, where Aunt Miriam’s daughters Ethel and Yetta lived with their families. While Ethel and her husband, Larry, were technically my cousins, I called them Aunt Ethel and Uncle Larry, and the two of them lived in a small, cramped apartment, where they had a sewing studio. They were in the schmata business (taking after my father’s parents who traded textiles and crafted custom garments) and they made knockoff mother-of-the-bride gowns. This was a typical garment industry trade in New York in the late 1940s-early 1950s. My cousins made me haute couture party dresses out of the remnants of the gowns. I was a very well-dressed child – a little runway model – even if the runway was simply someone’s wedding aisle or bar mitzvah event.
Runway chic 1966ish. The author and her father in their house in New Jersey. Photo from the author’s collection.
Freddy S. Zirl was officially sworn in as a U.S. citizen on a Saturday morning (sometime in September) 1946, alongside 30 other immigrants turning into new Americans, at a courthouse in New York, seven and a half years after he fled his homeland of Czechoslovakia. He was 28 years old and starting his life over – again. With his educational background in pharmacology, his work with the chemical company, and his facility with talking to strangers, Dad landed a position at a pharmaceutical wholesale company in New York City and began his career as a pharmaceutical salesman (picking up where he left off in 1939). He worked for another drug company in New Jersey, and then moved to Cleveland, Ohio, with a regional sales position, only staying there a short time.
Then he moved back to Newark, N.J. in 1950, and for the next decade, he lived a simple bachelor’s life in America. He joined a ski club and skied at mountains on the east coast, and he returned to playing tennis and exercising. Now he could visit his family members in person and make up for lost time, spending time with his grandparents, aunts, and cousins; taking trips to California to see his brother and going to England to see his sister and older brother; and venturing into Canada to visit with more distant cousins. Kate got married to Azia in 1949, and the siblings gathered in London for the ceremony. Over the next few years, the Steinbrecher siblings were back together for visits in 1952 and 1956, spending time with each other’s families.
Freddy skiing on the east coast of the U.S. circa 1950s.
The Steinbrecher brothers reunited in London in 1956 with their sister, Zvia, and her husband, Azia, and young daughter, Michelle. L to R: Hersch, Freddy, Azia, Michelle, Mendel. Photo from author’s collection.
Marilyn Lenox in 1960.
Found a girl…settled down. Freddy and Marilyn in Livingston, N.J.
He found a girl…settled down…and then got married. What a contrast Dad’s life had become. The war was over, and he was safe and living a peaceful life in a New Jersey suburb. They bought a house in Livingston, N.J. in 1962, and made it a home. My mother had been brought up in a traditional Conservative Jewish household, and now my father was able to embrace his Jewish roots without any fear of persecution. The rescued pair of Austrian silver candelabras sat on the sideboard in the dining room, next to Shabbat candlesticks my mother lit at sundown on Friday evenings. On the bar cart in the living room, they kept the Steinbrecher family silver monogrammed Kiddush cup and its mini cups. My mother would find a place for it on the Seder table awaiting Elijah, or as part of the centerpiece with the candelabras on our Rosh Hashanah table. These heirlooms of our Jewish heritage brought the family history to light as we’d strike a match and say blessings over the candles or sip the wine at holidays and family gatherings.
The Steinbrecher’s rescued family heirlooms - the Austrian candelabras - in the Zirl family dining room in New Jersey.
My parents joined the Oheb Shalom Synagogue in South Orange, N.J. that my mother’s parents belonged to, and they created their own Jewish family traditions. My brother and I attended religious school and learned some Hebrew. But Dad only spoke English to us – with a curious mishmash of accents. You could hear traces of German, Austrian, and Czech, and a bit of Yiddish thrown in the mix. Mom would later become the first female president of the synagogue congregation and go on to be its administrator.
Dad was active, fit, and disciplined, a mindset with muscle memory back to his Zionist youth days. He played tennis at the town courts, swam at the local pool, and relished swimming in the ocean at the Jersey shore, and taking us on beach holidays to Cape Cod in Massachusetts. He shared his love of skiing with our family, too. He tried to teach my mom to ski, but she was afraid after her first attempt during their honeymoon in Mont-Treblant, in Canada, so she knitted sweaters in the ski lodge while my Dad, my brother, and I took to the slopes.
