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.

A Schiele painting transcends time - a Holocaust survival history

Elsa Koditschek was living in a prosperous section of Vienna, near the foothills of the Alps, when the Nazis, who had annexed Austria, confiscated her home in 1940. A German officer, a squad leader in the SS, soon moved in.

Mrs. Koditschek, a Jew, was allowed to stay on, in an upstairs apartment, a tenant in her own house for about a year, until a deportation edict arrived ordering her to a bleak, uncertain future in a Polish ghetto. She fled instead, leaving behind her life’s possessions including the only major artwork she had ever purchased, a landscape by Egon Schiele.

For years, she hid in the homes of non-Jewish friends, according to an account she gave in dozens of letters written during and after the war. But she was ultimately desperate enough to seek refuge in the house the Nazis had seized from her, sneaking back in to live there in secrecy and silence with an upstairs tenant.
From there, she spied on the SS officer, Herbert Gerbing, watching through a window as he sat in the garden with his family. Probably unbeknown to her, while she hid upstairs, he was helping with the deportation of Jews across Europe.

“Who would think I would find myself sharing a roof with an SS officer?” she wrote later in a letter to her son, Paul, who had moved to New York years earlier.

Mrs. Koditschek’s Schiele was ultimately sold during the war, while she struggled to survive, and it has been sold several times since.

But her letters, handwritten on onionskin and intact after having been carefully packed away in a relative’s basement, helped the Koditschek family and researchers at Sotheby’s piece together the provenance of the painting. So this fall in New York, when it goes up for auction with an estimated value of $12 million to $18 million, Mrs. Koditschek’s heirs will share in the proceeds with its current owners.

“It’s so unusual to have a victim of Nazi theft or expropriation who writes everything down,” Lucian Simmons, the worldwide head of restitution at Sotheby’s, said. “Usually you’re trying to join the dots, but the dots are far apart.”

Steven Luckert, a historian with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said that Mrs. Koditschek’s experience stood out even among the startling tales of Jews who had lived through the war hiding in Nazi-occupied cities. “The fact that she was living in the same house as someone who was in charge of deportations makes it even more extraordinary,” he said.

Mentions of the Schiele painting in the letters buttressed the provenance research by Mr. Simmons, who had approached the family in 2014 after independently finding indications that it had lost an important painting during the war. What followed were several years of negotiation with the current owners of the Schiele, Europeans who had bought it in the 1950s, that led to an agreement that will govern the sale next month of the work, “City in Twilight (The Small City II)” painted in 1913.

“It’s an important painting with a wonderful revolutionary abstract form,” Mr. Simmons said.

Perhaps more remarkable than the painting is the tale that accompanies it: the account of woman made vagabond by the Nazis who ended up returning to the very house from which she had been evicted, and living out the war there, just feet above one of her persecutors. Mrs. Koditschek survived the war, and related her account in many letters to her son, who died in 1974. But he seldom discussed those experiences in any detail, so relatives have only recently begun to unravel Mrs. Koditschek’s history by sifting through the correspondence. (Sotheby’s provided translations of excerpts from the letters.)

Their tone deepens as events evolve, according to Sarah Whites-Koditschek, a great-granddaughter, and turns grim in 1941 when the deportation order arrives. At that point, Ms. Whites-Koditschek said, “She’s just writing about whether she can find any way to escape.”

Mrs. Koditschek, picture taken in the 1920s.

Steven Luckert, a historian with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said that Mrs. Koditschek’s experience stood out even among the startling tales of Jews who had lived through the war hiding in Nazi-occupied cities. “The fact that she was living in the same house as someone who was in charge of deportations makes it even more extraordinary,” he said.

Mrs. Koditschek, the widow of a banker, had sent her son and daughter away to safety before Europe became engulfed in war. 

Egon Schiele’s “City in Twilight (The Small City II),” painted in 1913, was owned by Mrs. Koditschek.Credi

But she stayed behind in Vienna, living in the three-story home her husband had built in 1911. She lived on the first floor, below her longtime tenant, Sylvia Kosminski, who was known as “Aunt Sylvia” though she was not a relative.

When the Nazi and his family took over the first floor, Mrs. Koditschek moved to the second to share quarters with Aunt Sylvia, bringing with her, the Koditschek family believes, the Schiele painting.

The letters do not indicate that Mrs. Koditschek was particularly fearful of the Nazi she was living with. He occasionally summoned her to explain how things in the house worked. She described his demeanor as civil, even after she received “an ominous card” directing her to show up at a school to be deported to German-occupied Poland. 

When she asked the officer if the trip could be delayed, he replied that it could not, she wrote. But he painted a glowing portrait of what life would be like in the Lodz ghetto and offered a word of advice, suggesting she bring a minimum of belongings.

“This was a kind thing for him to say,” Mrs. Koditschek wrote, “because the luggage of most Jews was robbed even before they arrived at their destination. Also of course their lives.”

