Note: In this brief post, I discuss how while researching the fate of my great-granduncle’s 14 or 15 children I learned about a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, who saved the lives of upwards of 6,000 Polish and Lithuanian Jews following the Nazi invasion of Poland and the beginning of WWII.
My great-grandfather Fedor Bruck (1834-1892) (Figure 1) and his wife Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer (1836-1924) (Figure 2), were the second-generation owners of the family hotel in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland], the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel. (Figure 3) Fedor Bruck and his eight known siblings, born between 1831 and 1849, were the children of Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) (Figure 4) and Charlotte Bruck née Marle (1809-1861) (Figure 5), seven of them believed to have lived into adulthood.
The oldest child was Oskar Bruck (1831-1892) married to Mathilde Bruck née Preiss (1839-1922) with whom she had, by my last count, 14 or 15 children born between 1859 and 1877. The sources of this information are two family trees (Figure 6); the Jewish birth register listings from the Church of Latter-day Saints Microfilm No. 1184449 for Ratibor, where most of the children are known to have been born; and ancestral information on MyHeritage. (The names of the children, their birth and death dates, and the sources of the data are summarized on a table at the end of this post). Aware that several of their children were born during the Kulturkampf, the conflict from 1872 to 1878 between the government of Prussia and the Roman Catholic Church, I even asked Paul Newerla, my historian friend from Racibórz, to check the civil birth records at the Archiwum Państwowe W Katowicach Oddzial W Raciborzu (“State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz”) for their children born during this period, to no avail.
Realizing that any of Oskar and Mathilde’s surviving great-grandchildren would be my third cousins, I recently tried to determine whether any of their children have living descendants to whom I would be related by blood. Surprisingly, after having conducted a thorough search, I have been unable to find a single living third cousin (i.e., my generation), second cousin once removed (i.e., previous generation), or third cousin once removed (younger generation) descended from any of those 14 or 15 children. I did not include any of Oskar and Mathilde’s children’s spouses where the divorced or surviving spouse remarried and had children who would not be blood relatives. I have tentatively been able to track one of their children, Dr. Erich Bruck (b. 1865) to, of all places, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, and am currently scrounging more information to hopefully bring an intriguing future post to regular readers. The youngest daughter Emma Naumann née Bruck (1877-1942) and her husband Ernst Naumann (1877-1942) were both murdered in Theresienstadt, but otherwise all their other children are believed to have died of natural causes.
What is surprising to me given the enormous collection of family photos I own or that have been shared with me by different branches of my family is that I have not a single photo of my great-granduncle or great-grandaunt nor any of their children. I’m hoping that a reader of this post may recognize an ancestral connection and contact me so I may learn more about this offshoot of my family.
Continuing. As often happens when I embark on searches of remote ancestors is that I make unexpected discoveries, such as the one which forms the basis for this brief Blog post. And truth be told this fortuitous finding is much more significant than unearthing another distant cousin. As an aside, I would never pretend that my ancestors are any more interesting or accomplished than those of readers. In writing about my predecessors, I am more interested in describing the too often tragic social and historic context in which they led their lives to see what lessons and modern-day parallels can be drawn. As Shakespeare wrote in “The Tempest,” “what’s past is prologue.” In other words, history sets the context for the present.
As mentioned above, the table below summarizes the birth and death dates, where known, of Oskar and Mathilde’s children. One of their daughters, Charlotte Bruck (1866-1909) married a man named Rudolf Falk (1857-1912) with whom she had one daughter, Käthe Falk. This is the only one of Oskar and Mathilde’s descendants I’ll directly discuss, one of their granddaughters.
Through the documents I found on ancestry.com, Käthe Falk had already caught my attention. Her first husband was Wilhelm Sinasohn (b. 1880-d. unknown), and her second husband was Erhard Friedrich Sinasohn (1888-1967); I assumed her husbands were related to one another. A January 1925 notation in the upper righthand corner of Käthe and Wilhelm’s 1911 marriage certificate (Figures 7a-c) indicates they were divorced on the 29th of November 1924; Käthe got remarried on the 11th of February 1926 (Figures 8a-c) to Erhard Sinasohn, who I would later learn was her first husband’s cousin. Inasmuch as I can determine, Käthe had two sons, Robert Nast and Werner Rudolf Nast (in America, Warren Roger Nast) with her first husband, and none by her second; Nast was the maiden name of their paternal grandmother.
A continuing search on ancestry.com yielded an astonishing document for both Käthe (Figure 9) and her husband (Figure 10), simply a cover sheet entitled “in the Lithuania, Jews Saved by Passports from the Japanese Diplomat Chiune Sugihara, 1940”; the page showed both were Luxembourgers, and that each had been issued a visa dated the 31st of July 1940 signed by a Japanese consul. Having never heard of Chiune Sugihara, I scurried to learn about him.
Chiune Sugihara (Figure 11), I would find out, was a Japanese diplomat who during WWII helped Jews living in Lithuania leave, including Jews who had made their way there after the war began. Let me provide some brief historic context. WWII began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. This caused hundreds of thousands of Jews and other Polish citizens to flee eastward ahead of the advancing German troops; many displaced persons found at least temporary safety in Lithuania. Once there, however, their options for escape were limited and required diplomatic visas to cross international borders. One route involved traveling through Asia, but it required a combination of permits issued by acquiescent foreign envoys trying to address the refugee crisis. However, it required declaring a final destination, with the Dutch Caribbean Island of Curaçao being suggested.
