Tini's People

By Edith M. Kozdon

Tinis People is a true story about real people, her memories of Jews, Poles, Czechs, Germans and Austrians all of whom she thought of as her people form the backbone of this book. The book provides a historical, cultural and social perspective on the life of a Central European Jewish family from the 1820s to end of the Holocaust in 1945.

Tini was the youngest daughter of a traditional Jewish family. After her arranged Jewish marriage failed she married Willi, a Roman Catholic, the first mixed marriage in her family as well as the first such in the town where they lived.

In the 1930s growing anti-Semitism emanating from Germany culminated in the occupation of the Czech lands. Under the Nazi Race Laws Tinis mixed marriage initially provided her with immunity from persecution, however, her name was eventually placed on a deportation list. Willi foolishly talks about his Jewish wife with a total stranger, Bernhard Asmus, only to discover that he was confiding in a high-ranking member of the Gestapo. Asmus unexpectedly promises to help and issues them travel passes to the small country village where he had found them a safe place to stay. Nicknamed The Jewish Father by the local populous, Bernhard Asmus risked not only his own life but also the lives of his wife and son by helping Protestants, Catholics and Jews alike.

Tini survives the war - a woman left behind to mourn the deaths of those she loved, including her beloved daughter, Hedy. All of them were innocent victims, first incarcerated and then exterminated in Nazi death camps.

While reminiscing about her people only once did Tini say of those Germans who complained of their treatment in the post-war years Perhaps they brought it upon themselves when they chose Adolf Hitler to be their leader!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 18, 2005
• ISBN: 9781465332226

Edith M. Kozdon

After the Second World War the Edinburgh-born author and her husband, Tini’s son, settled in Czechoslovakia to be close to his mother who had survived the Holocaust. After the 1948 Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia they returned to the United Kingdom. Following the death of her husband the author settled in Oxford.

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TINI’S PEOPLE

EDITH M KOZDON

Copyright © 2005 by Edith M. Kozdon.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

ONE - GERSHON AND JOHANNA

TWO - BOSKOVICE

THREE - WACHTL AND UNICOV

FOUR - MORAVSKA OSTRAVA

FIVE - KRAKOW

SIX - BRNO

SEVEN - KARWIN/KARVINA

EIGHT - KARWIN/KARVINA

NINE - EUGEN KOZDON

TEN - INDECISION

ELEVEN - KRAKOW, MARCH 1939

TWELVE - KARWIN/KARVINA

THIRTEEN - MORAVSKA OSTRAVA

FOURTEEN - BERNHARD ASMUS

FIFTEEN - LUTYNE

SIXTEEN - RYCHVALD

SEVENTEEN - THERESIENSTADT/ TEREZIN

EIGHTEEN - BEDZIN AND AUSCHWITZ

NINETEEN - BERNHARD ASMUS

TWENTY - DEFEAT

TWENTY-ONE - AFTERMATH

TWENTY-TWO - BERNHARD ASMUS

TWENTY-THREE - POSTSCRIPT

To Tini and her people, past, present and future.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My grateful thanks to Arnold Asmus who shared memories of his father, Bernhard Asmus, with me and provided documents and tapes relating to his post-war trials and eventual acquittal.

My deep gratitude to George Wilson for many selfless hours of semantic discussion, as well as for proofreading the manuscript.

Finally, to my sons, Peter and Michael, my loving thanks for their encouragement and help during the telling of Tini’s People.

INTRODUCTION

Ever since my husband and I met in Edinburgh in 1942, my thoughts had been with his mother in occupied Europe; hoping she would be spared, hoping that we would one day meet. In 1945, at last the war was over, she and I came face to face and embraced in the sparse kitchen of a small attic flat in the East Silesian town of Karvina. A joyous meeting but, as we sat silently at her scrubbed wooden table, searching each others eyes, I wondered how much time would elapse before she and I would be able to communicate. I, a stranger from a land she knew little of, had married her son but, although she and I now bore the same name, we lacked a common language in which to converse. More important, however, than language, more important than words, was the realisation - how could I begin to comprehend what she had endured since 1939?

