Note: In this post I talk about the failed search for my first cousin twice removed Dr. Erich Bruck whom I have tantalizing evidence wound up in the Argentinian part of Tierra del Fuego. I discuss the proof I obtained in confirming that a similarly named Dr. Enrik Bruck who is buried in Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, a town more than 2,300 miles away from Tierra del Fuego, is not my distant cousin.
Dr. Erich Bruck is my first cousin twice removed born in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland], same town as my father Dr. Otto Bruck, on the 31st of August 1865. I have evidence of his birth from the Family History Library’s Microfilm Roll 1184449 for Jewish births in Ratibor. (Figure 1) He was one of 14 or 15 children born to my great-granduncle- and -grandaunt, Oskar Bruck (1831-1892) and Mathilde Bruck née Preiss. At the tail end of Post 113, I included a table with the available vital statistics on these children. Astonishingly, to date, I’ve been unable to find a single living descendant for any of these offspring.
Unlike some of his siblings who perished in the Holocaust, Erich is believed to have survived. As briefly mentioned in Post 113, a tantalizing clue as to Erich’s fate was found in the “Pinkus Family Collection 1500s-1994, 1725-1994” archived at the Leo Baeck Institute. On the Oskar Bruck-Mathilde Preiss family page, names and some vital data on 12 of their 14 or 15 “kinder,” children, can be found, including information on Dr. Erich Bruck. (Figure 2) It confirms he was born on the 31st of August 1865 in Ratibor, was a doctor in Argentina, and emigrated to “Feuerlandinseln,” Tierra del Fuego Islands in the 19th century. Beyond the fact this is an unusual place for an individual to have emigrated to, this is the closest I’ve been to finding a Jewish ancestor in Antarctica, still more than 2,300 miles away, the only continent where my family’s diaspora has not yet taken me.
Some brief geography. Tierra del Fuego, Spanish for “Land of the Fire,” is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan. The archipelago consists of the main island, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, with an area of 18,572 sq. mi. (48,100 km2), and a group of many islands, including Cape Horn and Diego Ramírez Islands. Tierra del Fuego is divided between Chile and Argentina, with the latter controlling the eastern half of the main island and the former the western half plus the islands south of Beagle Channel and the southernmost islands. Ushuaia is the capital of Tierra del Fuego, with a population of nearly 80,000 and claims the title of the world’s southernmost city. The family page from the Pinkus Family Collection makes it clear that Dr. Erich Bruck was a physician in Argentina, not in Chile.
My quest to discover what may have happened to Dr. Erich Bruck has been ongoing for several years interrupted by investigations into other ancestors. Obviously aware of an Argentinian connection, in 2021 I contacted the “Asociación de Genealogía Judía de Argentina (AGJA),” the Jewish Genealogical Society of Argentina, asking whether they or another genealogical association or group could provide any information about my distant cousin. I received a prompt response from a Ms. Estela Rappaportt (Figure 3) referring me to a Facebook group located in the Ushuaia community of Tierra del Fuego. I contacted them but never received a reply.
More intriguingly, Estela mentioned there is a tomb in the province of Chaco in Argentina, in the city of Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, of an Enrik Bruck, who died there on 31st of May 1931. Given that Erich Bruck was born in 1865, the age of this individual at death at least seemed like a plausible match. Moreover, I thought his forename might well have been changed to Enrik in Spanish. Ignoring the fact that Tierra del Fuego and Sáenz Peña in Chaco Province are more than 2,300 miles apart (Figure 4), I became obsessed with the notion that my distant relative is interred there. How Erich Bruck might have wound up in Sáenz Peña after living in Tierra del Fuego was an afterthought.
Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña in Chaco Province is under 700 miles from Buenos Aires (Figure 5), and has a population of 83,000 people, mostly descendants of settlers from Spain, Italy, Russia, Poland, then-Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine, as well as Jewish families from elsewhere in Argentina. Sáenz Peña was founded in 1912 and has developed as a commercial and industrial center serving the surrounding agricultural region of the Gran Chaco plains. In 1945, the Jewish population numbered around 200 families, though today fewer than ten Jewish families remain.
With Jews having lived in and around Sáenz Peña, it stands to reason there would be a Jewish cemetery. And, in fact, I learned about Saenz Peña’s “El Cementerio Judio,” a Jewish cemetery dating from 1920 with 120 graves, formerly called “Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña Cementerio.” The information about this Jewish cemetery was derived from the International Jewish Cemetery Project, which is a volunteer, cooperative effort of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies and JewishGen, Inc.’s “JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry” or “JOWBR” which seeks to identify Jewish burial sites and interments throughout the world.
I tried contacting the Sáenz Peña’s Ayuntamiento, the city’s town hall, but never received a response. I tried working through a friend at the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles and her Rabbi to establish a local contact but this too failed. I even tried having South American relatives call the Jewish cemetery’s caretaker, all to no avail. Because information on the International Jewish Cemetery Project regarding gaining entry to the cemetery implied the process was rather informal (Figure 6), I set the issue aside for future consideration. Nonetheless, I remained stubbornly convinced that my ancestor was interred in the Jewish cemetery in Saenz Peña and had eventually intended to go on a letter-writing campaign to confirm this.
Let me briefly digress. Like most avid genealogists, I have a “bin” of unresolved genealogical questions, quests if you will. In Post 62 and Post 62, Postscript, I discussed my father’s first cousin, Heinz Ludwig Berliner, who, like Erich Bruck and my father, was born in Ratibor; “Berliner,” incidentally, was my paternal grandmother’s maiden name. Hearsay from Heinz’s branch of the family suggests he committed suicide in 1948, place unknown.
Heinz’s last known location is in Bolivia. A brief reference in MyHeritage stated he wound up there. In 2019, I contacted the Jewish synagogue in La Paz, the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia, hoping they might have immigration or other records on Heinz, which they do not. At the time, I mistakenly concluded the theater where Heinz had performed under his stage name “Enry Berloc,” the “Teatro Municipal,” was in Buenos Aires rather than in La Paz (Figure 7); as a result the Circulo referred me to the AMIA in Argentina, the central institution of the country’s Jewish community. AMIA, in turn, directed me to the “Asociación de Genealogía Judía de Argentina (AGJA),” which is how I encountered Ms. Rappaportt.
My contact with the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia was not for naught, however, as I will explain in another postscript to Post 62.
Getting back on track. A recent email from the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia reminded me I had never connected with Saenz Peña’s El Cementerio Judio, so I decided to again contact Ms. Rappaportt from AGJA asking her who I should write to in Saenz Peña about Enrik Bruck. Estela sent me the name and email of the President of the Kehilá or village of Sáenz Peña, but then almost immediately sent me a photo of Enrik Bruck’s headstone. (Figure 8) To say I was flabbergasted would be an understatement given that I’d been looking for such information for years.
While I never asked Estela where she obtained the photo, I eventually located it on my own on the JOWBR website. I have literally looked at hundreds of burial registry records on JOWBR’s website (Figures 9a-b), and this is the first time I’ve ever seen one with a picture of the individual’s gravestone, so I consider myself fortunate to have obtained this image without going down more rabbit trails.
At first glance, Enrik’s tombstone appears unreadable but enlarging and zeroing in on the text I realized that a lot of information was decipherable. (Figure 10)
EL 16 DE DICIEMBRE xxxx (the 16th of December xxxx)
FALLECIO EL 31 DE Mxxxx (passed away the 31st of xxx (May according to JewishGen))
DE MUERTE PE (of death xx)
Armed with what seemed like rather scant details, I first turned to Google to learn where “Alba Julia” is located. I discovered it is in Transylvania, the historical and cultural region in Central-Eastern Europe, that now encompasses central Romania. Alba Iulia, as it is called, was the seat of residence of the princes of Transylvania in the 16th and 17th centuries, and for several centuries was administered by Hungary. In the 17th century there were about 100 Jews living in Alba Iulia, and by 1930, 1,558 out of 12,282 people living there were Jewish. By 1941, all Jewish community property had been confiscated, and the men seized for forced labor. The Jewish population peaked in 1947 at over 2,000, but by the beginning of the 21st century, the Jewish population in Alba Iulia, as well as in the rest of Romania, was very small.
Next, I searched in ancestry for Enrik Bruck in Alba Iulia, and surprisingly found two births registers listing a Henrik Brück, with an umlaut over the “u,” born there on the 16th of December 1888. (Figures 11a-c) Since the place and day of birth match the information on the headstone located in Saenz Peña, I am certain the individual interred there is Dr. Henrik Brück.
While disappointed so far not to have tracked down my distant cousin Dr. Erich Bruck in Argentina, I am now certain he is not interred in Sáenz Peña. Ms. Rappaportt, who has relatives in Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego, tells me there is no Jewish cemetery there. An online search of the cemetery records in Ushuaia and Río Grande, Tierra del Fuego’s two largest cities, show no Brucks interred there. So, while the question of where Erich Bruck wound up remains unresolved, I was finally able to establish the identity and origin of the Brück who lies in Sáenz Peña.
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)
Note: This post is about my great-uncle Robert Samuel Bruck, one of the younger brothers of my grandfather Felix Bruck; he died at sixteen years of age. Not surprisingly, little is known about him, though mention on one family tree suggests he suffered from a mental disability.
My paternal grandfather, Felix Bruck (1864-1927) (Figure 1), whom I never knew, had seven siblings. These were the eight children of my great-grandparents, Fedor Bruck (1834-1892) (Figure 2) and Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer (1836-1924). (Figure 3) Because my father almost never spoke about his family, I was able to figure out all the names only after scrolling through one of the Church of Latter-day Saints (LDS) Jewish Microfilms (LDS Microfilm Roll 1184449) for the town where all were born, Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]. Here I found the birth register listings for my grandfather and only six of his seven siblings. I knew of the seventh because my father used to refer to her somewhat derisively in French as “la Communiste,” because she was a high-ranking member of East Germany’s post-WWII Communist government. In time I came to learn her name was Elisabeth “Elsbeth” Bruck. (Figure 4)
Because of events surrounding what is called the Kulturkampf, vital records such as births, marriages, and deaths, that used to be maintained and recorded by the various religious denominations, came to be registered as civil events. The Kulturkampf was a conflict that took place from 1872 to 1878 (dates vary) between the government of the Kingdom of Prussia led by Otto von Bismarck and the Roman Catholic Church led by Pope Pius IX. The main issues were clerical control of education and ecclesiastical appointments. Because of the Kulturkampf Elsbeth Bruck’s birth which occurred in 1874 was entered into the civil records and found at the Archiwum Państwowe W Katowicach Oddzial W Raciborzu (“State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz”) rather than among the Jewish vital records. (Figure 5)
Regardless, after discovering the names of my grandfather’s siblings, naturally, I became curious what had happened to them. I quickly learned that in addition to my grandfather, five of his siblings had survived to adulthood, and been productive or accomplished members of society. The two siblings whose fate I was initially unable to uncover were Elise Bruck (born 1868) and Robert Samuel Bruck (born 1871). (Figure 6) Then, as I discussed in Post 44, I uncovered a family tree in the “Pinkus Family Collection,” archived and available online through the Leo Baeck Institute, that provided the death dates for these two ancestors. (Figure 7) Elise Bruck died at less than four years of age of unknown causes, while Robert Samuel Bruck died in Braunschweig, Germany, otherwise known as Brunswick, Germany, in 1887, also for untold reasons.