We took family road trips to ski in the mountains in Vermont and New York State. Dad would reminisce about his life in Europe and sing silly songs in the car to entertain me and my brother to pass the time. Zum gali gali gali. Zum gali gali. Hechalutz le’man avodah. Avodah le’man hechalutz. This played over and over in my head and I could hear him singing it as if he was right next to me. I had to look it up. It’s an Israeli folk song in Hebrew, and the lyrics mean: “The pioneer is for his work; work is for the pioneer.” This was the song of the kibbutz settlers in Palestine before it was Israel; and the anthem of the HeHalutz and Blau-Weiss Zionist movement that Dad and his brothers would have learned at summer camp as boys in Czechoslovakia.
Zum gali gali gali. Zum gali gali. Hechalutz le’man avodah. Avodah le’man hechalutz.
Israeli folk song
When we rode up the chairlifts to the top of Killington or Stratton in the Green Mountain range in Vermont, Dad would yodel, his voice carrying far across the snow-covered mountain tops, as if they were Austrian Alps. He would yodel outside our house in the summer evenings to call us home for dinner if we were out riding our bikes in the neighborhood. “Yodel-lay-hit-tee, yodel-lay-hit-tee.” “What’s that?” the neighborhood kids would ask. “That’s just my Dad,” I’d tell them with a little chuckle.
He had a goofy side that emerged when you’d least expect it: in my favorite photograph of my father, taken when I was a little kid, he’s wearing a brown paper bag on his head as a makeshift cap while he’s painting the ceiling of our sun porch. He was also charming, and quite a good dancer, swirling my mom around on the dance floor at social events.
Dad continued to be an avid photographer and he documented all our family gatherings and travels. He was ahead of his time, hopping into the middle of our family photos with his Leica camera set on automatic, as if he was in the 21st Century taking selfies with a smartphone. He’d set up a slide projector and large screen in our downstairs family room, and insist that we sit through his carefully coordinated slide shows, clicking through one Kodachrome slide after another with a remote.
We were a lot alike, my Dad and I – both of us stoic, steadfast, tenacious, driven – more so than I’d ever admit when he was alive. We butted our stubborn heads often, with neither of us relenting. I started running for exercise to stay fit when I was in college, and that led to training for and running marathons for nearly 20 years. I studied photojournalism and spent hours in the darkroom learning how to develop my own photos. Then I continued to document moments with a camera throughout my life, creating memories with images on film or pixels, as much as I do with words. But we never got to compare notes. He never got to see me run marathons; he never saw my photography. He never read anything I wrote.
In 1972, when I was about 11 and Dad was 54, we went to England and Israel as a family and spent about 4 weeks visiting with relatives. In London, Dad saw his sister Kate and her husband Azia, along with their daughters, my first cousins Michelle and Nadine. We visited Dad’s brother Mendel and his wife, Doreen, who were still living in Nottinghamshire, where Mendel worked as a professor at the University of Nottingham. Then we went to Israel and visited some of Dad’s cousins in Haifa and Jerusalem.
We traveled all over the country and saw popular tourist sites, like the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem; the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and other religious spots; we climbed up to the fortress on Masada; and floated in the Dead Sea. But Dad wanted to go some places not on typical day trips, so he hired a private guide. The day we were supposed to take the private tour, Mom and David didn’t feel well, so just Dad and I took the tour. The guide drove us a couple of hours north to Ein Gev on the eastern coast of the Sea of Galilee, the kibbutz Hersch went to when he first got to Palestine, and where Aunt Kate arrived after escaping Czechoslovakia as a young girl. We visited biblical sites in Nazareth on the way back, and then we wound up in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem Town Hall
We pulled up to an old pale limestone building on Jaffa Street not far from the Jaffa Gate of the Old City. It’s unusual, curved frontispiece boasted stained glass windows that looked out onto Safra Square where our guide let us off. Above the entrance where we were going in was some kind of seal with a shield that had a stylized lion and olive branches. I noticed a plaque on the building that said circa 1934. Jerusalem Town Hall. I wasn’t sure why we’d come there.