One diplomat willing to help Jews was the Japanese Imperial Consul Chiune Sugihara, the first Japanese diplomat posted to Lithuania. Absent any clear instructions from his government, Sugihara took it upon himself to issue 10-day transit visas to Japan to hundreds of Jewish refugees supposedly possessing destination visas for Curaçao. By the time he received a reply from his own government, he’d already issued 1800 visas. The Foreign Ministry in Japan told him then that individuals to whom he’d issued these visas were really headed to Canada and the United States but had arrived in Japan without money or final destination visas.
Sugihara acknowledged to his superiors he’d issued visas to people who’d not completed all the necessary arrangements for destination visas but explained that Japan was the only transit country available for people going in the direction of the United States and Canada, and that Japanese visas were required to leave the Soviet Union. Despite orders from his government to desist, Sugihara continued issuing visas, even going so far as to sign his name on blank stamped sheets, hoping the rest could be filled in; he was apparently still passing out the visas as he boarded the train for Berlin where he’d been reassigned. At the end of August 1940, the Soviets shuttered all diplomatic consulates, including the Japanese mission, but by then, Sugihara had managed to save thousands of Jews in just a few weeks. For his humanitarian efforts in 1984 Yad Vashem awarded him the title of “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Many of the Jews who managed to escape through Lithuania were either Jewish residents from there or Jews from Poland. Sugihara is estimated to have helped more than 6,000 Jewish refugees escape to Japanese territory. And among those to whom Sugihara issued visas are the granddaughter of Oskar and Mathilde Bruck and her husband. Among the pertinent documents I found on ancestry.com was a “Manifest of Alien Passengers” for the “SS President Taft” with Käthe and Erhard Sinasohn’s names showing they arrived with one of her sons, Werner Rudolf Nast, in San Francisco from Kobe, Japan on the 8th of February 1941 (Figures 12a-b), slightly more than six months after receiving their visas signed by Chiune Sugihara. Coincidentally, following their escape from Europe and their arrival in the United States, Käthe and Erhard settled in Forest Hills, Queens, the neighborhood adjacent Kew Gardens, Queens, where I was raised.
One final fitting note about this valorous Japanese diplomat. On his tombstone is engraved his first name, “Chiune,” the Japanese word which just so happens to translate into “a thousand new lives.”
VITAL STATISTICS FOR OSKAR & MATHILDE BRUCK AND THEIR CHILDREN
| NAME
(relationship) |
VITAL EVENT | DATE | PLACE | SOURCE OF DATA |
| Oskar Bruck (self) | Birth | 8 October 1831 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Marriage | 29 October 1858 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | FHL Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (marriages) | |
| Death | 6 April 1892 | Berlin, Germany | Berlin, Germany death certificate | |
| Mathilde Preiss
(wife) |
Birth | 20 October 1839 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Marriage | 29 October 1858 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | FHL Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (marriages) | |
| Death | 23 February 1922 | Berlin, Germany | Standesamt Berlin XI, Berlin, Germany death certificate | |
| Richard Bruck (son) | Birth | 17 August 1859 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | Unknown | |||
| Georg Bruck (son) | Birth | 21 July 1860 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | 2 April 1937 | Berlin, Germany | Berlin, Germany death certificate | |
| Carl Bruck (son) | Birth | 10 May 1862 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | Unknown | |||
| Samuel Bruck (son) | Birth | 17 July 1863 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | Unknown | |||
| Franz Samuel Bruck (son) | Birth | 28 September 1864 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | 19 February 1924 | Berlin, Germany | Landesarchiv Berlin, Standesamt Charlottenburg I, Sterberegister, 1921-1931 | |
| Erich Bruck (son) | Birth | 31 August 1865 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | Unknown | Argentina ?? | ||
| Charlotte Bruck (daughter) | Birth | 18 September 1866 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | 7 December 1909 | Berlin, Germany | Charlottenburg I, Berlin, Germany death certificate | |
| Margaretha Bruck (daughter) | Birth | 19 October 1868 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | 18 February 1900 | Frankfurt am Main, Germany | Frankfurt, Germany death certificate | |
| Gertrud Bruck (daughter) | Birth | 9 June 1870 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | 26 July 1871 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births)-notation of death on birth register | |
| Anna Bruck (daughter) | Birth | 4 July 1870 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | 8 September 1895 | Neustadt, Upper Silesia, Germany [today: Prudnik, Poland] | Pinkus Family Collection (family tree for Oskar Bruck & Mathilde Preiss) | |
| Martin Bruck (son) | Birth | 22 July 1873 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | Unknown | |||
| Marie Bruck (daughter) | Birth | 29 June 1874 | Plania, Kreiss Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Family History Library (FHL) Ratibor Microfilm 1184449 (births) |
| Death | 20 February 1913 | Leipzig, Germany | Borchardt-Pincus-Peiser Family Website (MyHeritage) | |
| Bertha Bruck (daughter) | Birth | 5 November 1876 | Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] | Pinkus Family Collection (family tree for Oskar Bruck & Mathilde Preiss) |
| Death | July 1949 | Santiago, Chile | MyHeritage Family Tree | |
| Emma Bruck (daughter) | Birth | 20 October 1877 | Berlin, Germany | Standesamt Berlin VI, Berlin, Germany birth certificate |
| Death | 15 October 1942 | Theresienstadt Ghetto, Czech Republic | Theresienstadt death certificate (holocaust.cz) | |
| Selma Bruck (daughter) | Birth | Unknown | Pinkus Family Collection (family tree for Oskar Bruck & Mathilde Preiss) | |
| Death | Unknown |