Following publication of Post 44, my friend Peter Hanke (Figure 8) offered to help me learn more about Robert Samuel Bruck. I affectionately dub Peter the “Wizard of Wolfsburg” because of his genealogical prowess and the fact he once worked at the VW headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany. In reading Post 44, Peter noticed that Robert had passed away in Braunschweig (Brunswick), which just so happens to be only 20 miles southwest of Wolfsburg near where he lives. (Figure 9) By contrast, Braunschweig is 444 miles west-northwest of Ratibor, (Figure 10) where Robert was born. It is a persistent mystery why Robert died so far from home. Naturally, I accepted Peter’s gracious offer to learn what might have happened to Robert; given that he was a teenager when he prematurely died, I thought he might have suffered an accident while serving as an apprentice in some unknown specialty.
Peter submitted an inquiry to the Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel, the State Archive in Wolfenbüttel, eight miles south of Braunschweig (Brunswick), which forwarded the request to the Stadtarchiv Braunschweig, the City Archive in Braunschweig. Ultimately, despite Peter’s efforts, the archive was unable to uncover any evidence that Robert either lived or died in Braunschweig. Thus, without Robert’s death certificate his cause of death remains a mystery.
Naturally, I assumed this would be the last I would learn of my distant ancestor. And this is mostly true. However, among the personal papers from my esteemed ancestor, Dr. Walter Wolfgang Bruck (1872-1937), given to me by Dr, Tilo Wahl, which I discussed in Post 99, is another family tree. Amazingly, in capitalized letters is written “ROBERT IDIOT.” (Figure 11) Setting aside the obviously inappropriately crass and vulgar reference to a person with a disability, it strongly implies Robert suffered a mental or possibly physical impairment that dramatically shortened his life. What this may have been remains unknown. Also, why he wound up in Braunschweig can only be guessed at, but possibly he was sent to a sanatorium there for medical treatment of a chronic illness.
Given the many accomplished and interesting characters that populate my family tree, I feel compelled at times to remember the less fortunate ones who were unable to lead normal lives or achieve greatness. Which naturally gives rise to questions of one’s mortality or the reason we’re born. So perhaps this post says more about me than it does about Robert Samuel Bruck?
BIRTH & DEATH DATES FOR FEDOR & FRIEDERIKE BRUCK’S EIGHT CHILDREN
Note: In this post, I discuss evidence of the Marle branch of my extended family from the late 18th Century-early 19th Century, which survives in the “Archiwum Panstwowe Oddzial Pszczyna,” State Archives Pszczyna [Poland] Branch, as well as in the Jewish cemetery that still exists there.
My father, Dr. Otto Bruck (1907-1994) (Figure 1), had an indifferent if not dismissive attitude towards his ancestors and next of kin apart from his beloved sister Susanne Müller née Bruck (1904-1942), murdered in Auschwitz. By contrast, my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck (1895-1982) (Figure 1), the oldest of my father’s siblings, was deeply interested in his forefathers. Upon my uncle’s death in 1982, my aunt gave me a copy of an abbreviated family “tree” my uncle had developed. (Figure 2) This includes the earliest mention I can recollect of the Marle branch of my family, specifically, “Wilhelm MARLE” who was married to “Reisel G. (=GRAETZER).” My uncle’s schematic tree provided no vital dates for the Marles.
In time, I would learn from a German cousin that Wilhelm and Rosalie Marle’s headstones survive in the extant Jewish Cemetery in Pszczyna, Poland, formerly Pless, Prussia. During my and my wife’s 2014 visit to Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], our English-speaking Polish friend, Malgosia Ploszaj, took us the to their graves, approximately 35 miles distant. (Figure 3) Malgosia, who hails from nearby Rybnik, Poland, formerly Rybnick, Prussia, is ardently interested in the history of Jews in Silesia and works with local volunteers to restore and raise fallen Jewish headstones throughout the area. In 2014, only Wilhelm Marle’s headstone had been restored and reset, but subsequently, his wife’s headstone has also been raised. I include pictures here of their beautifully rehabilitated tombstones.
[Just a quick footnote. I have variously found Wilhelm Marle’s wife’s forename spelled as “Reisel,” “Roesel,” “Rosel,” “Raizel,” and “Rosalie.” I will primarily use “Rosalie” as this name appears on her tombstone.]
Let me very briefly digress to provide some context. The subject of Post 88 was my third great-aunt, Antonie Pauly née Marle, an illegitimate daughter of the Rosalie Marle née Graetzer buried in Pszczyna; as previously discussed, Antonie was humorously if not sarcastically referred to as the “Queen of Tost,” even though she was born in Pszczyna not Toszek, Poland as Tost is today known.
Because Wilhelm and Rosalie Marle’s headstones are the very earliest known to me of any ancestors and relate to individuals born in the late 18th Century, I was particularly interested in learning more about them. Thus, I recently asked my friend, Ms. Madeleine Isenberg, affiliated as a volunteer with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles, whether she could translate the Hebraic text on Wilhelm (Figures 4-6) and Rosalie Marle’s (Figures 7-9) headstones. Madeleine is fluent in Hebrew and is ardently interested in deciphering and interpreting Hebrew texts on headstones. Madeleine provided a beautiful translation and interpretation of the text on both tombstones.
A few points of clarification. “Kohen” is the Hebrew word for “priest,” thus, a member of the priestly class having certain rights and duties in the synagogue.
As to the reference that Wilhelm Marle’s father was a “chaver,” Madeleine explained that in today’s Hebrew, it would simply mean “friend,” but that at one time it was a sort of title. If a person studied at a yeshiva to gain the certification of a rabbi, it was with the intention he might serve a community as a rabbi or teacher. However, Madeleine found another “classification” of chaver in a paper entitled “Regulations of The Synagogue ‘Altneuschule’ In Prague In Their Historic Context” which I quote:
“In 18th Century Germany, there were two degrees of rabbinical ordination: the higher degree, using the title ‘moreinu’—our teacher or guide—given to scholars who devoted all their time to Torah study even after marriage and intended to serve the Rabbinate or as a Yeshiva teacher. The lower degree—chaver—was given to students before marriage who intended to take up a trade other than the Rabbinate.” (Gevaryahu & Sicherman 2010)
The German translation of “chaver” on Wilhelm Marle’s headstone is “Kaufmann,” merchant or businessman, indicating that he did not intend to become a rabbi or teacher.
As mentioned, the translation of Wilhelm and Rosalie Marle’s headstones was recently obtained. However, in December 2017, I was contacted through my family tree on ancestry.com by Professor Sławomir Pastuszka from Jagiellonian University in Kraków looking for information on the Marle family. While I was able to provide Professor Pastuszka with some new material, I was the primary beneficiary of our exchanges.
Professor Pastuszka’s data comes from the Archiwum Panstwowe Oddzial Pszczyna, State Archives Pszczyna Branch, located in Pszczyna proper, which is unavailable online. I will briefly summarize and provide some historic context for the information about Wilhelm and Rosalie Marle. Wilhelm Wolf Marle was born on the 14th of November 1772 in Pless to Isaac (Figure 10) and Magdalena (Figure 11), both of whom died before 1811 and are buried in the Mikołów Jewish Cemetery in Mikołów, Poland [formerly Nikolai, Prussia], a well-preserved Jewish cemetery; Mikołów is located about 19 miles or 30km north of Pszczyna. (Figure 12) The texts on most of the headstones in Mikołów are in Hebrew so without an interpreter it would be difficult for the average visitor to locate Wilhelm Marle’s parents’ headstones. (Figure 13)
The Marle families was one of the oldest Jewish families in Pless. According to censuses in the Pszczyna Archive, respectively from 1811 (Figure 14) and the 24th of March 1812 (Figure 15), Wilhelm Wolf Marle was also referred to as “Wolf Marle Schlesinger.” According to Sławomir, “Schlesinger” is a word in Schläsisch, or Silesian German, referring to “the Silesian.” Silesian German or Lower Silesian is a nearly extinct German dialect spoken in Silesia. It is part of the East Central German language area with some West Slavic and Lechitic influences. In German, Schläsisch is Schlesisch.
Wilhelm Marle married Rosalie Graetzer on the 15th of August 1799. Records show Rosalie was born in Tost, Prussia [today: Toszek, Poland] on the 19th of March 1780, daughter of Meyer and Goldine, both from Tost, Prussia. Her headstone states she was 70 years old when she died in October 1849, suggesting she may actually have been born in 1779 rather than 1780.
Other census records indicate Wilhelm Marle was variously a trader [1813], a shopkeeper [1814], and a merchant [1817,1820, 1821, 1822, 1823, 1839, 1842], and that in 1841, he owned a spice shop, an iron shop, and a money exchange.
On January 28, 1802, Wilhelm Marle took over a plot of land from his father with a tenement house located at Deutsche Vorstadt 4, worth 266 Thalers and 20 silver pennies. He sold the property on November 23, 1833. The house still stands today. (Figure 16) In 1814, Wilhelm bought a house at No. 18 on Market Square for 2500 Thalers from Heinrich Theiner, which his son Isaak Marle inherited upon his death. This house also still stands today. (Figure 17)
The cause of Wilhelm Marle’s death in 1846 was pulmonary edema.
Let me briefly digress to provide some historic context to enable readers to understand when and under what conditions Jews were provided with some civil equality in Prussia. On March 11, 1812, the Prussian King Frederick William III issued an edict that under the first article declared all legally resident Jews of Prussia to be citizens. Article 2 considered Jews to be natives [Einländer] and state citizens of Prussia provided they adopt strictly fixed surnames; that they use German or another living language not only in keeping their commercial records but also in the drawing of contracts and legal declarations of intention; and that they use only German or Latin script for their signatures. Articles 7 and 8 provided that all occupations were open to Jews including academic positions. Article 9, however, postponed the question of Jewish eligibility to state offices. In sum, the Edict provided some civil equality for Jews in exchange for their assumption of fixed surnames, their adoption of German “or another living language” in their professional activities and compliance with other civil duties, including military conscription.
Wilhelm and Rosalie’s dates of birth come from the census record of Pless Jews dated the 24th of March 1812, who, after the emancipation edict, became full citizens of Prussia. Professor Pastuszka emphasized these records contain many errors and dates are not always correct, but this is the only source where complete dates appear.
It was only after the issuance of the Edict of 1812 that Wilhelm Marle could run for office and be elected as one of the first two councilors of the Jewish confession in Pless.
Officially, as implied, Jews in the Kingdom of Prussia had to adopt surnames in 1812, before which they used “nicknames.” The last name “Marle” was originally a nickname used by Wilhelm’s father Isaac. In some documents Sławomir found Wilhelm listed as “Wolf Isaac,” meaning he was “Wolf son of Isaac.” Wilhelm’s mother “Magdalena,” did not have a maiden name. The only Pless census in which her name appears is the one from 1784 at which time she is shown to be 48 years old. (Figure 11)
After the Edict of 1812, women without maiden names typically adopted their father’s first name as a surname. For example, in Pless, a widow listed in the 1811 census named “Pessel Ephraim,” Pessel daughter of Ephraim, was known after her marriage in 1812 to “Abraham Grunthal” as “Pessel Grunthal née Ephraim.” On other occasions women used as their nicknames the nicknames of their fathers, as in the case of Rosalie Marle née Graetzer. Rosalie Graetzer’s mother, “Goldine,” does not appear to have had a surname. While not likely, if I can obtain a picture of her tombstone from the Mikołów Jewish Cemetery, I may be able to confirm this.