It does not seem, based on her letters, that Mrs. Koditschek had an inkling of Mr. Gerbing’s larger role in the deportation of Jews. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance center, describes him as a key player in executing those policies and said he “participated in raids and arrests, and was reported to have been exceedingly brutal, at one case causing grievous injuries to detainees.”
Image

Armed Nazi youths march through the streets of Vienna in March 1938 after Hitler’s annexation of Austria.

When Mrs. Koditschek fled, she lived with a family named Heinz and spent virtually all of her time indoors, often hiding for hours behind a cupboard inside their apartment. She passed the lonely hours by practicing her English or playing chess against herself.

But her life there was disrupted in 1943, Mrs. Koditschek wrote, when Mr. Heinz came home one day “under the escort of some strange men” who began searching the apartment. She slipped away though an open door.

“I must have been wearing a magic cap of invisibility because the plainclothes men did not notice me,” she wrote, adding that as she roamed the streets that night, “people stared at me as if I was a ghost from another time.”

Under cover of darkness Mrs. Koditschek met Aunt Sylvia, and they returned to her home, rushing inside, she said in a letter, “when the coast was all clear.” For the next two years she lived a clandestine life there, sleeping on a makeshift bed and hiding whenever the doorbell rang.

Mr. Gerbing was not often home, she wrote. Historians have recorded that he had a role in deportation efforts in Paris, Slovakia and Thessaloniki. When he was away, Mrs. Koditschek noticed, Jewish laborers, marked by badges, would carry the plunder of war — furniture, a piano, clothing — into her home. “Wherever he stays,” Mrs. Koditschek wrote, “in Greece, in France, in Slovakia, he sends big boxes back with goods from each country.”

“If there was something that had to be repaired in the house,” she wrote, “the Jews came again, and they also labored in the garden.”

A letter Mrs. Koditschek wrote to her son, Paul. Her preserved, translated letters proved invaluable in tracking the provenance of the Schiele painting.

As compelling as the letters are, they leave much unanswered. How did Mrs. Koditschek completely avoid notice? Was Aunt Sylvia Jewish, and if so, how did she escape persecution?

Still, Ted Koditschek, Mrs. Koditschek’s grandson and a history professor emeritus at the University of Missouri, said in an interview that the correspondence is an invaluable resource for the family. “It is like a Rosetta Stone for a small group of people,” he said, adding, “There are still many questions that are unanswered and will remain that way.”

Just when the Schiele was sold is unclear, though Sotheby’s said it seems to have happened between 1941 and 1943. One of Mrs. Koditschek’s letters describes how Aunt Sylvia, who had supplied her with food while she hid, arrived one day at the Heinz apartment to say that she too now needed money and wanted permission to sell “the pictures.”

In a letter after the war, Mrs. Koditschek wrote to her son: “Aunt Sylvia sold your microscope, as well as the Schiele and the two Rugendas,” adding “Aunt Sylvia was actually repaid her loans to me twice over.”

Sotheby’s, which will earn a commission on the sale of the painting, has negotiated several similar deals between the heirs of Jews who lost art during the Holocaust and the current owners of paintings, solutions often meant to address complicated issues of ownership, ethics and international law. The auction house did not identify the current owners of the Schiele, who wanted to remain anonymous.

Mrs. Koditschek was still in her house in 1944 when the Allies bombed Vienna and in 1945 when she heard rumors that Mr. Gerbing had been killed by a mob in Prague. He never returned from that trip and the Russian army entered Vienna that year, ransacking her house, she wrote, as they passed.

Eventually, Mrs. Koditschek made her way to safety in Bern, Switzerland, where she died in 1961.

Mrs. Koditschek’s instincts about Poland probably saved her life, said Ms. Whites-Koditschek who believes her great-grandmother had somehow figured out what was happening to those people who were deported to the Lodz ghetto. “She must have heard what was happening there through her community,” she said.

Indeed, most of the Jews who lived or were shipped to Lodz went to death camps before the close of the war. By the time the Russians entered, a prewar Jewish population of about 250,000 had been reduced to fewer than 1,000.

Mrs. Koditschek, the widow of a banker, had sent her son and daughter away to safety before Europe became engulfed in war. But she stayed behind in Vienna, living in the three-story home her husband had built in 1911. She lived on the first floor, below her longtime tenant, Sylvia Kosminski, who was known as “Aunt Sylvia” though she was not a relative.

Eastern Europeans teach communist occupation history

After a wonderful 10 day visit to four Eastern European nations, that were once in the heart of the Cold War block, my husband and I were surprised to discover how willing our hosts were to discuss the years when Soviet Communism ruled.  (Our tour director, a nice man named Andre Toth, a Hungarian, said we were really in "Central Europe", but our trip seemed to be as far "east" as we might ever travel.)

Richard and Juliana in Prague celebrating our Golden Years in Prague and Eastern (okay- "Central") Europe.

