An immigration history - 80 years after World War II

Published in MichiganLive.com by Julie Mack

On WWII 80th anniversary, the story of one Jewish family caught in winds of war. "After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Jews were forced to sell their property at ridiculously low prices. Some Jews fled the country. Others were deported to concentration camps."

The photograph was in our living room for years: A family portrait of my husband’s grandmother and her family.

It was taken around 1907 in Austria. It shows a prosperous Jewish couple, Simon and Klara Sommer, surrounded by their 11 children, most of them adults. The second-youngest in the photo is Laura Sommer, my husband’s grandmother. She was about 20 at the time.

Laura Sommer went onto to marry Erich Beu, a German and a Christian. Their oldest son, my husband’s father, was born in Vienna. In the early 1920s, the family emigrated to Buffalo, N.Y.

Erich and Laura Beu lived the rest of their lives in Buffalo, where Erich joined a German-American club and Laura eventually joined the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo. The couple had another son. A professional musician, Erich was a founding member of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and its first concertmaster.

Laura’s Jewish heritage was rarely referenced, say my husband and his two sisters. Growing up, they heard a few vague references to relatives killed in the Holocaust, but no details.

But I wondered.

Recently, with the help of ancestry.com and a Holocaust victim database, I dug into the family mystery: What happened to Laura Sommer’s family during World War II?

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the war’s start. And as I discovered, the Sommers were among the millions caught up in the Jewish genocide.

By 1939, Simon and Klara had passed away and Laura was one of 10 surviving Sommer siblings, agees 63 to 45.

Two were in Buffalo: Laura and her brother Emil. But for those still in Austria, things got rough.

After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Jews were forced to sell their property at ridiculously low prices. Some Jews fled the country. Others were deported to concentration camps.

By the end of 1938, the Sommers’ hometown of Amstettan, about 80 miles west of Vienna, was declared to be “Judenrien” or free of Jews, according to historical accounts.

One of the Sommer siblings, Sofie, went to Finland with her two sons in 1938. A brother, Richard, fled to Palestine.

Then there was Hugo, his wife Trudy, and their daughter Edith. My husband remembers meeting Hugo as a child. What he didn’t know was the family’s frantic scramble to leave Austria.

Edith came first in July 1938, alone as a 9-year-old on a ship sailing from France to New York City, ending up in Buffalo. Hugo and Trudy followed in November 1939 on separate ships -- Hugo leaving from Belgium and Trudy from Italy, a sign of the chaos descending on Europe. The family regrouped in Buffalo, moving in with Emil and his wife.

The other five Sommer siblings weren’t so lucky.

Ludwig was killed by Nazis in Vienna in April 1939. Arthur and Sigmund died in camps in Poland.

Friederike, the oldest sister, had married a Hungarian and was living in Romania. The couple survived the war but had a son killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944. Maxmillian, the second oldest brother, also survived; his name shows up in records as a war refugee resettled in Linz, Austria.

As her siblings were caught up in the horror of World War II, Erich and Laura were living in Buffalo within walking distance of Emil and Hugo. Karl, my husband’s father, was 18 at the start of the war in 1939.

Surely, the Beu family heard first-hand from Hugo and Trudy about the atrocities being committed by the Nazis, and the threat facing those still in Austria. Surely, the drip-drip-drip of bad news from family members during the war years must have packed an emotional wallop.

We don’t how Laura and Erich and their sons processed what was happening. Were they horrified by Hitler? Or was it more complicated than that? Did Erich feel loyalty towards his German homeland? Did Laura distance herself from her Jewish roots amid the era’s anti-Semitism?

Can we read anything into the fact that Erich continued to belong to a German-American club? That my husband and his sisters never knew they had a Great Uncle Emil in Buffalo? Emil and Laura obviously were very close at one point. Emil and his wife brought the Beus to America. Emil named his daughter Laura; Laura give her son the middle name of Emil. Yet until I asked, my husband and his sisters had never heard of Emil Sommer. They also hadn’t heard of their Great Aunt Sofie, even though she moved to the United States after the war and spent her last years in Buffalo.

The fact is, my husband says, his grandmother and father never talked about the past. There was no talk about World War II. There was no explanation of how Laura lost three brothers and a nephew to the Nazis. Maybe that’s to be expected. The Beus were a reserved family, not given to introspection. And many, many people impacted by the war found it too painful to discuss.

But my husband now wonders: Did the family’s connection to the Holocaust affect his father? A brilliant physicist, Karl Beu suffered throughout his adult life from major depression. He died of suicide in 1968. Karl’s brother also was hospitalized with depression.

Laura Sommer lived until 1988, past her 100th birthday. Her grandchildren recall her as a stern woman with a heavy German accent. “She wasn’t very pleasant,” recalls my husband. How did the war and the Holocaust change her?

Eighty wars ago on September 1, Hitler started a war that changed the course of history. It’s only now family members are exploring their personal connection to the Holocaust, and mulling how it might have shaped their lives, too.

CNN- German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has asked for Poland's forgiveness 80 years after the start of World War II.
"I stand before you, those who have survived, before the descendants of the victims, the old and the young residents of Wielun, I am humbled and grateful," Steinmeier said during a ceremony in the Polish city of Wielun, the site of one of the first Nazi bombings in the country on September 1, 1939.