Let me move on to the subject of Wilhelm and Rosalie Marle’s children, and the evidence Professor Pastuszka was able to muster about them. Naturally, a few caveats are in order. As previously mentioned, Wilhelm and Rosalie married in 1799. The census of the 24th of March 1812 lists four of their children, namely, Goldine (b. 2nd April 1804), Moritz (b. 12th May 1806), Charlotte (b. 2nd October 1809, and Handel (b. 28th August 1812). (Figure 15) However, because no registers of births and deaths of Jews in Pless exist from before 1813, predating the Edict of 1812, we do not know how many additional children Wilhelm and Rosalie may have had between 1799 and 1812 who died at birth or in infancy.
In Pless censuses postdating the one of 1812, Professor Pastuszka found evidence of five additional children, specifically, Isaac Marle (b. 14th October 1814), Rosel Marle (b. 12th July 1817), Antonie Therese Marle (b. 1st February 1820), Fanny Marle (b. 14th March 1821) and Ernestine Marle (26th October 1822). A family tree archived in the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute (Figure 18), available online, coincides almost exactly with the names and number of Wilhelm and Rosalie’s children from the census data, with one exception, Handel Marle, born in 1812 who died a little more than a year later. Not surprisingly, there are notable differences in the years of birth of Wilhelm and Rosalie and their eight surviving children.
The compiled vital data for Wilhelm, his wife, and their nine known children is summarized in the table below, along with the source of the information. Whereas I consider the census records Professor Pastuszka retrieved from the Archiwum Panstwowe Oddzial Pszczyna to be primary source documents, I do not deem the vital data in the family tree from the Pinkus Family Collection to be such. Clearly, the more reliable vital data comes from the Pszczyna Archive.
VITAL STATISTICS FOR WILHELM WOLF MARLE, HIS WIFE & AND THEIR NINE KNOWN CHILDREN
NAME
(relationship)
VITAL EVENT
DATE
PLACE
SOURCE OF DATA
Wilhelm Wolf Marle (self)
[In Pless censuses from 1811 and 24th of March 1812, he was named Wolf Marle Schlesinger]
Birth
14 November 1772
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Pless Census of 24th of March 1812 (Pszczyna Archives)
Marriage to Rosalie Grätzer
15 August 1799
Tost, Germany [today: Toszek, Poland]
Death
31 October 1846
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Pszczyna, Poland
Rosalie Graetzer (wife)
(Figure 19)
Birth
19 March 1780
Tost, Germany [today: Toszek, Poland]
Headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Pszczyna, Poland
Marriage to Wilhelm Marle
15 August 1799
Tost, Germany [today: Toszek, Poland]
Death
26 October 1849
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Pszczyna, Poland
Goldine Marle (daughter)
Birth
2 April 1804
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Pless Census of 24th of March 1812 (Pszczyna Archives)
Marriage to Simon Pincus Oppler
10 December 1823
Rosenberg, Germany [today: Olesno, Poland]
Jewish Records Indexing-Poland (LDS Microfilm 1184449)
Death
1853
Kreuzburg, Germany [today: Kluczbork, Poland]
Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Moritz (Moses) Marle (son)
Birth
12 May 1806
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Pless Census of 24th of March 1812 (Pszczyna Archives)
Death
1866
Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland]
Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Charlotte Marle (daughter)
(Figure 20)
Birth
2 October 1809
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Pless Census of 24th of March 1812 (Pszczyna Archives)
Marriage to Samuel Bruck
18 January 1831
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Death
17 August 1861
Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]
Handel Marle (son)
Birth
28 August 1812
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Death
29 November 1813
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Isaak Marle (son)
Birth
15 October 1814
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Headstone in the former Jewish cemetery in Ratibor, Germany; Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Marriage to Friederike Traube
11 April 1842
Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]
LDS Microfilm 1184449
Death
14 May 1884
Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]
Headstone in the former Jewish cemetery in Ratibor, Germany; Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Rosalie Marle (illegitimate daughter of Rosalie Graetzer) (married to Jonas Bruck)
Birth
12 July 1817
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Headstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław
Death
6 June 1890
Breslau, Germany [today: Wrocław, Poland]
Headstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław
Antonie Marle (daughter) (married to Zadig Pauly) (Figures 21a-b)
Birth
1 February 1820
Pless, Prussia [today: Pszczyna, Poland]
Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Death
17 September 1893
Posen, Germany [today: Poznan, Poland]
Pinkus Family Collection, Marle Family Tree
Fanny Marle (daughter) (married to Salomon Mühsam)
Note: This short post is about Antonie Pauly née Marle, my third great-aunt or my great-great-great-aunt, regarding whom I made an interesting discovery. This finding touches on a quaint but satirical practice members of the upper class might once have employed to de-stigmatize public disapproval of an illegitimate child.
Regular readers will recall I have often written about my Pauly relatives. In Post 56, I wrote about the paterfamilias Josef Pauly (Figure 1), using his personal memoirs. With his wife Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer (Figure 2), he bore nine children, eight of whom were daughters and all of whom have been the focus of earlier posts. The subject of this publication is Josef Pauly’s mother, Antonie Pauly née Marle (Figures 3-4), who was born in Pless, Germany [today: Pszczyna, Poland] and married to Zadig Pauly. (Figures 5-6) For most followers, I expect the discussion about my third great-aunt to be of limited interest, thus I encourage readers to focus not so much on who she was but on how and what we learn about the time in which she lived.
One of my younger cousins recently asked me about the notation below Antonie Marle’s name in the Pauly Stammbaum, family tree. (Figure 7) Being unable to decipher the writing and understand the German abbreviations, I turned to two friends who often assist me in interpreting and making sense of German documents and texts. Their translations were roughly identical, but one explication was amusing in its revelation. Let me explain.
The circled section of the Pauly family tree in Figure 7 reads as follows in German:
Antonie MARLE
1850-93, Posen
Unehel. Kd. v. Fürst Pless [=uneheliches Kind von Fürst Pless]
One correction I want to note before delving into the significance of the notation below Antonie Marle’s name in the Pauly family tree. Antonie’s year of birth is incorrectly noted on the Pauly Stammbaum as 1850, when in fact she was born in 1820. The correct information can be found on a Marle family tree in the Pinkus Family Collection archived at the Leo Baeck Institute showing Antonie’s parents and seven surviving siblings. (Figure 9) Further confirmation of Antonie’s date of birth comes from a Polish gentleman who contacted me through my family tree on ancestry and has accessed various census records from the 18th and 19th centuries from the archives in Pless registering births there. And, finally, the third source for Antonie’s year of birth can be found in the on-line Posen “Einwohnermeldezettel,” residential registration form, for Zadig Pauly and Antonie Marle. (Figure 10)
Both friends who transcribed and translated the notation on Antonie Marle agree that the sobriquet, “Queen of Tost,” was meant in jest, for amusement. Tost, known today as Toszek, Poland, is 50 miles or 80km north of Pszczyna, Poland.
One friend suggested Antonie’s father might have been Henry, Duke of Anhalt-Köthen (30 July 1778, Schloss Pless-23 November 1847, Köthen), who would have been only 42 years of age when Antonie was born, thus a theoretical possibility; Henry was a German prince in the House of Ascania, ruler of the non-sovereign principality of Anhalt-Pless.
My second friend suggested something I am more inclined to believe because of its mischievous implications. This gentleman is an experienced genealogist and in his years of doing ancestral research he has on multiple occasions come across family claims that a child was the illegitimate son or daughter of a Prince or noble; upon further investigations my friend found all these declarations to be fiction, complete fabrications. While there seems no reason to doubt that Antonie Marle might have been the result of an illicit affair, it is more plausible to believe it was the outcome of a tryst with a commoner or person of equal social standing. What I find so quaint is that her family could so easily thumb their nose at society’s mores by claiming Antonie was the illegitimate child of an affair with a monarch or sovereign, thus enveloping her in a mantle of respectability and superiority. No doubt, this fiction was an option only available to members of the upper classes.
Why Antonie Marle’s moniker was the “Queen of Tost” rather than the “Queen of Pless,” where she hailed from, is unclear, though possibly her biological father was from there. This is mere conjecture, and something we will likely never know.
Note: In this post I relate the story of how in the process of helping a reader whose grandmother died in 1940 in Ratibor, the birthplace of my father, I improbably discovered information on some of my own ancestors.
Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] (Figure 1), the town in the Prussian province of Upper Silesia where my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, was born in 1907 was one of the largest municipalities in the region. Periodically, readers who are descended from former inhabitants of Ratibor will contact me through my Blog asking for information I have or may have come across related to their ancestors. Often, their relatives are entirely unknown to me but seeing what, if anything, I can uncover about them becomes an extension of my own forensic genealogical endeavors. And, the pleasure I derive in helping others is sometimes magnified when I learn something about my own ancestors in the process. The inspiration for the current post stems from precisely such a situation.
One reader, Dan Ward, recently contacted me after perusing Post 13 and Post 13, Postscript, and learning the “Muzeum w Raciborzu” in Racibórz had given me an Excel spreadsheet with the names of the Jews that had once been interred in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, requesting a copy of this database. This cemetery was demolished in the 1960’s during Poland’s Communist era to further expunge evidence of German residency in the area. Fortunately, before the stout headstones were torn down and sold off locally, a Polish gentleman whom I wrote about in Post 13, Postscript, Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński (Figure 2), had the foresight to photograph all the gravestones; these images served as the basis for the creation of the Excel database, with the Racibórz Museum staff gleaning as much vital information as possible from the high-quality snapshots. Despite the sharp and fine details on the photos, not all the data is discernible. More on this below.
Dan Ward contacted me seeking information on the tombstone and burial location of his grandmother, Rosa Wartenberger née Perl, who according to records he found was buried on the 29th of March 1940 in the Jüdischer Friedhof Ratibor, Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, in Plot 153; she died or committed suicide before she was scheduled to be deported to a concentration camp. As a quick aside, the “Ward” surname is clearly the Anglicized version of the “Wartenberger” family name. Dan sent me screen shots with the source of this information, Jewish Gen. As readers can see, Rosa Wartenberger’s name was misspelled as “Risa Wortenberger,” although the transcriber obviously had trouble deciphering the script. (Figure 3)
Armed with the information Dan sent me, I immediately began my own research. The first thing I checked was the Excel spreadsheet with the names of Jews formerly buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, and Rosa Wartenberg is not listed. Dan would later tell me his grandmother’s maiden name was “Perl,” and I found four individuals with this surname once interred in the Jewish graveyard, but being unfamiliar with Dan’s family tree, I am not sure how they might have been related to her.
Next, I checked address books and phone directories for Ratibor. I have previously told readers about a database on ancestry.com, entitled “Germany and Surrounding Areas, Address Books, 1815-1974 (Adressbücher aus Deutschland und Umgebung, 1815-1974),” with address books for Germany, Poland, and other neighboring countries. In the only address book in this database for Ratibor for the year 1938, I found a single “Wartenberger.” It was for a man named “Kurt Wartenberger,” identified as a “gastwirt,” innkeeper, shown living at “Breite Straße 54.” (Figure 4)
I asked my friend Mr. Paul Newerla from Racibórz, a retired lawyer whom regular readers have often heard me mention, who now researches and writes about the history of Silesia, whether the surname “Wartenberger” is familiar to him. It is not, but in a 1926 Ratibor Address Book not included among the “Germany and Surrounding Areas” directories, he too found “Kurt Wartenberger” listed, identified then as a “destillateur,” distiller, living at “Brunken 54.” (Figure 5) Other than finding Kurt Wartenberger’s name in the 1926 Ratibor directory, Paul could add nothing more.