We were behind the former "Iron Curtain", an iconic border during the Cold War. 

Yet, Iron Curtain became an anachronism, almost over night, when the power struggle ended. In fact, the Cold War was the ideological conflict and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas, from the end of World War II in 1945 until 1991, when the Cold War ended.

Since then, the nations once occupied by the Soviet Communists have built energized economies. 

Obviously, communism was a complete failure.

Now, the European Union (EU) allows freedom of travel between the Eastern European nations, particularly the ones we visited in October, 2015....without any border checks!

Our small group tour visited Prague in the Czech Republic, Vienna in Austria, Budapest in Hungary and we took a side trip  to the Slovenia city of Bratslava. (This small nation was once part of Czechoslovokia.)

Bratslava in Slovenia

We certainly enjoyed visiting nations that we never dreamed of going to, even a decade ago.

While sorting through many pictures taken in Eastern Europe, three of them make for an interesting history collage.

Although, the pictures weren't taken in sequence, they're a personal collage of how we learned about the communist occupation of  Czechoslovakia (Prague in the Czech Republic) and Hungary - in Budapest.

A picture of the World War II bullet holes, purposefully retained in the Budapest Defense Ministry (even after renovation) building, to remind people about the horrors of World War II. 

Budapest remains of World War II- bullet holes in the Defense Ministry

Our guide called the battles in Budapest, between the Russians invading the city against the occupying Germans, "a second Leningrad". 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Budapest

Unfortunately, after the Russians liberated Budapest, they "forgot to leave," said our tour guide.  They took over the government and forced the people to accept communism.  Our guide said everything was controlled by the central government (I assume in Moscow). This control was frequently incompetent. For example, one communist agricultural directive was given to the Hungarians to begin to grow orange trees!

A picture taken on the main boulevard in Prague, shows a historical main thoroughfare, where centuries of history have transpired. This photo shows how the communists tried to destroy the culture in the nations they occupied after World War II. A communist office building on the left, with virtually no decor, was erected next to a beautiful Prague facade, now a small inn, on the main boulevard, in Prague. Stark contrast!

Prague, in Czech Republic, the main boulevard contrast between austere communist and lovely cultural architecture

Today, the old communist buildings are practically vacant and the Prague residents are discussing whether or not to destroy them, or to let them stand, as reminders of the austerity of communist oppression.

Finally, in Budapest, the city on the "Buda" side of the Danube River decided to exhibit the communist automobile, on the street, to remind people about the hideousness of the communist regime. Apparently, people were once forced to buy these ugly cars. They're now relics of the communist occupation.

Budapest "LADA" automobile relic. 

Communist Eastern Europeans were required to buy this model car, even though they were known for having "a LADA problems".  In other words, they often broke down. This auto relic is now on display on Budapest street, as a reminder of the failed communist Hungarian occupation.

What's most interesting about this history was how freely everyone was willing to discuss and to talk about it, rather than to try and pretend it didn't happen.

A validation of this history came in a message from Gail, who lives in North Carolina.  She recognized the picture showing the stark contrast between the pre-communist era and the quaint, pre-World War II, cultural architecture.  

She noticed that same marked difference when traveling into the former East Germany, from West Germany, right after the Iron Curtain fell. ""The austere-looking buildings were so ugly," she wrote.  "It had a profound affect on my visual senses; everything immediately became gray and design-less", she wrote. "Even the once beautiful town of Potsdam was in waste, with the lovely houses crumbling. Many of those (communist made) cars you had in one of your pictures were made by a company called LODA. They caused a 'lot-a trouble' because they continually broke down. The Russians and many other East European diplomats in Algeria drove those cars in Algiers in the mid 80s. They were always having problems with them".  

Another interesting travel experience was our ability to cross the borders between Austria and the Czech Republic without incident.

In fact, our motor coach was relieved when we were able to pass right over the Czech-Austrian border without being stopped. Nevertheless, there were Syrian refugees living on the Czech side of the crossing; some of the women were hand washing their cloths and hanging them on cloths lines.

In our lifetime, we've experienced the Iron Curtain going up and coming down. Now, even the Iron Curtain border crossing is a memory. 

As a result of the European Union (EU) the border is just a spot in the highway; although, Czech guards were pulling some
cars over that were entering the country from Austria. 

Leaving the Czech Republic, however, was no problem at all. 

We also visited a nation now called Slovania, the other half of what was, at one time, Czechoslovakia. 

This link below is informative. 

http://www.praguemonitor.com/2015/10/07/iron-curtain-memorial-unveiled-czech-austrian-border

As our Eastern Europe journey is now a memory, my  husband and I can't believe we've now "been there".

Obviously, when crossing the Czech-Austrian border, we did NOT stop to take pictures!!!! But, we certainly felt the experiences of what it was like to live under the Soviet Communist government, a forbidding regime that existed during most of our formative lives.

Moreover, and most importantly, we saw how the Eastern European people have, finally, liberated themselves from communism.