Her name was Ernestine, Tini for short. She was one of the few members of her family who had survived the Holocaust. She was a woman left behind to mourn the senseless, brutal deaths of her daughter and most of her closest relatives, sacrificed on the altar of racial hatred,murdered with six million others simply because they were Jews.

The Tini I met was a small, haggard woman whose clothes hung loosely on what must once have been a fuller, rounder form, whose sad-eyed, grey-tinged face bore a look of abject suffering. Her mourning took the form of a deep necessity to talk of her loved ones almost constantly and, as she spoke of them, she used the Yiddish word meshpocheh1 - the family in its widest sense. A mespocheh of elders, of children and children’s children, a close- knit family whose forefathers had come from the Austrian lands of Hungary and Moravia.

Clinging desperately to memories of earlier days and years, to the remembrance of the love her parents and family had always shared, Tini gained comfort in talking of the past. She spoke of those she grieved for as though they were still alive and talked of them so vividly that, as the years went by, I came to feel as though I had known them all myself. She told me about her grandparents, her mother and father, her brothers and sisters and their families, she told me about her life from childhood onwards and some of the memories she shared with me, graphic memories of well-remembered people, well- recollected incidents, the amusing, the happy, the tragic and the sad, are repeated here for you in the way she herself spoke of them.

You will learn about her first husband, Salomon, about Hedy, her daughter and Fredi, her son. You will also hear about her non-Jewish husband, Willi, and about a rare and remarkable German, Bernhard Asmus, to whom she came to owe so much. Without Willi’s unfailing, courageous love and without the moral strength and support of Herr Asmus, she would, almost certainly, have been one of the millions who died in the Holocaust.

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Tini had the enviable ability to care about most people she came into contact with, nearly always seeing good in them, valuing them as fellow human-beings regardless of nationality, religion or race. It was beneath her dignity to judge the perpetrators of the crimes committed against her people; for the evil-doers she voiced no hatred and appeared able to exclude the exterminators of her meshpocheh from her thoughts. For those who had first welcomed and supported the National Socialists, who later professed to have known nothing, heard nothing, seen nothing, those who complained that they themselves had suffered and were still suffering, she voiced neither compassion nor malevolence.

Over the years Tini grew plump again, her sorrowful face lost its sallow look, gradually she learned to smile. With the passing of time her melancholy eyes became lively and bright, began to sparkle as I am sure they had done long ago when she was a child. Many, many years, however, were to elapse before I heard her laugh.

What follows is the story of Tini’s life as she shared it with me over forty years; the story of an ordinary Central European Jewish family whose lives, affected by times long past, were played out against recent history - helpless, innocent victims of the evil forces which enveloped and destroyed them.

ONE - GERSHON AND JOHANNA

But we must wander witheringly, In other lands to die; And where our fathers’ ashes be, Our own may never lie.

‘The Wild Gazelle’, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies.

Gershon Neufeld and his wife, Johanna, born in the early 19th century, grew up in the Hungarian Burgenland in the small, sleepy, whitewashed Austro-Hungarian village of Mattersdorf. Centuries of Diaspora, the dispersion of the Jewish people, had brought their forefathers to Mattersdorf, to the flax-growing, linen-producing, low-lying, south-east edges of the Neusiedler See.

The advent of the First Crusade brought a thousand years of mutual tolerance and coexistence between Gentile and Jew to an end. The Crusades were Christian wars, the Holy Roman Church allowed no Jew to participate in its sacred cause and, amongst the superstitious, half-starved, disease- ridden armies of crusading European serfs and peasantry, a false rumour was fermented - Jewish non-participation was proof of a Hebrew plot against true Christendom, was affirmation of the Jews’ support for the barbarous, sacrilegious Muslim Infidel. The Crusades were the catalyst for centuries of hatred, mistrust and harassment when the Neufelds’ ancestors were swept back and forth, helpless as sea-weed, sand and pebbles on a cruel and stormy beach, as tides ofJewish persecution ebbed and flowed over Europe and the Middle East.

They crucified Jesus, didn’t they?