I found it odd the address number “54” was identical in 1926 and 1938 but that the street names were different. Paul Newerla explained that “Brunken” was a connecting street to what is referred to as the Altendorf district, that’s to say, a little “outside” of Ratibor along the main road towards Oppeln [today: Opole, Poland] and Leobschutz [today: Głubczyce, Poland]. I located this street, respectively, on plan maps of Ratibor from 1927-28 (Figure 6) and 1933 (Figure 7), although a plan map from 1914 names it “Große-Vorstadt.” (Figure 8) In tiny print on all three plan maps, readers can see the number “54,” confirming it was the same corner lot with different street names over time.
I passed along what Paul and I had found to Dan Ward. He confirmed that Kurt had owned a tavern and that family papers in his possession place Kurt’s business at “Große-Vorstadt 54,” papers which must clearly pre-date 1927-28, by which time the street was known as “Brunken.” By 1938, the street had been renamed yet again because it was then called “Breite Straße.” According to Dan, Kurt Wartenberger was murdered in the Shoah in Buchenwald, and, indeed, Yad Vashem lists him as a victim of the Holocaust. (Figure 9)
Next, I retraced Dan Ward’s steps to track down the source of the information on his grandmother, misspelled as mentioned above as “Risa Wortenberger.” The data, as I previously also said, originates from JewishGen, and relocating it was straight-forward. Here, however, is where things took an interesting turn. The source documentation for the data in JewishGen comes from elsewhere, namely, from the Church of Latter-Day Saints’ (LDS) “Family History Library International Film 1184447, Item 2” (Figure 10), which is one of three microfilm rolls with data on the former Jewish inhabitants of Ratibor. While I had last examined this microfilm many years ago, when it was still necessary to order films from the LDS Church in Salt Lake City and have hard copies sent to a local Family History Library for viewing, I clearly remembered this roll as having limited or, at least, confusing information. Now that the Ratibor records are accessible online through familysearch.org, I decided to reexamine film 1184447.
For anyone interested in seeking similar information from familysearch.org for towns they are researching, they can replicate these steps:
1) Go to familysearch.org (you can create a free account);
2) Under the “Search” button, scroll down to “Catalog,” click enter, and go to the following page;
3) Next, type in “Raciborz” under “Place,” or whatever town you are seeking records for (i.e., different spellings yield different results, so for towns that are now located in different countries than they once were, you may need to try alternate spellings);
4) Scroll down to “Poland, Opole, Racibórz (Racibórz),” then hit “Search”;
5) Select “Poland, Opole, Racibórz (Racibórz) – Jewish records (1),” hit enter;
6) Next select “Matrikel, 1814-1940”;
7) On the next screen select “1184447, Item 2” (select the camera icon all the way to the right; if there is a key above a camera icon, the microfilm is unavailable online).
There are 342 pages on Microfilm 1184447 but only pages 220 through 338, referred to as “Item 2,” specifically deal with Ratibor. The film contains “Friedhofsurkunden 1888-1940” for Ratibor, which Peter Hanke, my German friend who helps me with translations and making sense of German records, tells me is more aptly referred to as “Friedhofsdokumente,” or cemetery documents. The cemetery administration would use these files to see which tombs were unused; which ones could be reused after 25 or 30 years if descendants stopped paying to keep their ancestors interred; which tombs were reserved in perpetuity for so-called “family graves”; or simply to help visitors locate specific graves. These files often contain useful information for genealogists, as I illustrate below.
Let me digress for a moment. Given the disparate sources of ancestral information I have accessed over the years, including in this current post, I am often reminded of the American television game show “Concentration” that aired from 1958 until 1991. Basically, the game was based on the children’s memory game of the same name. Players had to match cards which represented prizes they could win. As matching pairs of cards were gradually removed from the board, it would slowly reveal a rebus puzzle that contestants had to solve to win a match. The similarity I see with genealogical research is not so much solving the rebus, but matching pairs of cards. Often years pass before a “genealogical card” I newly discover can be “matched” to one or more I found earlier in my investigations. The challenge, particularly as I get older, is retrieving the earlier “card” from my memory. Such is the case with connections to Microfilm 1184447, Item 2.
I downloaded, saved, and studied all 119 pages from this film, and made several interesting discoveries and connections. Of immediate interest, I found Rosa Wartenberger’s name in an index (Figure 11); as readers can discern from what I have circled in Figure 11, the number “46” appears to the right of Rosa’s name; this refers to the page number in the “Friedhofsdokumente,” on which Rosa’s name and interment date appear. Initially, I found only one page 46, not realizing there was a left page-right page pair.
Let me briefly explain. When the LDS Church originally photographed vital records for Ratibor and other places, they typically started by photographing the left-side pages from the front to the back of the register, then in reverse order from the back to the front photographed the right-side pages; thus, the left page-right page pairs, either identically numbered or consecutively numbered, from any register will not be found on consecutive microfilm images. Thus, while Rosa’s name does not appear on the left-hand page 46, it is found on the right-hand page 46; for reader’s ease, I have “grafted” the two pages in one (Figure 12), and translated, using a different grafted left-right pair of pages, the headers for each column. (Figure 13)
As readers can see, by “Grabnummer,” grave number, 153, the date of Rosa’s interment is shown, the 29th of March 1940, which matches the information in JewishGen. The column titled “Belegt” translates to “occupied,” and signifies when a person was interred, rather than when they died.
Once a researcher understands the organizational “structure” of microfilms with cemetery documents, they are easy though tedious to use. On one left-right pair of pages, I was able to find both sets of great-grandparents on my father’s side. (Figure 14) Oddly, the names of Fedor Bruck (Figure 15) and his wife, Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer (Figure 16), are not found in the Excel spreadsheet at the Muzeum w Raciborzu, meaning no photo of their headstone was taken. However, Hermann Berliner (Figure 17) and Olga Berliner née Braun’s names do appear in the Excel spreadsheet indicating a picture of their gravestone exists. (Figure 18)
I know from a family tree in the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute that my great-grandmother Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer died in Berlin on the 29th of February 1924 (Figure 19), though she was not buried there. From Microfilm 1184447, I learned she was instead interred on the 11th of May 1924 in Ratibor, almost 10 weeks later, presumably alongside her husband. Jews are typically interred within two to three days after they die, so a 10-week delay is very unusual. (Figure 20)
On Microfilm 1184447, I also found a single page mentioning one of my father’s older brothers who died in infancy, Walter Bruck. (Figure 21) His name is found on a page entitled “Kleiner Kinderfriedhof,” small children’s cemetery. This is further proof of his existence. A brief explanation. After I began immersing myself in family history and creating a family tree years ago, I started to wonder why there was a nine-year age difference between my father’s oldest brother, Fedor Bruck, born in 1895, and my father’s older sister, Susanne Bruck, born in 1904, in an era where families were large. I eventually learned in 2014 when I visited the “Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu” (“State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz”) that another sibling had been born in 1900 (Figure 22) who died in infancy the next year (Figure 23), named Walter Bruck. I was able to retrieve both his birth and death certificates among the civil records archived at the Archiwum Państwowe. Thus, the discovery of Walter Bruck’s name on Microfilm 1184447 was confirmation he was once buried in the Jüdischer Friedhof Ratibor.
Among the photos that Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński took at the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor before it was demolished is one showing the “Kindergräber,” children’s graves. (Figure 24) As readers can see, the children’s names on some of the headstones can be made out, though most are indecipherable. Interestingly, there is a separate index on Microfilm 1184447, entitled “Großer kinderfriedhof,” big children’s cemetery (Figure 25), with the names of older children buried in the Jewish Cemetery. Infants may have been interred in graves identified only by number, as I discovered in the Weißensee Jewish Cemetery in Berlin.
As a tedious exercise for another day, which I started while researching and writing this post, is cross-checking the names on Microfilm 1184447 with those on the Excel spreadsheet. Some names on Microfilm 1184447 are not in the Excel database, while others are found in both. Preliminarily, I was able to amend death dates or years in the Excel directory, which, as previously mentioned, was compiled from photos, some of which are indistinct.
In closing, I would say one final thing. Based on the Excel index I obtained years ago, I mistakenly concluded then that none of my Bruck relatives had ever been interred in the Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, even though I knew some died there when the cemetery was still in use. However, with the benefit of the information I recently acquired from the Jewish records on Microfilm 1184447, I am certain that at least three relatives with the Bruck surname were once buried there. And, this discovery was spurred by helping a reader learn about one of his relatives, a case of helping yourself by aiding others, a most satisfying outcome!
Note: In this post, I discuss a recently obtained list of students who attended Ratibor’s Gymnasium, or high school, between its opening in 1819 and 1849, and facts I’ve gleaned from this registry. While I expected a linear unfolding of the ledger’s contents and information, in some ways it has turned into a game of three-dimensional chess, as I’ll explain. This post also provides an opportunity to lay out the exacting approach I try and take to make a case for ancestral connections relying on primary source documents.
One of the most exciting moments doing forensic genealogy occurs when you discover a copy or original historic document with the names of your ancestors, particularly when the names are those of your oldest known relatives. As a former archaeologist, this is analogous to unearthing an artifact that was last handled by a human hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The context in which an artifact or document is found is key to properly interpreting its significance.
Last year, Mr. Paul Newerla, my friend from Ratibor, retired lawyer and current writer of Silesian history, mentioned that 2019 marked the bicentennial of Ratibor’s Gymnasium, or high school, still used today as a commercial school. To remind readers, Ratibor is the town where my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, was born in 1907. In Post 60, using background information provided by Mr. Newerla, I discussed the high school’s history and a publication Paul found archived at the British Museum written by the school’s first director, Dr. Carl Linge, entitled “Denkschrift über die feierliche Eröffnung des Königl. Evangel. Gymnasium zu Ratibor am 2. Juni 1819. . .,” “Memorandum on the solemn opening of the Royal Evangelical High School in Ratibor on June 2, 1819. . .” (Figure 1) This publication, printed in 1820, included a list of names of all first-year attendees, including two members of my Bruck family with only the initials of their forenames written in elaborate Gothic script, read by Paul as “S. Bruck” and J. Bruck.” (Figure 2) Based on the intimate knowledge of my family tree, I concluded these stood for Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) and Jonas Bruck (1813-1883), brothers who are shown as the children of Jacob Bruck in an abridged typed family tree developed by my Uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck. (Figure 3)
Typically, attendance at Gymnasiums begins between the ages of 10 and 12, give or take a year, so Samuel’s attendance in 1819 when he would have been 11 years old makes sense. However, his brother Jonas’s attendance in 1819, when he was only six years old seems implausible, unless he was exceptionally precocious. Absent any other incontrovertible evidence, however, this is the preliminary conclusion I came to in Post 60, namely, that Jonas Bruck had attended the Ratibor Gymnasium at a very early age.
Naturally, I became curious whether the original ledger of student names upon which Dr. Linge’s publication was based still exists, whether it is in the Polish State Archives in Racibórz or possibly curated by the Muzeum Racibórzu. Paul explained that because an existing commercial school now occupies the buildings of the former high school (Figure 4), some of the original records are retained there. In the recent past, there had apparently been some discussion about transferring the remaining ledgers to the archive or museum but for unknown reasons these negotiations ended acrimoniously.