We wait in a reception area in some comfortable chairs, and then an office assistant asks us to follow her, and we are invited in to a large office. The man inside the office smiles warmly as we enter the room. He is looking directly at Dad and the two men stop and just stare at each other. Dad and the man embrace, giving each other a giant bear hug, the likes of which I’ve rarely seen my father do. This is Teddy Kollek, the Mayor of Jerusalem, in his private office. The two old buddies reminisce (they have not seen each other in 33 years) and Dad introduces me to his friend. Dad wants to take pictures, but he decides the photos should be of me with Teddy Kollek. I remember what I was wearing that day: a purple t-shirt with an appliqué of a cat on the front, I have on white shorts. My hair is in two ponytails tied back with stretchy bands with big white beads. Kollek stands next to me and puts his arm on my shoulder as Dad snaps a photo.
Teddy Kollek, Mayor of Jerusalem, Israel, from 1965-1993, and Freddy’s boyhood friend and mentor.
I still have that picture. Somewhere in a plastic bin, buried deep inside the storage garage where all my belongings are housed – temporarily – while I try to afford housing in California. The old family photo albums are there too, filled with black and white and sepia photos Dad took with his Leica camera when he was in Czechoslovakia and Germany. There are photos of Dad’s family in their home in Moravská-Ostrava, boyhood adventures, and pictures taken during the war. I know there are photos of his military training days. Those albums sat on a high shelf in the closet in my parent’s bedroom in our house on Scotland Drive in Livingston. Now they are in my storage unit all the way at the back, and I cannot get to them right now. But they still exist as evidence of the life that was before. My father’s. Mine.
I know there are clues there.
Despite being perpetually fit and healthy, Dad found out he had a heart murmur, and in 1984, he needed surgery to replace the aortic valve in his heart. This was routine heart surgery, and it should have extended his life for at least another decade, maybe two.
I was 24 when they wheeled him in for heart surgery on that late November day in 1984 – about the age he was when he knew he’d never see his parents again. He was trying to remain brave, but I could see the fear on my father’s face for the first time, both shocking and unusual, since he rarely displayed any emotions. My mother, my brother, and I sat in a family waiting area as the surgery went on for several hours and the medical team updated us. I would sit in that same space by myself, some 30 years later, as I waited while my mother was having life-saving sinus surgery.
Dad’s heart surgery was routine. They replaced the aortic valve, and gave him several blood transfusions. He was fit and healthy otherwise, and he should have recovered and been okay.
Only he wasn't.
He was recovering slower than the doctor’s projected, trying to get back to walking and exercising, reading and doing things he enjoyed. But he wasn't feeling well or bouncing back; his health was unstable. Of course, he didn’t say anything, or talk about his health or his fears. It was undeniable that he was declining. He already knew he was dying.
One day Mom noticed Dad was cleaning out his desk in his basement office. He was tossing out files and papers and letters written in German until most of the drawers were empty. He left a few items like his work autobiography (which Mom fortunately saved) and a tattered copy of his birth certificate (in Czech) that he'd no doubt jumped through bureaucratic hoops to obtain so he could prove his birth date in order to become a U.S. citizen. But he had thrown out copies of all the correspondence that he’d written over the years seeking reparations for the property that had been stolen from his parents during the war. He didn’t want to keep any of it. Whatever was going on, my parents weren't telling me.
As a former spy, my father was good at keeping secrets and staying silent. So was my mother. Together, they kept untold secrets from me until they were too obvious to ignore.
On a sunny weekend morning in December of 1987, I saw my Dad laying face down on the bed in their bedroom – flopped down and prone as if he just couldn't stand up anymore and landed that way. For weeks he’d had shingles up and down his spine and on his face and head. Now, the pain was too much.
Mom was in the other part of the house, sitting at the dining room table (at the spot where I'd dropped an entire plate of spaghetti and red sauce on the carpet when I was 5) when I confronted her. I was afraid to ask. I just knew this was going to be an indelible life-changing kitchen-table-moment, but I couldn’t hold back.
"What is wrong with him?" I demanded cautiously. She looked at me, lips tight, but she couldn't keep it from me any longer. "He has AIDS."