Romantic Crusades? Heroic Crusades? For three hundred years Crusaders wandered, slaughtered and slaughtering and, as the straggling hordes died in their tens of thousands of exposure, epidemics, starvation and battle, they left a trail of innocent Jewish blood behind them on their ill-fated journeyings to the Holy Land. Under the waving banners of the Holy Cross, thousands ofJews fell victim to Crusader carnage in England and the German Palatinates. Defenceless German Jews, true to their faith, refusing conversion and baptism, were slain at Trier and Worms, at Speyer and Mainz, at Cologne and Regensburg. In England, they died at Norwich, Stamford, Kings Lynn and Bury St. Edmunds. Besieged by Knights of the Holy Cross in the royal castle, the Jewish Community of York, in preference to enforced baptism, chose suicide. Intoning the Jewish Benediction Hear O Lord, the Lord is One, men slit the throats of their wives and children, then took their own lives.

The Middle Ages were dark and fearful days for Europe’s impoverished, humble, indigent citizens; days of feudal allegiances, destitution, disease, hunger, pestilence, pillage, rape and slavery. Days which saw the horror of the terrifying, gruesome plague, days when the Black Death swept over land after land, fatal to the rich and privileged as well as to the poor. In the terror and helplessness, in the prevailing ignorance and prejudice, innocent Jews were accused of poisoning the water-wells. Who else but the Jews could be responsible? The cry went up - "The Jews must die. " An excuse for massacre, for Jewish homes and synagogues to be destroyed.

Dark centuries of foreboding for medieval Jewry; dark, anxious centuries when they were forced by edict to wear identifying marks and garments that the Jew may be told apart. The special clothing, a yellow star, a circle or a diamond, the peaked hat, the uncut hair, the untrimmed beard - all marks prescribed to identify the despised, abhorrent Jew, the ultimate scapegoat for each and every natural disaster, eternal victim of theological prejudice. And when the churches were not themselves supporting, encouraging, often inciting hatred of the Jews, the voices of Christian priests were rarely, if ever, heard defending the innocent victim, or extending to their Jewish neighbours the Bible’s commandment to love thy neighbour as thyself!

They crucified Jesus, didn’t they?

Days ofJewish martyrdom, the desecration and burning of their sacred Torah scrolls and precious Talmudic books. Days which saw the inception of the herding of the self- styled Chosen People into walled communities, into ghettos to isolate the Christian from Jewish contamination and influence. As a people, grown accustomed to persecution, accepting vilification as a sign that their God was angry with them, they had for centuries been drawn together in small clusters or larger groups, united by tradition and common religious practices. The isolation and the nightfall locking of the ghetto gate were, however, not ofJewish choice; ghetto walls, said to have been built for their own protection, served other purposes and afforded no security against intermittent destruction, looting and mob violence.

Feudal Europe’sJews, regarded as protected servants of kings and local rulers, paid high taxes for dubious protection and the right to dwell within their lord’s domain. Forbidden the practice of any crafts, excluded from membership of medieval guilds, most were peasants, pedlars, merchants; a few became money lenders for onlyJews were sanctioned to deal in money by the Catholic Church. Some prospered and their wealth, demanded at will as protection tax, provided a valuable contribution to the coffers of sovereign noblemen for the maintenance of castles, courts and armies; sporadic pogroms presenting a desirable excuse for the seizure ofJewish property, and for protection tax to be increased.

The 13 th century was beset with new terror - the bigotry and torture of the Inquisition in France and Spain, the hunting out and burning of heretics, Muslims and Jews, together with the long-since baptised, ill-fated Conversos still suspected of clandestine practice of Jewish rituals. The Inquisition, apostasy or death, judgement in secrecy, execution a public pageant; the lighting of the pyre, the auto-da-fe, an honour, a religious duty for true followers of Jesus Christ.