Paul offered to contact the commercial school and inquire about the student ledgers, which he knew to have existed at one time because a colleague had shared some pictures of the “Album,” as it is referred to. Paul was recently granted access to the Gymnasium’s records. This turned out to be a frustrating exercise because the school was unable to initially locate the Album of student names for the period 1819 to 1849, even presented with irrefutable evidence of its existence in the form of pictures; Paul even checked the school’s archives, to no avail. Dispiritedly, Paul left his name and number, and asked them to call him if the Album was ever found.
Paul was not optimistic the ledger would turn up. He’s related some horror stories how nearby Polish and Czech Republic parishes have on occasion burned Kirchenbücher, church books, Kirchenmatrikeln, the roll or register of parishioners, and Pfarrmatrikel, parish matriculations, related to former German occupants of the area simply because none of their descendants live locally anymore. To use another archaeological analogy, it’s like pillaging a cultural site, ripping a page from prehistory, so to speak. So, it came as a pleasant surprise when several weeks after Paul’s visit to the former Ratibor Gymnasium he received a call telling him they’d finally located the Album in question. Paul promptly visited the commercial school and took pictures of the entire ledger of students covering the period 1819 through 1849, roughly 90 pages worth of material, which he sent me. (Figure 5)
I’ve been a coin collector much of my life and going through all the pages of the Ratibor Gymnasium Album was comparable to sorting through a cache of pennies in search of pre-1959 wheat chaff coppers. While the names of family members I discovered were relatively few, the information corresponding to each ancestor has provided multiple avenues for further investigation. The challenge is making sense of ancestral connections for people who lived 170 to 200 years ago in the context of what was a very large Bruck family at the time. As I mentioned at the outset, it’s a bit like playing three-dimensional chess
In the table below, I summarize the family data I gleaned from the Ratibor student ledger. Then, I examine using available primary source documents how or whether these people are or may be related.
SUMMARY OF FAMILY NAMES FROM RATIBOR GYMNASIUM ALBUM, 1819-1849
Readers will note that Isaac and Samuel Bruck’s names are listed in succession and bracketed, and the profession of their father is identical, an “Arrendator,” a leaseholder (i.e., holding property by lease). Thus, I assume they were brothers, although I had no prior knowledge of Isaac. Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) (Figure 7) was my great-great-grandfather, and I have photos of both he and his wife, Charlotte Bruck née Marle (1809-1861), later in life. Samuel purchased the family hotel in Ratibor, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, around the middle of the 19th Century, following a career as a wood merchant.
My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck produced an abbreviated typed family tree (Figure 3) that includes the names of Samuel Bruck and his brother Jonas (more on him later), shown to be the sons of Jacob Bruck and his wife Maria Aufrecht. From primary source documents, Jacob (Jakob) Nathan Bruck, his complete name, and Maria Aufrecht are known to have had other children. LDS microfilm roll 1184449 for Ratibor documents the birth of a daughter named Rebecka on the 10th of January 1815. (Figure 8) The same microfilm roll also documents the marriages of three of Jacob’s daughters, Wilhelmina, Dorothea, and Fanny, respectively, in 1814, 1817, and 1822 (Figure 9); the mother is not identified but I presume is Maria Aufrecht. And, yet another primary source document identifies Jacob Nathan Bruck as the father of a son named Marcus Moritz Bruck who married Nanette von Aldersthal in 1836 in Berlin at the age of 36 (Figure 10); again the mother is not named but I presume is Maria. So, from various sources, I can reasonably document that Jacob Nathan Bruck likely had at least eight children (i.e., Wilhelmina, Dorothea, Fanny, Marcus Moritz, Isaac, Samuel, Jonas, and Rebecka).
Let’s move on to Isaac and consider what primary sources are available for him. With the original Ratibor Gymnasium Album for 1819-1849 in hand, and with Isaac Bruck’s full name written out, I am now certain the initial for Isaac’s forename in Dr. Carl Linge’s 1820 publication referenced above was mistakenly recorded as a “J.” rather than an “I.” This led me to initially conclude that Jonas had attended the high school at the precocious age of 6. Not the case.
Isaac’s age at the time he attended the Ratibor Gymnasium in 1819 is stated as 13. Given that the Gymnasium Ratibor Album records students’ names starting on the 11th of May 1819, I generally place Isaac’s birth in the early part of 1806, though it could certainly have been in the latter half of 1805. I discovered a family tree on MyHeritage that gives an Isaac Bruck’s exact date of birth as the 9th of November 1805 in Breslau. However, upon locating the original birth register listing for this individual in the LDS microfilm for Breslau (LDS Roll 1184380, page 34 of 594), I found the listing is for someone named ISAAC BRUG. (Figure 11) Conceivably, an alternate spelling for “Bruck” in the early 19th Century could have been “BRUG,” but because the father is identified as “abr. Meyer Brug,” I’m dubious this is the same Isaac. I’m convinced Isaac’s father was Jacob Nathan Bruck because of his association in the student ledger with the name “Samuel Bruck,” whose father was assuredly Jacob. This is another example of something I rail about, the need to be cautious about adopting and replicating information found in other family trees without confirming the source of the data.
Years ago when I did a basic Google query on Isaac Bruck, I stumbled upon an intriguing announcement in Volume 18 of the “Amtsblatt für den Regierungsbezirk Marienwerder (Official Gazette for the Marienwerder District),” dated the 26th of May 1828 about him. (Figures 12a-b) There is no question the announcement relates to my ancestor as he is said to have come from Ratibor, and his age of 22 in 1828 coincides with my estimate of how old he would have been then had he been born between 1805 and 1806. It seems, the Security Services from the West Prussian town of Graudenz issued a bulletin in May of 1828 alerting the police authorities to arrest Isaac Bruck after he had gone AWOL or escaped from the local penitentiary. He was described as Jewish, 22 years old with black and curly hair, a black beard, a normal sized mouth, having an oval chin and face, of average stature, 5 feet 2 inches, with a scar on his right forearm from a horse bite. Whether Isaac was ever brought to justice remains unknown.
Several other primary sources from Ratibor make mention of Isaac Bruck and his wife Caroline Bruck née Stolz, who is identified as the daughter of Joachim Meyer Stolz. The birth register for Ratibor records Isaac and Caroline gave birth to a daughter named Fany on the 28th of December 1833 (Figure 13), who according to one of my cousins supposedly died in 1834. Isaac and Caroline’s divorce is recorded on the 19th of July 1835, and gives the name of Caroline’s father as “Joachim Meyer Stolz.” (Figure 14) Yet a third primary source from 1835, claiming that Caroline and Isaac are then living separately, states Isaac remarried a woman named Charlotte Leopold; this same document gives the names and dates of birth of Isaac and Caroline’s two other children, Marie born on the 27th of June 1832, and Heinrich on the 6th of January 1835. (Figure 15) Caroline Bruck née Stolz’s death certificate records her death in Berlin on the 24th of January 1875, and claims she was born in 1803 in Rawitsch [today: Rawicz, Poland]. (Figures 16a-b)
The Ratibor Gymnasium Album records Heimann’s enrollment on the 4th of April 1823, when he was 11 years old, placing his birth around 1812. Some ancestral trees claim his full name was “Heinrich Hermann Heimann Bruck.”
The Ratibor Gymnasium Album states that Heimann’s father was a “Destillateur,” a distiller, unlike Isaac and Samuel’s father, who, as mentioned, was an “Arrendator,” a leaseholder. Given that Jacob Nathan Bruck had so many siblings, it’s possible some lived in Ratibor, and that Heimann was one of Jacob’s nephews rather than his son. There is insufficient data to conclusively determine Heimann’s relationship to Jacob Bruck.
A Jonas Bruck, whose father was also a “Destillateur,” a distiller, was enrolled in the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 21st of April 1824, when he was 10 ½ years of age. Once again, the question of whether this Jonas was the son of Jacob Bruck or the son of one of his brothers or cousins is subject to debate. Let me explain.
The Jonas Bruck who was the son of Jacob Nathan Bruck and the father of the famed dentist Dr. Julius Bruck, discussed in Post 68, is buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Breslau; his dates of birth and death are thus known (i.e., b. 5 March 1813-d. 5 April 1883). (Figure 19) In April 1824, when Jonas was enrolled, he would already have been 11 years of age, not 10 ½ as noted. This, and the fact that the father of the Jonas who was enrolled in the Ratibor Gymnasium in April 1824 was “Destillateur” would suggest this is possibly not Jacob’s son. No way to be sure.
Marcus (Markus) Braun was enrolled at the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 19th of May 1829 at the age of 12 ½. Marcus, my great-great-grandfather, a Brauereipachter, or tenant brewer, was the subject of Post 14. He is known to have been born in 1817, and his age in 1829 confirms this.
Oscar (Oskar) Bruck was registered as a student at the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 22nd of May 1845. By this year, the precise date of birth of students rather than their age was recorded, and Oscar’s birth is noted as the 8th of October 1832, which corresponds with data available to me elsewhere (i.e., the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute). Oscar Bruck was my great-great-uncle.
On the 3rd of January 1846, a Heimann Bruck from another generation is enrolled at the Ratibor Gymnasium, and his father was “Sattlermeister,” or saddler. His date of birth is noted as the 26th of December 1833. It’s not clear how he’s related to Jacob Nathan Bruck. Figure 15 indicates that Isaac Bruck and Caroline Bruck née Stolz had a son named Heimann, born on the 6th of January 1835, so presumably the parents of the Heimann born on the 26th of December 1833 were someone other.
My great-grandfather Fedor Bruck (Figure 24), brother of Oscar Bruck, was enrolled at the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 27th of April 1848. His date of birth is recorded as the 30th of September 1834, which again corresponds with data available in the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute.
In preparing this Blog post, I conferred with one of my fourth cousins. He has in his possession a memoir written by his great-aunt Bertha Jacobson née Bruck, great-granddaughter of Jacob Nathan Bruck, claiming he was one of 17 children and had 12 children of his own with Maria Aufrecht!! One family tree manager, now deceased, has precise vital data on Jacob’s dates and places of birth and death (b. 18 February 1770, Pschow-d. 29 June 1832, Ratibor), as well as the birth years of a few of his children, but cites no source. Given the very precise dates and places, I’m inclined to believe they’re authentic, but I can’t independently confirm this, so I reserve judgement as to their accuracy.
Given the large number of potential ancestors Jacob Bruck may have had and the likelihood that names repeated themselves within and across generations, it’s difficult to pinpoint the relationship among all the Bruck members who attended the Ratibor Gymnasium absent more primary source documents.
In closing, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that many of the family history stories I relate on my Blog would be impossible without the generous assistance of a cadre of researchers and genealogists who offer their help free-of-charge simply because they derive a vicarious “high” from doing so. Obtaining the help of local historians and researchers, particularly native speakers, is especially valuable as they often have knowledge of historic documents, not yet automated, that an outsider, like myself, would be unaware of. The mere existence of my Blog, albeit of limited interest to most of the world, attracts enough attention by people in a position to further my ancestral investigations and allows me to relate some of my tales. To these named and unnamed people I’m eternally grateful.
Note: In this post, I relate the forensic work I undertook to learn the fate of Franz Pincus/Pauly, husband of Lisa Pauly, one of Germany’s “silent heroes” during WWII. Franz Pincus and my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck were second cousins, and though Franz died in 1941 before my uncle was forced “underground” in 1942 by the Nazis, Franz’s widow sheltered my uncle for periods during his 30 months in hiding.