A stunning silence for what seemed like forever, as I just stared at her.
"The blood transfusion was contaminated."
My first reaction, when I could even speak, was anger. “How could you keep this from me?” “Did you get a lawyer?” “Are you suing the blood bank? The doctors?” I wanted someone to be held responsible. I wanted there to be repercussions. And then, softening, “What are his doctors doing for him?” Not much – by today's standards.
How long did I sit there in the aftermath, replaying her words in my head? There was no turning back. Our world was forever splintered like the “Night of Broken Glass” – Kristallnacht – that set the devastating tragedy of the Holocaust in motion nearly 50 years before this moment.
This was only the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when everyone was fearful and the very diagnosis carried a stigma, so no one was even talking about it, except in hushed tones. There weren't many medical options in the 1980s: one drug, AZT, but nothing like the drug choices people have today to keep their immune system in check and their viral loads low to non-existent. This was a man who travailed in the pharmaceutical industry, stocking pharmacies with prescription drugs, without ever taking as much an aspirin, and now he was having one opportunistic illness after another and there was little doctors could treat him with. For the next two years, he was in and out of the hospital, and our house was filled with medical equipment and cold, uncaring hospice nurses sent by an agency. What haunts me is how my father looked when he was dying: gaunt, emaciated, skin and bones like the concentration camp prisoners, only he was in a hospital bed in New Jersey and it was 1990.
My father died on a Thursday morning on July 26, 1990, five years after his heart surgery. He was just 71.
He'd escaped the Nazis in his homeland of Czechoslovakia, traversed the globe some 20,000 miles and back again to the other side of history, finally reaching United States to live out the American dream, and now his life was cut short by a medical screw-up. He was an unsuspecting victim, caught off guard by the American medical community drowning in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Ironic, and utterly unfair.
We held a sad, Jewish funeral. Aunt Kate, the last living Steinbrecher sibling, came from London for the funeral services and burial, to pay her respects for her brother. We sat Shiva and mourned with family and friends. But, most people didn't know how he died, and my family wasn't talking, maintaining an ingrained silence that became an unbearable burden and a source of unmitigated stress for me and my mother for a long time. All we could feel was isolation, despair, and anger – our faith shattered; our world upturned.
Mom and I grew closer with our shared grief, and eventually we became close friends. Both of us buried ourselves in work. We adopted some pets to care for. We made over the kitchen and some other rooms of the house to temper the lingering ghosts and focus on the present. My brother moved to California, and we traipsed across the country to visit a couple of times each year. I got to know my mother as a person, more than a parent. Yet, we did not talk much about my father or the secrets they kept from me. I asked her one day late in her life why she didn't tell me, and she said she was afraid, and wanted to spare me from the knowledge. Not knowing was worse.
I would have asked my father a million questions, and pressed him to share the details of the fascinating journey of his life before I ever knew him. Mom and I carried on without him for the next 28 years – about as long as I actually knew my father. I did not process his death well, or deal with my grief and my emotions until decades later.
My mother died of cancer in 2018 (a third recurrence after being in remission for several years) and I was all alone – an orphan, grieving. I could not possibly have fathomed the depths of grief my father must have lived with after losing his parents and sister, and his homeland, until I could see it through the lens of my own loss.
I spent the first four years there, living in an apartment that ate up all my resources, and struggling just to stay solvent in Silicon Valley, easily the most expensive place in the country. When I couldn’t possibly afford housing on what I was earning, and had nowhere else to go, I moved into my brother and sister-in-law’s house as a last resort, what I hoped would be a temporary way station until I could figure something else out. The atmosphere grew tense, and when we even spoke to each other it was only to have a confrontation or an argument.
My sister-in-law cornered me at the fridge one evening when I was taking out ingredients to make a salad. I just stared at her trying not to cry, as she continued, unfiltered, and finally looked back down at her phone.
She suddenly switches gears. “Your brother found your Dad’s name in a book about World War II,” she says casually, as if she’s telling me she bought a pallet of lettuce on sale at Costco. “What?” I stop cutting tomatoes. “What are you talking about?” She tells me they were Googling about her uncle to learn about his family (an ancestor was a famous rabbi) and somehow that lead to putting my Dad’s name in a search.
