Note: This tale is about another of my father’s first cousins, Mr. Fritz Goldenring. This post provides an opportunity to explore the fate of a Jewish émigré, who, while he did not perish in a concentration camp or ghetto in Europe, is every bit as much a victim of Nazi persecution as those individuals who were murdered in these places. How I learned about Fritz does not follow a linear path, although I’ll strive to relate my discoveries in a somewhat chronological fashion. Like the stories of many of my relatives, there are glaring gaps in what I’ve pieced together.
Two of my father’s photos taken in May 1938 in Fiesole, Italy, following his arrival there after fleeing Germany, show a woman identified as Eva Goldenring. (Figures 1 & 2) I later learned she was another of my father’s first cousins. Like most of his relatives, Eva and her mother Helene Goldenring, née Hirsch, were rarely mentioned when I was growing up, although I knew they’d survived the war and eventually immigrated to America. Both daughter and mother stayed at the Pension “Villa Primavera” in Fiesole, Italy, co-managed by my Aunt Susanne Müller, Helene twice in 1937-38 (Figures 3 & 4) and Eva in 1938.
In Post 14, I discussed the Tenant Brewer, Markus Braun, from Ratibor, the town where my father was born. Markus had a dozen children by his first wife, Caroline Spiegel, then two more by his second wife, Johanna Goldstein. I’m distantly related to most of my American cousins through Markus Braun. My third cousin, once-removed, Larry Leyser (Figure 5), is one such relative, and, like myself, an active genealogist. Several years ago, Larry shared a two-page summary written by his grandmother, Katerina Leyser, née Rosenthal (Figure 6), detailing some of Larry’s ancestors. This document provided the first mention of Fritz Goldenring and identified him as the brother of Eva Goldenring and son of Helene Goldenring; no other information was given.
To try and learn more, I turned to ancestry.com, and happened on a tantalizing mention of Fritz Goldenring originating from Aufbau Newspaper, saying he had died in Shanghai; Fritz’s name was listed in the April 19, 1946 edition of Aufbau. (Figure 7) Aufbau (German for “building up, construction”), I discovered, is a journal targeted at German-speaking Jews around the globe founded in 1934. From September 1, 1944 through September 27, 1946, Aufbau printed numerous lists of Jewish Holocaust survivors located in Europe, as well as a few lists of victims. These lists, which have been digitized, contain 33,557 names that are searchable via “JewishGen’s Holocaust Database,” “JewishGen Germany Database,” and the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database.” According to JewishGen, the extent of the information available on any individual varies widely.
For Fritz Goldenring, I learned he was born on September 11, 1902 and died on December 15, 1943; intriguingly, it gave his last residence simply as “Nizza.” Coincidentally, Nizza is the Italian name for Nice, France, a place with which my family has connections, as readers may recall. Mistakenly believing that Fritz may last have resided here before immigrating to Shanghai, I asked an acquaintance at Nice’s l’Hôtel de Ville whether she could find any trace of Fritz Goldenring there, to no avail. Knowing of the Goldenring family’s travels to Genoa, Italy in July 1926, I looked for a “Nizza” nearby, and discovered a place named “Nizza Monferrato” only 65 miles away; I sent the Comune there an email, received a very gracious reply saying Fritz Goldenring similarly had no connection to this place.
Realizing I was grasping at straws, I resolved to renew my search for Fritz Goldenring from the place he’d assuredly lived, namely, Shanghai. I turned to my friend, Ms. Madeleine Isenberg, from the Los Angeles Jewish Genealogical Society, who assists fellow “travelers.” I asked whether she could refer me to someone in the Jewish community in Shanghai, and she suggested I contact “Chabad” centers in Shanghai; Chabad is one of the largest Hasidic groups and Jewish religious organizations in the world. I emailed three such centers in Shanghai, asking who I should contact about obtaining a copy of Mr. Goldenring’s death certificate, and almost immediately received an email from Rabbi Shalom Greenberg. He’d forwarded my request to Mr. Dvir Bar-Gal, who leads “Tours of Jewish Shanghai.”
Mr. Bar-Gal, it turns out, is an Israeli photojournalist whose mission of tracking down traces of Shanghai’s Jewish past began by accident, when he discovered a Hebrew tombstone in a Shanghai antique shop in 2001. He’s become known as Shanghai’s “gravestone sleuth,” tracking down Jewish tombstones scattered around the city’s outlying villages, tombstones used for everything from building beams to washboards. Between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, Shanghai transformed from a small fishing village to China’s largest city and become known as the “Pearl of the East.”
The Jewish tombstones that Mr. Bar-Gal is racing the clock to save are remnants of Shanghai’s Jewish community that once numbered no fewer than 30,000 Jews. Jews first arrived in Shanghai in 1845, built their fortunes, and quickly occupied key positions in the city, making significant social and economic contributions. Russian Jews escaping the pogroms of the early 1900’s represented the next wave of immigrants. They were followed by the last major group of Jewish immigrants, the most well-known of three waves, European refugees escaping Nazi terror. At the time, China was the only country in the world where Jews did not require an entry visa, and this is certainly the reason my father’s cousin, Fritz Goldenring, sought refuge here.