On February 3, 1947, Elisabeth “Lisa” Pauly née Krüger, one of my uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s protectors in the course of his thirty months spent “underground” eluding the Nazis in Berlin during WWII, wrote a letter of reference for him. (Figure 1) In this recommendation, Lisa Pauly mentioned that her husband had died in 1941, without naming him or specifying a cause of death. By referring to the Pauly Stammbaum, family tree (Figure 2), I was able to figure out her husband was Franz Pincus, although for a very long time I was uncertain this was really Lisa Pauly’s spouse. As I explained to readers in the original post, I was only able to confirm “Franz Pincus” and “Franz Pauly” were the same person by systematically going through 1920’s and 1930’s Berlin Address Books checking both names residing at the same address. Employing this approach, as discussed in the original post, I eventually found a “Franz Pincus” living at Deidesheimer Str. 25 in Friedenau in 1928 (Figure 3), and by 1930 discovered a “Franz Pauly” residing at that same address. (Figure 4) For whatever reason Franz changed to using his mother’s maiden name, though both Pincus and Pauly were Jewish.
Having uncovered Lisa Pauly’s husband’s name from the Pauly Stammbaum, I next turned to ancestry.com to see what more I might learn. As alluded to in the previous paragraph, I found Franz Pincus/Pauly listed in multiple Berlin Address Books in the 1920’s and 1930’s. I also found a family tree on ancestry.com providing his purported place and date of birth, in Posen, Germany [today: Poznan, Poland] on the 23rd of October 1898 (Figure 5a); this same tree showed that Franz Pincus’s sister, Charlotte Lieselotte “Lilo” Pincus, had been born in Posen on the 30th of December 1895. (Figure 5b)
When I stumbled upon a picture of Franz and Lilo as children, attending the 1901 wedding of their aunt Maria Pauly to Alexander “Axel” Pohlmann [see Post 57], where Franz looks decidedly older than his sister (Figures 6a-b), I knew Franz and Lilo’s year of births were incorrect. This allows me to reiterate a point I’ve repeatedly made to readers to question vital data found in family trees on ancestry and elsewhere unless you have the original documents to corroborate dates. So, while I was able to conclude Franz and Lilo Pincus were not born, respectively, in 1898 and 1895, I had not yet resolved in what year they’d been born.
I then remembered the Pinkus Family Collection [See Post 44] archived at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York which is accessible online. Thinking this might include a chart with Franz and Lilo Pincus’s names, along with that of their parents, I scoured the online documents, and eventually stumbled on a page with all their names. (Figure 7) This page confirmed what I had suspected, namely, that their years of birth had been transposed. It turns out, Franz Pincus was born in 1895, and his sister Lilo in 1898; the family tree on ancestry.com, however, correctly noted their respective dates of birth, the 23rd of October for Franz, and the 30th of December for Lilo. This same page also noted Lisa Pauly née Krüger’s place and date of birth, in Berlin on the 20th of December 1890. With the help of Mr. Peter Hanke, affiliated with “forum.danzig.de,” I was able to track down copies of both Franz and Lilo Pincus’s original birth certificates. (Figures 8-9) So far, however, I’ve been unable to pinpoint which borough in Berlin Lisa Pauly was born so have not found her birth certificate.
Having located Franz Pincus’s birth certificate, I now set out to try and find his death certificate. From the 1947 letter of recommendation his wife Lisa had written for my Uncle Fedor, I only knew he’d died in 1941, and assumed to begin with that he had died at Maßmannstraße 11, where he and Lisa Pauly resided at the time in the Steglitz Borough of Berlin. I erroneously assumed locating his death register listing in the Landesarchiv Berlin database would be relatively straight-forward; I was sorely disappointed.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, let me explain to readers how and where I was eventually able to locate Franz Pincus’s death register listing. This requires reviewing findings I discussed in Post 48, the publication describing Dr. Ernst Neisser’s final days in September-October 1942 in Berlin after he and his cousin Luise Neisser, with whom he lived, were told to report to an old age transport. To remind readers, the elderly Ernst and Luise Neisser opted to commit suicide rather than report for deportation. Because Luise died immediately after taking poison, I easily located her death register listing under the records of Berlin-Charlottenburg, but I was unable to find Ernst’s name listed in the records of this Berlin borough. Ernst, I later learned from a letter his daughter wrote in 1947, lingered for several days before dying, so I reckoned he might have died in another borough. I eventually figured out the only place in Berlin where Jews could still receive medical attention by 1942, or where they were brought to die in case of “failed” suicide attempts, was the Jüdisches Krankenhaus Berlin, the Berlin Jewish Hospital, in the Wedding Borough of Berlin. Having worked this out, I was then able to find Ernst Neisser’s death register listing under records for 1942 in the Wedding Borough and order his death certificate from the Landesarchiv Berlin.
In trying to track down Franz Pincus’s death register listing, I decided to apply the same logic and “assume” he might also have died in the Wedding Borough of Berlin for unknown reasons. Obviously, I had no way of knowing then whether Franz Pincus’s death ultimately was from a “failed” suicide attempt, war wounds, fatal disease, or natural causes. Nonetheless, my logic turned out to be sound, and, as in the case of Ernst Neisser, I located Franz Pincus’s death register listing under 1941 in the Wedding Borough. (Figures 10a-b) Naturally, I ordered a copy of Franz’s original death certificate uncertain what new information it might include.
Franz’s typed death certificate arrived several weeks later. (Figure 11a) My cousin translated the form and it included several new pieces of information. (Figure 11b) Franz had been given the added middle name of “Israel” as was required of all Jewish-born males during the Nazi era. It confirms he died on the 2nd of August 1941 in the Berlin Jewish Hospital of a ruptured appendix. And, at the bottom of the certificate, it shows he’d gotten married on the 12th of May 1928 in Berlin’s Friedenau Borough, or so my cousin and I both read.
Armed with a new vital event to check out, I again immediately turned to the Landesarchiv Berlin database trying to locate Franz Pincus and Elisabeth Krüger’s marriage register listing. Surprisingly, I was unable to find it even though the precise date and number of the certificate, Nr. 241, were furnished. I’ve previously encountered this situation, even with exact dates and specific Berlin boroughs in hand, where it is not always possible to track down listings of vital events. The reason for this is not clear to me.
Just in the last few days, collecting and organizing newly acquired information for this post, I reexamined Franz’s typed death certificate hoping something new might reveal itself, and indeed it did. While the marriage year clearly seemed to be 1928, I began to question whether the typed “8” might not be a “3,” so checked the marriage listings under “K” (for Krüger) for 1923 and was rewarded by finding Elisabeth Krüger and Franz Pincus’s names in the Berlin-Friedenau Landesarchiv database. (Figures 12a-b) I’ve now ordered and await the actual marriage certificate but detected a notation in the register that Franz Pincus changed his surname to Pauly, a footnote obviously made some years after Franz got married.
A recent check in MyHeritage for Franz Pincus yielded a “German Minority Census, 1939” form which corroborates some of the aforementioned information, namely, Franz’s dates of birth and death, and he and his wife’s ages and residence in Berlin-Steglitz in 1939. (Figure 13) The information from MyHeritage was late in coming and might have short circuited other searches I did.
Franz Pincus’s sister, Charlotte “Lilo” Pincus, I discovered from ancestry.com rode out the war in Scotland; as a German foreigner, she was briefly interned before being released and allowed to teach. (Figure 14) She returned to Berlin after the war. A small metal sign bearing her name has been placed at the Christus-Friedhof in Mariendorf, Berlin, showing she died on the 6th of September 1995. (Figure 15)
From time to time, I stumble across a family letter or diary mentioning the people about whom I write. In writing this post, I recalled a brief mention of Franz and Lilo Pincus in a letter Suse Vogel née Neisser, daughter of the Dr. Ernst Neisser discussed above, wrote in 1972 to her first cousin, Klaus Pauly. (Figure 16) Klaus developed the Pauly Stammbaum, and he asked Suse Vogel’s assistance in identifying some of the people in the picture taken at Maria and Axel Pohlmann’s 1901 wedding. This included Franz and Lilo Pincus (Figure 17), and translated below is what Suse Vogel wrote about them:
“. . .The remaining little dwarfs bottom left: the upper one is obviously Franz Pincus-Pauly, below probably his sister Liselotte (is she calling herself Charlotte now?) I confess that I disliked her since childhood contrary to the nice ‘Blondel,’ her brother. And I was in agreement about that with bosom friend Aenne. Later, but long before Hitler-times, I declared to myself that Franz and Lilo were raised by their father strictly positivist. To my childish horror they did not ‘believe’ in anything. So, they were a priori ‘without faith, hope and love’ – sounds very presumptuous, but that’s how I felt as a young girl.”
While Suse Vogel’s words are not particularly complimentary, the mere fact I could find anything written about Franz and his sister, provides a fleeting glimpse into these long-gone ancestors and brings them to life in a small way.
REMARK: What started out as an attempt to remember relatives and friends of Dr. Josef Pauly’s branch of my family who perished in the Holocaust became more involved the deeper I got into writing. I uncovered two new third cousins, including an elderly relative who personally knew some of the victims; I discovered a diary written by one of the Holocaust victims, translated into English, describing the final wrenching months of he and his wife’s lives before they killed themselves; I found a second, lengthier account, in German, written by the daughter of another victim, describing her father’s final two years before he too committed suicide; I learned about a Polish on-line database with inhabitant information from Posen, Germany [today: Poznań, Poland] (Figure 1), the community where Dr. Pauly lived and where all nine of his children were born. And, to top it all off, I just uncovered another collection at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York/Berlin, the John H. Richter Collection, an enormous cache of materials referencing, among other ancestors, the family of one of Josef’s son-in-laws, the Neissers. None of these discoveries alone have changed the trajectory of this post, but together they were cause for distraction. That said, these recent finds allow me to tell a more complete story.
Note: In this post, I remember members of my Pauly family and their close friends who perished in the Holocaust.
Holocaust Memorial Day takes place annually on different days across the globe and marks the date on which remaining prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp, were liberated in 1945. This is a day for everyone to remember the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution, and in subsequent genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. With each passing month, unhappily, I learn about more members of my extended family and their friends who perished at the hands of the National Socialists. To coincide with this day of remembrance, I want to recall and memorialize the multiple victims among the Pauly branch of my family along with a few of their close friends.
Regular readers may recollect that Post 40 post was about Elisabeth “Lisa” Pauly née Krüger, one of my Uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck’s “silent heroes,” who hid him in Berlin during WWII for periods of his 30-month survival “underground.” Most of the Pauly family members mentioned in this post were aunts, uncles, and cousins of Lisa Pauly. Briefly, let me provide more context on how this family is related to me.
In Post 44, I mentioned two siblings, my great-grandmother, Friederike Mockrauer (Figure 2), and her brother, my great-great-uncle, Josef Mockrauer (Figure 3); I was already aware of their existence but found more information on their children in the “Pinkus Family Collection” archived at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York/Berlin. Friederike and Josef had other siblings, including a sister Rosalie Mockrauer (1844-1927) (Figure 4) who married Dr. Josef Pauly (1843-1916) (Figure 5) from Posen, Germany [today: Poznań, Poland]; together they had eight daughters and one son, all of whom survived to adulthood. Ancestrally-speaking, these nine children would be my first cousins twice-removed.
The only son from Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s union was named Wilhelm Pauly (Figure 6), and through steps I detailed in earlier posts, I was able to track down two of Wilhelm’s grandsons, Peter Pauly and Andreas “Andi” Pauly, living in Germany; Peter and Andi are my third cousins. Both have been enormously helpful in the course of my ancestral research. Not only have they provided a detailed, hand-drawn Stammbaum (family tree), developed by their father, Klaus Pauly, but they’ve scanned and made available copies of many family photographs.