Freddy S. Zirl (né Steinbrecher) came up in an alphabetical roster of World War II intelligence officers. “Your Dad was a Ritchie Boy,” she told me. “A what?” I had no idea what that meant. She told me my brother sent an email to the author and asked about my father’s inclusion in the book. Was he even going to tell me what he learned?
“Your Dad was a Ritchie Boy.”
The author wrote back and told my brother that my father was part of an elite group of intelligence officers trained at Camp Ritchie: Class 25 – November 30, 1944-January 29, 1945.
Well, I knew that. Dad told us about his training at Camp Ritchie. I knew he was a spy, even if he never said it in those terms.
The term “Ritchie Boys” wasn’t even used in World War II to refer to those soldiers who trained at Camp Ritchie – their story was classified until 2000. The “Ritchie Boys” moniker became part of the World War II lexicon after a 2004 documentary entitled The Ritchie Boys was produced by Christian Bauer, a German filmmaker, who coined the name, and it stuck. The Ritchie Boys earned an iconic place in World War II history books and film and storytelling, right up there with the Navajo Code Talkers, resistance fighters, the “Righteous Among Nations,” and other rescuers who saved Jews.
Of course, now all the secrecy and clues I’d picked up over the years made sense – the puzzle with its holes now revealing a more complete picture I couldn’t see without the colorful box top for reference. The Ritchie Boys didn’t know they’d be famous some 60 years ago when they were young men training to be the eyes and ears of the U.S. Army.
Neither my father, nor most of the Ritchie Boys he served with, knew we’d be talking about them today in heroic terms. They were together with my Dad in the classrooms in Maryland, where they learned tactics for drawing information out of prisoners; on the deck right beside him looking out over the sea as they sailed on the Queen Mary to Scotland; bumping along hundreds of miles in the jeep from Scotland to Germany; sitting next to him in the front seat on the road trip to his family home in Ostrava; or on a mission for answers to Prague.
Dad and other Ritchie Boys, who also served in the counterintelligence corps, were the ones in the tents at Stuttgart, encountering thousands of surrendered German Nazis, bravely meeting the enemy face-to-face. As a Ritchie Boy, my father looked his former coworker in the eyes, and knew this prisoner was the one who murdered his boss. He might have interrogated the very Nazis who tossed his parents and sister onto a death train. The Ritchie Boys were effective soldiers who treated the enemy without violence, using psychological tactics instead of weapons of destruction.
I think of all of the earlier moments where Dad’s path may have crossed with young men just like him – fleeing Nazi persecution and facing an uncertain future – when he didn’t know they would meet in a highly specialized classroom in Maryland, or be thought of in the same sentence as a Ritchie Boy. Another pair of young Czech brothers on the train to Poland when Dad and Mendel fled Czechoslovakia when the German occupation began; a young man riding solo on the gunboat convoy crossing the Atlantic to America; another army inductee in basic training; a refugee family with a son escaping occupied Germany through underground immigration channels. Like my father, they were all courageous refugees, picking up their lives and meeting their destiny. They were all around him and he didn’t know them yet.
The Ritchie Boys were key players in the Allied victory of World War II. Immediately following the end of the war in Europe, a report surveying World War II battalion commanders showed that The Ritchie Boys’ secret, behind-the-scenes intelligence-gathering efforts were responsible for 60% of the “actionable” intelligence in tracking down Nazi criminals, winning war battles, and victories as the war came to an end.
In a comprehensive book about U.S. Army Intelligence in Germany from 1944-1949, entitled Covert Legions, the author Thomas Boghardt describes the role of the Counterintelligence Corps: “The Counterintelligence Corps served as the praetorian guard of the American occupation, and had wide-ranging powers and responsibilities.” Apparently, the captured Germans were afraid of the American CIC officers. He writes: “often operating in uniform and equipped with sidearms, steel helmets, and armbands emblazoned with the letters “CIC,” soldiers of the Corps represented the hard side of the occupation. Germans often addressed letters to CIC offices to The American Gestapo.” That’s the same term Dad’s prisoner (his co-worker who murdered their boss) used after being questioned.
