Leo Baeck Institute Newsletter

I can relate to those tragedies.
Two of my father’s cousins died in Auschwitz. I knew they were Catholic as were their parents.
Then I started searching in the database of ancestry.com and found references to them in USHMM. (USHMM: Czechoslovakia, Selected Jewish Holocaust Records, 1939-1941 (in Czech) United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). I wrote to the Holocaust museum for a copy of the records….the response was tragic.It consisted of letters written desperately trying to save their lives.

According to the Nuremberg laws.of 1935 they were classified as Jews as they descended from three Jewish grandparents.

The one cousin,a stomatologist,, who had been brought up as a Catholic and had attended a Catholic school was no longer allowed to have Christian patients and no longer belonged to the Christian community and neither to the Jewish community. In his letters he tried to revoke this decision, even claiming that his mother’s husband was not his father. He wrote about his “non-jewish” appearance and that of his sister but to no avail. There were no more letters post 1940, and there is a record of his extermination in Auschwitz.

The other cousin had 2 children born circa 1922 and 1927. She and her husband who was also Catholic had to divorce because of the Nuremberg laws. She also perished in Auschwitz

I searched for her children and found out they were alive, and in their 90’s living in Prague. But I have not contact them I feel that at their age it might be too distressing to have this past remembered. Maybe I was wrong?

Marina, your story reminds me of similar cases in my family that I haven't been able to cope with well - it's also difficult when the children are baptised when they are young and had no say in the matter, then decades later - well, you know of course. Last year I found out that a 2nd cousin of mine had probably had to serve in Hitler's Wehrmacht to protect his Jewish mother in Vienna, who had been baptised as a child, then married an "Aryan", who then divorced her in 1939. I discovered he was still alive (over 90) and living not far away from me, but he didn't want to talk about it all.

I've thought for some time that this is an "unrecognised" side of the holocaust that really could do with a special group of some kind. Maybe now's the time to start.

Mark Tritsch

@mark tritsch I have created such a project called "victims of the nuremberg laws"

These stories are so familiar to me. My parents and grandparents, thankfully, survived the Holocaust. I have a box of documents showing how they tried to save themselves. Both my grandmothers were born Catholic and married Jewish men. They never formally converted, but lived as the wives of Jewish men and observed some Jewish cultural and dietary norms. My maternal grandmother was from Lower Silesia as is my mother and I have letters attesting to the Catholic conversion of my grandfather and my mother's and uncle's baptism papers with the swastika on them. My grandfather had been in Buchenwald (he was from an Orthodox Jewish family in Poland) and was let out of the camp because of my grandmother's connections, but then had to flee to Holland where he eventually ended up in Westerbork. The family had plans to emigrate to South America and had all the papers ready and then Holland was invaded by the Germans which brought an end to those plans. It was then that my grandmother started her campaign to help her family. It worked for a short time until 1943 when my uncle was taken and then in 1944 after being in hiding for a year my mother was taken to Gross Rosen. My grandmother was allowed to keep their business (beauty barber shop), but only at certain hours and for Gentiles. She was harassed daily by the local Gestapo, but her tenacity proved to be a survival tactic. Thankfully my grandfather survived, but died in 1953 in Michigan after coming to the US with his wife and children in 1951. He is buried in an Orthodox Jewish cemetery outside of Detroit. On my father's side, my dad had only one Jewish grandparent and was classified as a mischlinge Jude. His parents raised him as a German speaking Czech with no religious affiliation. When his father was arrested in Prague for his leadership of the local Social Democrats and put in prison, their attempts to lead a totally secular life began to end. 6 months later grandfather was arrested again this time as a Jew and placed in Terezin where he was until the end of the war. My dad was placed in the Bistrice camp for children of mixed marriages and my grandmother who was a non-practicing Catholic was placed at Hagibor camp, one specifically for non-Jewish spouses. Apparently the Nazis did things a bit differently when they took over Bohemia and Moravia. After the war my dad dcided to go to Israel, was circumcised at the Jewish hospital in Berlin and lived in Israel from 1948-1951 before going back to Europe and then coming to the US in 1952. Dad had a cousin whose father was non-Jewish and whose mother managed to escape the Nazis completely, but when her son was forced into the Hitler Youth, they made fun of him because he had a Jewish mothers. go figure. Mother and son ended up in East Germany being expelled from Czechoslovakia at war's end because they were German speaking Czech's. That part of the family does not identify as Jewish. They all survived by some smarts and really just some luck. Today my family identifies completely as Jewish, but secular. Nevertheless I am proud of my non-Jewish heritage. It does prove to be an interesting, challenging and at times dark family history.

such tragedies..

Please feel free to add the names of those that suffered to the "Victims of the Nuremberg laws" project at the end of the project page / or if you prefer send me the name and the corresponding url and I can add the profiles.

there is an interesting document on the Pasch branch in the Ernst Oppenheim collection
"This collection contains the genealogical research of Ernst Oppenheim, and includes his investigations into the Oppenheim, Pasch, Breit, Altschul, Sirkis and Jaffe families. Included are his extensive correspondence, family trees and copies of original documentation, as well as interview transcripts and notes
"
https://archive.org/details/ernstoppenheimco02oppe