This included a photo of a large Pauly family get-together that likely took place in Posen, Germany, probably in the mid-1890’s, judging from the estimated age of some of the individuals pictured whose dates of birth are known to me. The partial caption that accompanied this and other photos has allowed me to put names to some of the people shown, including all nine of Josef and Rosalie Mockrauer’s children. Through a laborious process of cross-comparison with other photos, including another large Pauly family get-together for the 1901 marriage of one of Josef and Rosalie’s daughters, I’ve now been able to identify 22 of the 31 individuals captured on film in this snapshot (Figure 7); as I was writing this post, an elderly third cousin from Canada who I only just learned about, Ms. Agnes Stieda née Vogel (Figure 8), helped identify two more people. Considering the age of the image and the incomplete captioning, it’s astonishing that after almost 125 years it’s still possible to put names to faces of people who lived largely “anonymous” lives. I attach the table below with names and vital data of the people (i.e., casual readers need not concern themselves with this):
NO.
NAME
EVENT
DATE
PLACE
1
Anna Rothholz née Pauly
Birth
14 March 1871
Posen, Germany
Death
21 June 1925
Stettin, Germany
Marriage
20 May 1892
Berlin, Germany
2
Josef Pauly
Birth
10 August 1843
Tost, Germany
Death
7 November 1916
Posen, Germany
Marriage
1869
3
Paula Pincus née Pauly
Birth
26 April 1872
Posen, Germany
Death
31 March 1922
Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
Marriage
16 November 1891
Berlin, Germany
4
UNKNOWN WOMAN
5
Julie Neisser née Sabersky
Birth
26 February 1841
Wöllstein, Germany
Death
11 April 1927
Berlin, Germany
6
ERNST NEISSER
Birth
16 May 1863
Liegnitz, Germany
DEATH
(SUICIDE)
4 OCTOBER 1942
BERLIN, GERMANY
Marriage
5 September 1898
Stettin, Germany
7
Margarethe Neisser née Pauly
Birth
16 January 1876
Posen, Germany
Death
10 December 1941
Berlin, Germany
Marriage
5 September 1898
Stettin, Germany
8
Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer
Birth
3 January 1844
Leschnitz, Germany
Death
28 November 1927
Berlin, Germany
Marriage
1869
Unknown
9
Rosalinde Kantorowicz née Pauly
Birth
22 January 1854
Tost, Germany
Death
3 November 1916
Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany
10
UNKNOWN MAN
11
Charlotte Mockrauer née Bruck
Birth
8 December 1865
Ratibor, Germany
Death
10 January 1965
Stockholm, Sweden
Marriage
18 March 1888
Ratibor, Germany
12
UNKNOWN WOMAN
13
UNKNOWN BOY
14
Therese Sandler née Pauly
Birth
21 August 1885
Posen, Germany
Death
1969
15
GERTRUD KANTOROWICZ
“GERTRUDE PAULY (PSEUDONYM)”
Birth
9 October 1876
Posen, Germany
DEATH
(MURDERED)
20 APRIL 1945
THERESIENSTADT, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
16
Maria Pohlmann née Pauly
Birth
21 July 1877
Posen, Germany
Death
Unknown
Marriage
30 September 1901
Posen, Germany
17
GERTRUD WACHSMANN NEE POLLACK
Birth
10 July 1867
Görlitz, Saxony, Germany
DEATH
(MURDERED)
22 OCTOBER 1942
THERESIENSTADT, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Married
17 October 1893
Görlitz, Saxony, Germany
18
Heinrich Sabersky
Birth
July 1845
Grünberg, Germany
Death
January 1929
Berlin, Germany
19
HELENE GUTTENTAG NEE PAULY
Birth
12 April 1873
Posen, Germany
DEATH
(SUICIDE)
23 OCTOBER 1942
BERLIN, GERMANY
Marriage
5 February 1898
Berlin, Germany
20
ADOLF GUTTENTAG
Birth
4 December 1868
Breslau, Germany
DEATH
(SUICIDE)
23 OCTOBER 1942
BERLIN, GERMANY
Marriage
5 February 1898
Berlin, Germany
21
Wilhelm Pauly
Birth
24 September 1883
Posen, Germany
Death
1961
Unknown
22
UNKNOWN MAN
23
ELLY LANDSBERG NEE MOCKRAUER
Birth
14 August 1873
Berlin, Germany
DEATH
(MURDERED)
15 MAY 1944
AUSCHWITZ, POLAND
Marriage
1892
Posen, Germany
24
Edith Riezler née Pauly
Birth
4 January 1880
Posen, Germany
Death
1963
Unknown
25
UNKNOWN MAN
26
UNKNOWN WOMAN
27
ELISABETH HERRNSTADT NEE PAULY
Birth
2 July 1874
Posen, Germany
DEATH
(MURDERED)
27 MAY 1943
THERESIENSTADT, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Marriage
11 May 1895
Cunnersdorf, Germany
28
Arthur Herrnstadt
Birth
15 March 1865
Hirschberg, Germany
Death
21 October 1912
Stettin, Germany
Marriage
11 May 1895
Cunnersdorf, Germany
29
Adolf Wachsmann
Birth
3 January 1859
Ratibor, Germany
Death
Unknown
Unknown
Married
17 October 1893
Görlitz, Saxony, Germany
30
UNKNOWN MAN
31
UNKNOWN MAN
*Names italicized and in CAPS are family and friends who perished in the Holocaust. Numbers in the left-hand column correspond with the numbered, circled heads in Figure 7.
Having identified more than half the people in the Pauly family photo, I researched their fate using family queries, ancestry.com, and Yad Vashem; I’ve learned through experience that if I can find no other information on the fate of family, I’m compelled to check the Holocaust database. While multiple of the individuals in the photo had the relative “good fortune” to have died before the Nazis came to power, I was surprised at the number of people in the photo killed by the Nazis or who took their own lives after they were told to report for deportation. (Figure 9) What was even more sobering was discovering that children or husbands of some of the people photographed similarly perished during the Holocaust. While I’m unable to show images of all the victims, it’s important to acknowledge they once existed.
Helene Guttentag née Pauly (1873-1942) (Figure 10) was the third oldest of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughters, and married Dr. Adolf Guttentag (1868-1942) (Figure 11); they had one son, Otto Guttentag (1900-1992), who immigrated to America. In the course of writing this Blog post, I found his obituary and established contact with one of Adolf and Helene Guttentag’s grandchildren, my third cousin Christoph Guttentag (Figure 12), living in North Carolina; I learned from him about the existence of a diary that Adolf Guttentag wrote for his son in the final weeks of his life before he and Helene committed suicide on October 23, 1942 in Berlin. The diary eventually made its way to their son, who donated it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It is available in English on their website (i.e., Christoph’s mother did the translation). My next Blog post will be about this diary, which is unquestionably one of the saddest accounts I’ve read about Jews entrapped in Germany during WWII with no means of escaping other than to kill themselves.
Dr. Hermann Rothholz (1857-1940) was married to the oldest of Josef and Rosalie’s nine children, Anna (1870-1925) (Figure 13); she died in 1925, and thereby escaped the horrors of the Holocaust. Dr. Rothholz was not so fortunate, and was transported from Stettin, Germany [today: Szczecin, Poland] to the Lublin District of Poland, and died there on October 19, 1940.
Ernst Neisser (1863-1942) (Figures 14a-b) was born in Liegnitz, Germany [today: Legnica, Poland] in 1863 to a Protestant family of Jewish descent. He was a bacteriologist, and the nephew of Alfred Neisser who in 1879 isolated the Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria that causes gonorrhea. Ernst Neisser became the director of the municipal hospital in Stettin, Germany in 1895, and married Margarethe Pauly (1876-1941) (Figure 15) in Stettin on September 5, 1898. After his retirement around 1931 they moved to Berlin. He and his cousin, who was named Luise Neisser (1861-1942), committed suicide together. In Adolf Guttentag’s diary, Ernst’s cousin is referred to only as “L. Neisser”; only one Neisser with the initial “L” is listed in the Shoah database who died in Berlin, “Luise,” so I reasoned this was the cousin with whom Ernst committed suicide. And, Ms. Stieda confirmed her name.
Margarethe Neisser’s name does not appear in Yad Vashem as a Holocaust victim, suggesting she died before Ernst killed himself. According to the large family tree I’ve referred to in previous posts, the “Schlesische Jüdische Familien” (Silesian Jewish Families), she died on December 10, 1942, two months after her husband. This death date made no sense to me. First, Yad Vashem suggests Ernst Neisser was a widower (Figure 16), and second, why would Margarethe wait two months to kill herself after her husband, unless they were divorced or separated and living apart, no evidence of which exists. I’ve explained to readers in the past that I rarely accept prima facie ancestral data from other trees unless I can track down the origin, even if the information is from a usually reliable source. I again contacted Ms. Elke Kehrmann, the tree manager, and asked where dates for Margarethe’s death come from; she explained she’d found them in two other trees, but upon re-examining those trees, Elke realized she’d accidentally recorded the death year as 1942 when it was really 1941! Once I learned this, the timing of Ernst Neisser’s death vis a vis his wife’s death made more sense. The cause of her death is unknown, but the fact remains she is not listed as a Shoah victim.
In the course of researching Ernst Neisser, I found a 34-page typed letter written by his daughter, Susan Vogel née Neisser, in 1947 to an American relative. It is entitled “Die letzten ebensjahre Vaters Prof. Ernst Neisser,” “The Last Two Years, Professor Ernst Neisser,” and describes the last years of her father’s life from 1939-1942. The letter concentrates on the suicide of Ernst and his cousin to escape deportation in 1942. Unfortunately, the document is written in German, so presently I can offer no insights on Dr. Neisser’s final years.
And, lastly, as mentioned at the outset under “Remarks,” I learned about the huge “John H. Richter Collection, 1904-1994” archived at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York/Berlin; suffice it to say, this collection includes an enormous amount of ancestral information, not only about the Neisser family, but even about my own Bruck ancestors.
Elizabeth Herrnstadt, Anna Herrnstadt, & Ilse Herrnstadt
Elizabeth Herrnstadt née Pauly (1874-1943) (Figure 17) was the fourth of Josef and Rosalie Pauly’s daughters. She was married to Arthur Herrnstadt (1865-1912) (Figure 18), with whom she had two daughters, Anna (“Aenne”) in 1896 (Figure 19) and Ilse in 1897. (Figure 20) Arthur died in 1912, but Elizabeth, Aenne and Ilse were all murdered in 1943 in the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Astonishingly, Aenne Herrnstadt was the godmother of Agnes Stieda, the third cousin I mentioned above.
Gertrud Kantorowicz (1876-1945) (Figure 21), like all nine of Josef and Rosalie’s children, was born in Posen, Germany; her pseudonym was apparently “Gertrud Pauly,” suggesting a close relationship with the Pauly clan. Gertrud was one of the first women in Germany to obtain a PhD. in Humanities. She was in England in 1938 but inexplicably returned to Germany later that year. After the outbreak of war, she arranged a post at Skidmore College in the United States, but by then was unable to leave Germany legally; she was arrested trying to illegally cross into Switzerland, and sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia, where she died in April 1945, shortly before the end of WWII.
