With increasing frequency, subscribed and/or casual readers of my blog send me photos related to topics I’ve covered in my posts or images of their forebears. They rightfully assume I’m interested, or they hope to find remote relatives just like DNA testing might reveal. In the past month alone, I’ve had no fewer than three readers send me historic or recent photos connected to topics or places I’ve written about. What is particularly gratifying is when readers correct misidentifications I’ve inadvertently made. In some cases, readers are astonished to discover I have posted images of their ancestors they had no awareness existed.
Related to Post 187, my good friend Peter Albrecht sent me three photos from 1983 when he and his family visited Miramare Castle outside Trieste, Italy standing literally in the same place my wife and I were photographed a few short weeks ago. (Figures 1-3) For my amusement, I attach these three images.
Note: This brief post is a prelude to upcoming posts where I will talk about thrilling events that took place during a five-week European vacation my wife and I recently took.
My wife Ann and I recently returned from a five-week trip to Europe that had us leaving from San Diego and traveling to or through parts of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Italy (Figure 1), and France. We visited multiple out-of-the-way places connected to my Jewish family’s history. This required renting a car and driving long distances through often unfamiliar territory and on small backroads. This occasionally led to unexpected adventures and mishaps. Suffice it to say, our vacations are not conventional and are in some ways reminiscent of the semi-structured travel we took through Europe in our youth. Realistically, our advancing age makes it unlikely we’ll take more such trips in the future.
Notwithstanding the pace of our vacation, I had two primary aims during this trip. The first was to revisit the town where my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, was born in 1907, Ratibor, Germany [Racibórz, Poland]. As I’ve frequently discussed, my family owned a hotel restaurant in the town from ca. 1850 to 1925 known as the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel. The hotel survived the Second World War intact save for the burned roof, but sadly following their rise to power the Communist authorities dismantled the establishment to “harvest” bricks to rebuild Warsaw. I have old cutlery monogrammed with the three generations of my Bruck family that owned the hotel and decided to donate them to the local museum. I also bequeathed a small briefcase of my father’s surviving dental tools. (Figure 2) While my father never practiced dentistry in his birthplace, coincidentally, the Muzeum w Raciborzu has an entire floor of its exhibit space devoted to old dental machines and equipment so donating my father’s dental instruments there made sense.
The second purpose of my trip to Europe was to attend a restitution ceremony in Paris to retrieve three paintings from the French Ministry of Culture that were seized by the Nazis at the Port of Bordeaux in December 1940 from my father’s first cousin, a man named Fedor Löwenstein. (Figure 3) Following their confiscation, the three surviving paintings, among 25 originally expropriated, were shipped to the Jeu de Paume in Paris where they remain unrecognized as seized works until the early 2010s. Over the years, I’ve written multiple posts about my compensation claim originally filed in 2014. After 11 long contentious and litigious years, I finally achieved the goal of reclaiming the paintings. (Figure 4) The restitution ceremony took place on the 16th of September 2025 at the soon-to-be renovated and now empty Centre Pompidou in Paris, and my wife and I participated in this event where I delivered a formal speech in French, a language I speak passably well. (Figure 5)
In upcoming posts, I will tell readers more about these two events.
Sandwiched between these happenings, which occurred towards the beginning and end of our vacation, my wife and I met a great many other people I’ve encountered through my blog or developed a friendship with over the years. These rendezvous will be the source of additional forthcoming posts. I look forward to relating to readers some delicious little tales connected to our vacation that expand on posts I’ve previously written or that explore new topics.