By the close of the 15th century, when Spain declared itself cleansed of the impurities of all its known Jews, survivors of the Inquisition wandered to Italy, to Portugal, to Turkey and Greece; some sailed across the Mediterranean Sea to the northern coast of Africa. From France, others had found sanctuary in Germany, the land medieval Rabbis named in Hebrew Ashkenaz, the name by which Central and East European Jews came to be called; the Neufelds always thought of themselves as Ashkenase Jews. Sporadic expulsions from the German states resulted in mass Jewish settlement in Slav and other lands to the east; an exodus which may have brought Gershon and Johanna’s ancestors to Mattersdorf in Moravia.

Throughout Europe from the 18th century, the search for learning, for personal freedom, for independent thought and universal justice grew more and more rapidly as Christians, Jews and non-believers alike sought self- determination and independence. The days of bigotry and suppression of thought gave way to a new age - the Age of Enlightenment. An age of ever-expanding culture and debate, an age searching for new philosophies, for new concepts of enfranchisement and equality. This was the age when Voltaire, one of the Enlightenment’s most renowned and respected prophets, while writing, I despise your ideas but I would die for your right to express them, virulently excluded the Hebrew race from his protestations of commitment to humanity. The great philosopher Voltaire believed all men worthy of freedom, all men except the Jews, whose very presence he declared to be subversive of true European civilisation.

In the 19th century, an age of revolutions - industrial, agricultural, social and political - was spreading over Europe. In France, in the British Isles, in the numerous German states, in the many lands subject to the Habsburg Monarchy; peasants, craftsmen, traders, labourers and the new intelligentsia were engaging in militant struggles to transform oppressive social and political systems. And, as new freedoms were sought and sometimes gained, the freedom most fervently desired by European Jewry was full emancipation. Over the centuries, slowly, imperceptibly, hand in hand with openly-expressed, or scantily-concealed prejudice, had come a hesitant tolerance of the often learned, cultured, enlightened, partially-integrated, sometimes even patriotic Jew. Permission to return to many previously forbidden towns and cities was being granted and soon there was freedom to escape the all-enclosing ghetto and the mentality it had created within and without its walls. But if ghetto life was no longer a prescribed necessity, it continued to be freely chosen by many for whom no alternative was either possible or thought of as desirable. It was only the seemingly-accepted

Jew, embracing new ideas, emulating the life-style of the non-Jew, shaving off his beard and side-locks, adopting current fashions of manner and dress, taking up formerly forbidden crafts and professions, who departed from the restrictions of town and city ghetto. Integration into cultural and economic life began to be achieved and, in 1867, in the lands of Austria-Hungary, the long-awaited full Emancipation came; Jews could now vote, could stand for public office and could enlist in the resplendent, colourful armies of the Emperor.

Ignaz Leopold was born in Mattersdorf in 1844, firstborn child to Gershon and Johanna Neufeld, a son to bless their humble home. After Ignaz, another son was born to them, Jacob was his name. Then there was a daughter, Katie; three children only for Gershon and Johanna, a truly tiny family by the common standards of their time. Ignaz grew up in Mattersdorf and in its open countryside until, when he was twelve years old, his parents gathered up their few possessions, set out with their three small children and a load of linen fastened to a cart, left their gentle country birthplace, took to the road and walked a weary, many mile- long journey north. Their destination - the elegant, the magnificent, Imperial City of Vienna. Impossible now to know, or even try to speculate, why the Neufelds chose to depart from Mattersdorf, to leave the quiet security of their sleepy, village home, why they chose to go to Vienna, a city which was strange to them. But the streets of Emperor Franz Josef’s new and stately capital on the banks of the Danube were neither elegant nor magnificent for the Neufeld family. No beauty, no elegance, no splendour for Gershon orJohanna, nor for the humble mass ofVienna’s other impoverishedJewish and non-Jewish citizens struggling for mere existence in its densely overcrowded back-street slums.