Gertrud Wachsmann née Pollack (1867-1942) (Figure 22) was married to Adolf Wachsmann (Figure 23), an Apotheker (pharmacist) in Posen. The detailed Pauly Stammbaum (family tree) I’ve alluded to in multiple posts, includes some Pollacks, suggesting Gertrud was a distant cousin of the Paulys. She appears to have been deported from Breslau, Germany, first to a detention camp at Grüssau in Lower Silesia, then to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia where she perished in October 1942. (Figure 24)
Elly Landsberg née Mockrauer (1873-1944) (Figure 25), was the daughter of Josef Mockrauer by his first marriage to Esther Ernestine Mockrauer née Lißner; to remind readers, Josef Mockrauer was the sister of Rosalie Pauly née Mockrauer. Josef Mockrauer’s second wife was Charlotte Mockrauer née Bruck (1865-1965) (Figure 26), my great-aunt, who was born in 1865. In a book by Elly Landsberg’s grandson, W. Dieter Bergman, entitled, “Between Two Benches,” he mentions his grandmother: “In 1891 Elly came from Berlin to the town of Posen to stay with her aunt Rosalie and with the well-known family of Dr. J. Pauly. Her widowed father had remarried a young cousin and Elly was not happy in Berlin. In Posen, however, she fitted right into the family of eight girls.” (p.11) A point of clarification. Josef Mockrauer was not in fact a widower, and his first wife Ernestine Mockrauer lived until 1934; after separating from her husband, she had an out-of-wedlock son in 1884, Georg Mockrauer, oddly given the surname of his mother’s former husband.
In 1892 in Posen, Elly married a lawyer, Adolf Landsberg (1861-1940), who came from a family of distinguished scholars and rabbis. Elly went on to become a lawyer. She lived in Naumburg Saale, Germany during the war, and was deported first to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia, then moved to Auschwitz, where she was murdered on May 15, 1944.
In response to why Maria might have survived the Holocaust when multiple members of her family did not, my cousin sent, among other things, what turned out to be an “Einwohnermeldekarte” (resident registration card) or “Einwohner-meldezettel” (resident registration form) for Maria and her husband. Having never seen one of these cards, I asked about its origin, and my cousin explained that each city historically kept these records for their residents. With recent changes in European laws, these police records must be digitized for individuals born at least 120 years ago and made available at no cost to the public. Poznan, Poland happens to be one of those jurisdictions which has automated these resident registration cards, but each city and country is moving at its own pace.
Polish databases, for me, are notoriously difficult to navigate. I had the incredibly good fortune to find detailed English instructions on how to use these digitized population records for the city of Poznań (Posen), so for any readers with ancestors born there at least 120 years ago, here is the link.
Readers may rightly wonder where some of the specific vital data included in the table above comes from, so using the digitized Posen population records, I’ll give three examples.
The resident registration card for Alexander “Axel” Pohlmann and Maria Pauly, mentioned above, records their marriage as 30th September 1901. (Figure 29) A photo given to me by Andi Pauly of Axel and Maria’s wedding is captioned with the date 1902 (Figure 30), so the resident registration card provides an opportunity to precisely date the event.
Three resident registration cards can be found among the Posen population records for Josef and Rosalie Pauly and their nine children; as readers may be able to discern, for at least some of the children, their date of birth and place and date of marriage are shown. (Figures 31a-c)
And, finally, the resident registration form for Adolf and Gertrud Wachsmann, friends of the Pauly’s, provides Adolf’s date and place of birth and their date and place of marriage, all previously unknown facts now firmly “anchored” with reference to a historic document. (Figure 32)
In conclusion, in the absence of surviving personal papers, it is very difficult to properly commemorate victims of the Holocaust who led fulfilled lives which were abruptly terminated by the Nazis. Still, I feel a need to at least speak their names, show their faces, where possible, and acknowledge their existence using what scant evidence can be found to show they were once living beings.
REFERENCE
Bergman, W. Dieter
1995 Between Two Benches. California Publishing Co. San Francisco, CA
Note: In this Blog post, I discuss how I inadvertently uncovered vital records information for several people in my family tree and talk about leaving open the possibility of discovering evidence of ancestors whose traces appear negligible.
In the prologue to my family history blog, which I initiated in April 2017, I conceded there are some ancestral searches which are bound to end up unresolved during my lifetime. While I never actually close the book on these forensic investigations, I place them on a back-burner in the unlikely event I discover something new or make a new connection. This Blog post delves into one recent find that opened the door to learning more about several close ancestors whom I’d essentially given up hope of unearthing anything new.
Given my single-minded focus over the last two years on writing stories for my family history blog, I’ve woefully neglected updating my family tree which resides on ancestry.com. An opportunity recently presented itself to piggy-back on a friend’s membership to ancestry and review the hundreds of “leaves” associated with the roughly 500+ people in my tree. Typically, at the top of the list of ancestry clues are links to other family trees that may include the same people as found in one’s own tree. While I systematically review these member trees, I only “import” new ancestral information if source documents are attached to the member trees and I can confirm the reliability of the details; I may occasionally make exceptions if trees or tree managers have been trusted sources of information in the past, and/or I otherwise can confirm the origins of the data. Over the years I’ve seen multiple trees replicate the same erroneous information, and this is a path I choose to avoid.
The family ancestral information I happened upon came from a family tree I discussed in Blog Post 39, entitled “Schlesische Jüdische Familien,” “Silesian Jewish Families.” Regular readers may recall this tree has an astronomical 52,000+ names in it, so it should come as no surprise that it is often the source of overlapping or new information for individuals found in my own modest-sized tree. That said, I still apply the same rigorous principles in assessing the information found in this larger tree. I rarely take anything at face-value when it comes to vital records (e.g., births, baptisms, marriages, deaths) given the multiple reasons, often inadvertent or negligent, why data may be incorrect or divergent (e.g., illegible or unintelligible writing on source documents; transcription errors). With these caveats in mind, however, I came across some vital record information on the Silesian Families tree that seemed credible given the specificity of birth and death dates for a few individuals in my tree. The information related to my great-great-uncle Josef Mockrauer’s first wife, Esther Ernestine Lißner, and their son, Gerhard Mockrauer; while I’d previously found Gerhard’s birth certificate mentioning his parents, I had never found precise birth and death dates for Ernestine or Gerhard, so this was particularly intriguing.
Having previously established contact with the manager of the “Schlesische Jüdische Familien” family tree, a very helpful German lady by the name of Ms. Elke Kehrmann, I again reached out to her. I acknowledged that remembering the source of data for 52,000+ people is unrealistic but thought I should still ask. Initially, Ms. Kehrmann could only recall the information came from a manuscript prepared by an American Holocaust survivor who’d wanted to memorialize his lineage; with numerous computer upgrades over the years, Elke expressed the likelihood the document was digitally irretrievable. Disappointed, but not surprised, I was prepared to accept the vital records information at face-value.
Then, much to my delight, a day later Elke told me she’d located the source document from a larger collection entitled the “Pinkus Family Collection 1500s-1994, (bulk 1725-1994).” (Figure 1) It was too large to email, but she opined I might be able to locate it on the Internet, and, sure enough, I immediately learned the collection is archived at The Leo Baeck Institute—New York/Berlin (LBI) and can be downloaded for free. For readers unfamiliar with this institute, according to their website, “LBI is devoted to the history of German-speaking Jews. Its 80,000-volume library and extensive archival and art collections represent the most significant repository of primary source material and scholarship on the Jewish communities of Central Europe over the past five centuries.”
The Pinkus Family Collection is enormous. From the “Biographical Note” to the collection, I learned the Pinkus family were textile manufacturers. Their factory, located in Neustadt, Upper Silesia [today: Prudnik, Poland], was one of the largest producers of fine linens in the world. Joseph Pinkus became a partner in the firm S. Fränkel when he married Auguste Fränkel, the daughter of the owner. Their son Max Pinkus (1857-1934) was director until 1926. Subsequently, Max Pinkus’s son Hans Pinkus (1891-1977) managed the family company from 1926-1938 until he was forced out after the company’s total aryanization in the wake of Kristallnacht. Both Max and Hans Pinkus were very active in civic and cultural affairs and interested in local history; they amassed a large library of books by Silesian authors. In their spare time, they devoted themselves to genealogical research, the basis of the family collection archived at LBI. Hans Pinkus left Germany at the end of 1938, emigrated to the United Kingdom with his family in 1939, and died in Britain in 1977.
In reviewing the index to the collection, I had no idea where to begin. Fortunately, Elke came to my rescue and pointed me to “Series VII” (Figure 1), described as encompassing not just close Pinkus family relations but the broader array of families in Upper Silesia. Within this series I located pages related to my family, although, unlike other portions of the collection, ancestral information is recorded in longhand, in Sütterlin, no less. Even so, I was able to decipher most of the numerical data, and enlisted one of my German cousins to translate the longhand.
Here is where I discovered the source of the birth and death dates for my great-great-uncle Josef Mockrauer’s first wife, Esther Ernestine Lißner, and their son, Gerhard Mockrauer. A summary of vital information for Josef Mockrauer, his two wives, and their children follows:
I made other surprising discoveries in the Pinkus Collection. Briefly, some context. The second-generation owners of the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preussen” Hotel in Ratibor were my great-grandparents, Fedor Bruck (Figure 10) and Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer. (Figure 11) As the table below shows, Fedor and Friederike Bruck had eight children, only six of whom I’d previously been able to track from birth to death; Elise and Robert remained wraiths whose existence I knew about but assumed had died at birth, a not uncommon fate in the 19th century. This was not, in fact, what happened. Elise lived to almost age 4, and Robert to age 16. While Elise expectedly died in Ratibor, mystifyingly, Robert died on December 30, 1887 in Braunschweig, Germany, more than 450 miles from Ratibor. Why here is unclear. Their causes of death are a mystery, though childhood diseases a real possibility.
With respect to the tables above, I don’t expect readers to do anything more than glance at them; for me, they’re a quick reference as to what I know and where it came from, a form of metadata, if you will. The italicized information in the tables was new to me and originated from the Pinkus Collection.
As a related aside, Friederike Mockrauer and Josef Mockrauer were siblings. Interestingly, Josef Mockrauer would go on to eventually marry one of his sister’s daughters, his niece, my great-aunt Charlotte Bruck. Incestuous, I would agree.
Remarkably, on the very same page where I discovered Elise and Robert’s dates and places of death, I found my father and his three siblings listed! (Figure 17) Inasmuch as I can tell, the detailed family information was recorded by either Max (Max died in 1934) or Hans Pinkus around the early- to mid-1930’s, at which time my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, would have been a dentist in Tiegenhof in the Free State of Danzig, and this is precisely what is noted: “Zahnarzt im Tiegenhof (Freistaat Danzig)”; “Freistaat Danzig” was the official name of this former part of the Deutsches Reich after World War I.
Tracking down the Pinkus Collection with its relevant family history is admittedly noteworthy, but the real service was rendered by Max and Hans Pinkus. Their detailed compilation of ancestral data from related Silesian families was gathered while running a full-time business and in the days before genealogical information was digitized, when most of the painstaking work had to be undertaken manually through time-consuming letter-writing, and perhaps occasional phone calls and family gatherings. So, while I take obvious pleasure in having discovered the Pinkus Collection, I acknowledge the true forensic genealogists for amassing this valuable trove of family history.
Let me conclude by emphasizing that well-done family trees to which ancestry.com leads genealogists can often be the source of valuable forensic clues but should be closely scrutinized and delved into to before accepting the data prima facie. And, finally, I have no idea how many “cold cases” I can eventually solve but the challenge is what motivates me.