After V-E Day, the Army activated the 970th Counterintelligence Corps Detachment to operate in occupied Germany. Dad and the other Ritchie Boys who served as intelligence officers (approximately 1,400 soldiers) were now reporting to the Counterintelligence Corps. Through their interrogation of surrendered Nazis at Stuttgart, they were gathering vital evidence that would be used in the post-war Nuremberg Trials to come. From our family oral history, we knew Dad’s particular team “uncovered information about those involved with the infamous Krupp Factory” (a German munitions operation owned by industrialist Alfried Krupp). The Krupp Trial was the 10th of the 12 U.S. trials known as the “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials” that the U.S. authorities conducted before U.S. military courts in their occupation zone. The trial proceedings concerned the extensive use of slave labor by the Krupp industrial complex and other crimes committed by the company; the evidence came from the German documents seized by the Allied forces, and then translated by the counterintelligence team.
The Ritchie Boys came home from serving as intelligence officers and went on their different paths in life, becoming authors, lecturers, professors, lawyers, intelligence agents, filmmakers, politicians, artists, and pharmaceutical salesmen – proud of their contribution to bring World War II to an end, but unrecognized for the unique battles they fought. Dad served with such notable Ritchie Boys as authors J.D. Salinger and Joseph Wechsberg, investment banker David Rockefeller, Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, civil rights activist William Slone Coffin, Hermann F. Eilts, Ambassador to Saudia Arabia and Egypt, and Richard Schifter, assistant secretary of state for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, and special assistant to President Bill Clinton – as a group they could not be more varied and different, but collectively they shared a common goal: to defeat the enemy in defense of freedom. Their strategic weaponry was intelligence and psychological warfare.
Dad’s Honorable Discharge record notes his honors and distinctions received during his military service: he was awarded the American Campaign medal; the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal (EAME); the Good Conduct Medal; and the World War II Victory Medal. But his secret contributions as a Ritchie Boy and counterintelligence officer were never recognized in his lifetime. That information was still classified in 1946.
Dad’s honors and distinctions he received during his military service. Medals for the American Campaign, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign (EAME), Good Conduct, World War II Victory. Circa 1946.
In 2021, the U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan resolution (S. Res. 349) to honor the contributions of the Ritchie Boys; then in 2022, legislation was introduced to award the Ritchie Boys the Congressional Gold Medal (H.R. 3545 is still before committee.) Also in 2022, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum bestowed the Ritchie Boys with the Elie Wiesel Award, its highest honor, recognizing their actions as war heroes.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Elie Wiesel Award bestowed to the Ritchie Boys in 2022
Since the Ritchie Boys’ story was declassified in 2000, the Ritchie Boys have found a place in history books, non-fiction works, memoirs, fictional stories, and they have been the subject of television news documentaries (i.e., CBS’s 60 Minutes) and numerous documentary films.
Dad, and most of the other young World War II intelligence officers he served with, would never learn they were The Ritchie Boys, or that they would be a “thing” glorified in film – the stuff of the spy novels my father loved to read.
Dad didn’t know he was a Ritchie Boy; and he never knew he was a war hero,
Neither did my mother. She would have kvelled. In her last career (after teaching French, and running synagogues) she had returned to academia and was working for Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, in the department of Jewish Christian Studies. She led a non-profit arm of the university that awarded scholarships to graduate students who were earning their masters degrees teaching Holocaust education at the high school level in schools throughout New Jersey. The state was the first to have a mandate that the Holocaust was included in the curriculum of all public and private schools. The department was a fund-raising arm so more students could get scholarships that would enable them to complete their studies. Seton Hall University would hold fund-raising events, created by my mother, during which the university would honor individuals who were key figures in Holocaust remembrance, or who saved Jews during the war, or who embodied heroism. Honorees included such World War II notables as Elie Wiesel, Sir Nicholas Winton, Janusz Korczak, Irena Sendler, and Aristedes de Sousa Mendes.
I can only imagine the event my mother would have created if she had learned my father was a World War II Ritchie Boy, an unsung war hero, who was living an ordinary, but extraordinary life.
Freddy S. Zirl as a Ritchie Boy in 1944; and as an American civilian.