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Gershon and Johanna Neufeld

The Neufelds settled in the teeming, noisy, gloomy, Jewish quarter in Vienna’s district of Leopoldstadt and opened up a tiny shop. A shop? A simple booth with a room behind, a single room to live in, to cook in, to sleep in; from the dignity of countryside poverty to the degradation ofcity squalor. And why? Hope for a better future for their children? A dream of prosperity? For the Neufelds the dream was hard to realise. The tiny shop and the selling of linen held no interest for Gershon; the dream was false, it was a dream beyond his reach, an unattainable dream. It was an illusion soon replaced by the glittering lights ofcrystal chandeliers, the polished-marble table tops, the gilded mirrors, the velvet-covered chairs, the comforting, all-embracing warmth ofVienna’s coffee-houses. A new world, an escape, an illusion of prosperity and, although there was never any money for him to play at card-tables, Gershon became a knowledgeable kibitzer², giving his unsought advice to those who could afford to play.

The housewives of Leopoldstadt were too poor to buy fine linen brought from Mattersdorf and to make ends meet, while Gershon passed his days in his favourite coffee-house, Johanna trudged, a heavy bundle on her back, up and down the stairs of fashionable apartment houses where she sold her wares as best she could; crisply-starched white linen caps and aprons, the uniform of ladies’ maids. In less prosperous neighbourhoods, she peddled other linen too, bed linen and simple table linen. Resourceful Johanna, in her pocket she carried a little copy-book; a few coins, a tiny handful of Austrian groschen would acquire her wares, then Johanna would return to her customers each week and collect a few groschen more. In summer and winter, in autumn and spring, in sun and in rain, in the heat, in the snow and cold, Johanna carried her bundle through Vienna’s streets while young Ignaz was left at home to watch over his brother and sister, to safeguard as best he could the almost customerless shop.

Although he was a clever and an eager boy there was no money to allow Ignaz to attend a secular school; at the village school in far-off Mattersdorf he had learned to read and write in German, German and Yiddish were the languages his family spoke at home. At one of Vienna’s many free Yeshiva³ schools, he learned to read and write in Hebrew too. He read the Torah, he studied Talmud, the commentaries on Jewish Law and, after all, what more could a good Jewish boy require? But if his education began with Talmud and Torah, it was to end with linen and experience in how to buy and sell for, as he grew older, it was Ignaz, not Gershon, who travelled back and forth to Mattersdorf when stock was running low.

Over the years, little by little, trade in the tiny shop grew, the Neufelds became neither rich nor prosperous but they were not now the poorest either.Johanna peddled her waresno longer, Ignaz continued travelling back and forth to Mattersdorf. They still lived in a crowded ghetto street but, at last, they lived in a proper simple home with a proper simple shop thatJohanna could be proud of. The time had now come for her elder son to seek employment of his own; buying and selling were all he knew, travelling he was accustomed to - what should he do? What would be right and suitable for him? A traveller? What else? What else indeed? A salesman? Yes, a travelling salesman, that was an appropriate job for him. And so, complacently engaged in travelling for an Austrian manufacturer of quality hats, Ignaz sold straw hats and felt hats, ladies’ hats and hats for gentlemen, fashionable hats and expensive hats. Hisjourneys took him throughout the lands of Austro-Hungary; for many years he travelled extensively and never wished to settle down. A sad and bitter disappointment for Gershon, an even greater sadness, a tribulation for Johanna; her elder son, twenty-eight years old - a good Jewish boy, not married yet! And did the Bible not say that everyJewish boy should marry young? Should not every young man marry early and father a family of his own?Johanna despaired of her son, until one day - it could have been chance, it might have been destiny - his travels brought him to the north of Brno, to the quiet and peaceful Jewish town of Boskovice in Austrian Moravia.

TWO - BOSKOVICE

Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace Proverbs 3:17

Boskovice, a recorded Jewish settlement in the early 13th century, had grown in the Middle Ages when Jews fled from persecution in Germany. Over and over again their homes had been destroyed, over and over again their chattels had been seized, over and over again their communities had been devastated and dispersed. But, whenever possible, wherever they wandered to, their most precious, most valued possessions, their scrolls ofTorah and books ofTalmud, had gone with them; ensuring literacy and perpetuating scholarship. Most were hard-working and industrious but their diligence and literacy, their learnedness, their otherness, their veryJewishness, their Yiddishkeit, created suspicion, envy and hatred amongst illiterate indigenous populations. The evil cry was repeated again and again - "Death to theJews! They crucifiedJesus. Didn’t they?"