Many of the Jewish refugees who arrived in Shanghai were penniless but were assisted by the wealthier and established Sephardic Jews. After the Japanese occupied Shanghai in 1937, the Nazis applied pressure on them to deport or murder the city’s Jews, an order they refused. Instead, they confined the roughly 20,000 stateless Jewish refugees to the Shanghai Ghetto, formally known as the “Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees,” an area roughly one square mile in the Hongkou district. About 23,000 of the city’s Jewish refugees were restricted or relocated to the area between 1941 and 1945 by the “Proclamation Concerning Restriction of Residence and Business of Stateless Refugees.” The Shanghai Ghetto was never walled, and Jews were housed alongside local Chinese, who lived in equally deplorable conditions.
The first Jewish cemetery was established in 1862, and by the 1950’s four Jewish cemeteries existed in Shanghai containing 3,700 graves. As the city expanded, in 1958, it was decided to systematically transfer the graves to a newly constructed international cemetery to the west of the city. The few Jews who remained after the Communists came to power were supposed to assist in these transfers, but during Mao Zedong’s “Cultural Revolution,” the international cemetery was instead destroyed, and the gravestones scattered. These uprooted tombstones are the traces of Shanghai’s Jewish past that Mr. Bar-Gal is striving to relocate and preserve.
So, as readers can clearly conclude, referral to Mr. Bar-Gal was fortuitous. While unable to provide a death certificate for Mr. Goldenring, Mr. Bar-Gal provided two valuable clues. He told me that before being expelled from Germany, Fritz had last worked in Darmstadt, Germany as a journalist. He recommended I contact Darmstadt to obtain his death certificate, so I sent the Rathaus (City Hall) there an email. My request was eventually forwarded to the Stadtarchiv, or City Archive, in Darmstadt, and finally, in October 2017, they responded. They could find no evidence that Fritz Goldenring had lived in Darmstadt, but they did find a reference to him in on-line directory at the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, the Hesse Central State Archive, in Wiesbaden. They added one additional clue, namely, that Fritz was born in Berlin.
With this new information, I next contacted the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv. They eventually responded telling me there exists an Entschädigungsakte, a claim for compensation file, submitted by Helene Goldenring, née Hirsch, as the heir of her son Fritz Goldenring. (Figure 8) After paying a fee, I was able to obtain a copy of this 160-page file, a document that ultimately filled in some holes.
This file includes typed and handwritten pages, all in German, so I convinced one of my cousins to review and summarize the highlights. The compensation file, while leaving many facets of Fritz’s life in doubt, did answer some questions. It confirmed Fritz had been born in Berlin; attended grammar and high school there; apprenticed as an office worker in Nordhausen; and worked in Hamburg for Schenker & Co., a transport and logistics company dealing with planes, ships and trucks. He eventually became a journalist, as I’d learned from Shanghai. As his situation in Germany became increasingly tenuous, he hoped to parlay his possession of perfect pitch and musical talents into a ticket elsewhere, so in 1938 he went to Berlin. While there, he was apparently arrested for jay-walking and jailed for three days. In a classic example of a “Catch-22,” upon his release, he was deemed to have been “previously convicted” and forced to leave Germany.
Knowing Fritz’s sister and mother had both stayed at the “Villa Primavera” in Fiesole, I re-examined the Pension’s guest logs, and discovered Fritz had also stayed there, registering for a month-long visit on May 16, 1938. (Figure 9) I surmise after he was deported from Germany, Fritz first went to Fiesole before eventually making his way to Shanghai. While in Fiesole, he even played in a men’s tennis tournament because, among my father’s personal papers, I discovered a newspaper clipping showing my father and Fritz’s results. (Figure 10)
It’s not clear how long Fritz Goldenring stayed in Italy, but like my aunt and uncle, he likely left no later than September of 1938, probably from Genoa aboard a luxurious Italian or Japanese cruise ship headed to Shanghai. I became curious whether Mr. Bar-Gal could tell me when Fritz arrived there, so I again contacted him. There exists an Emigranten Adressbuch for Shanghai, dated November 1939, listing Fritz Goldenring, which Mr. Bar-Gal sent me a scan of, proving Fritz was there no later than late 1939. (Figures 11a & 11b)
The Japanese designated the Shanghai Ghetto on February 18, 1943 and compelled those who’d arrived after 1937 to move there by May 18, 1943; many relocated Jews lived in group homes called “Heime,” including Fritz, who lived at “Alcockheim 66,” along with 60 other men. Helene Goldenring’s compensation file explained Fritz’s cause of death, namely, Sprue and Avitaminose. Avitaminosis is a disease cause by a deficiency of vitamins, and is closely associated with sprue, a chiefly tropical disease characterized by diarrhea, emaciation, and anemia. Fritz is recorded as having died on December 15, 1943 at the Ward Road Hospital in Shanghai; apparently, the winter of 1943 in Shanghai was severe, and hunger was widespread.
Fritz’s mother’s compensation file, together with immigration records available from ancestry.com for his family, illustrate how widely the Goldenring family was dispersed during WWII. Fritz’s sister, Eva Goldenring, for reasons I’m striving to understand, survived incarceration in the notorious French detention center of Gurs at the base of the Pyrenees in southwestern France; Eva would eventually live in Madrid before immigrating to America in 1947. Fritz’s mother, Helene, made her way to Valparaiso, Chile, where her brother, Robert Hirsch, an engineer, had immigrated in 1939 from Bilbao, Spain. Robert died in 1943 in Chile, and on July 3, 1947, Helene immigrated to New York (Figure 12), where she was reunited with her daughter. (Figure 13)