Jewish settlements were rarely immune from the ravages of intermittent spoliation and plunder but the Jewish townof Boskovice, protected by an unbigoted local lord, enjoyed an unusual degree of tolerance and was spared the worst excesses of rampant pogroms.

When Rosa Zwicker was born in Boskovice, over a hundred years had passed since the Austrian Empress, Maria Theresia, introduced the notorious Familiantengesetz, the Familial Law, limiting the number ofJews permitted to dwell in Bohemia or Moravia, restricting marriage and the procreation of children to the eldest son of each Jewish family. In pursuance of her monomaniac hatred of the Jews, Maria Theresia ordered frequent expulsions, constantly demanding ever higher protection tax. But before Rosa was born,Jewish communities within the Habsburg Empire had enjoyed many decades of comparative tranquillity. Boskovice had become an important centre of Judaic studies where learned rabbis gathered to debate and teach the Law, and in 1851, it became the designated seat of the Moravian Provincial Rabbinate.

Over the centuries, Boskovice had evolved into two distinctly separate towns, a Christian town and aJewish town, two towns sharing a common market square to which both Jews and Christians came to buy and sell; two towns, each with its own Burgermeister, its own administration, its own police and independent fire brigade. Jewish Boskovice, with its two synagogues, its Yeshiva, its Mikva⁴, also had a school for children which had been founded in the 16 th century. The ghetto had a single well, its roughly-cobbled, narrow, twisting streets and little squares, harboured over one thousand souls living in just over a hundred homes, clustered tightly together within its walls. When Rosa was a child, the enclosing ghetto walls were still intact, but its gates, a Christian gate and a Jewish gate, stood open wide, no longer forced to close at night, on Sundays or Christian Holy Days. The by-gone years of apprehension and helplessness had long since receded and had almost been forgotten.

Rosa came from a goodJewish home, her six children later spoke of it with affection as a proper and an honourable house. Her father, Lazar, had married twice; her mother, Esther, was his second wife and Rosa was blessed with seventeen brothers and sisters. Lazar, a wine merchant, owned a hostelry on a corner of the street leading from theJewish gate, his tavern a popular meeting and drinking place for the Goyim⁵, the non-Jews, of Boskovice as well as for the ghetto Jews. The inn was a large, pastel-rendered, stone-built house; within its steeply-pitched, red clay-tiled roof was a single spacious room, a room the Zwickers rented out for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs6; for the New Year celebration of Rosch-ha-schana; for the joyous Chanukah festival commemorating victory over the mighty Seleucids by the Maccabees; for the dancing, drinking and and for Purim festivity.

In common with the traditions of most ghettoJews, Rosa’s parents were deeply religious and she grew up in a home imbued with observance and tradition, was brought up to be a good and obedient Jewish girl but Rosa transgressed; she fell in love before a suitable chassen7, a proper Jewish husband, could be found for her. Always docile, always timid, Rosa unexpectedly announced she wished to marry - and to marry, not a Jew but a gentile, a Goy - a policeman from a village close to Boskovice! A policeman who had often been a welcome visitor at Lazar’s inn, sometimes even a guest in the Zwicker home - but to marry a daughter? God forbid! Such a marriage was unthinkable! To keep her from temptation and adversity, Rosa must be betrothed as soon as possible! An acceptable bridegroom must be found for her at once! And so it came to pass. Into the saddened, dismayed and deeply disturbed Zwicker home, at a time when his presence was most needed, came the answer, Ignaz Leopold Neufeld; a relative,

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Early Neufeld Family Treea distant cousin, known to be highly respectable, twenty- eight years old, not married yet. God willing! the perfect match for the recalcitrant Rosa whose parents would have cast her out sooner than allow her marriage to a non-Jew, a Goy. Providence - perhaps? Maybe only coincidence? Some said young Neufeld had come on business to the nearby town of Prostejov; some said Lazar himself had sent for him with the promise of a goodly dowry! Others said it was only chance