Note: This postscript about my great-aunt Margareth “Greta” Brauer née Berliner details the substantial amount of new information I’ve learned about her and her family in the few short months since I published the original post in September 2018. In the process, sadly, I also learned when and where she died.
Related Post: Post 34: Margareth Berliner, Wraith or Being?
Aware of a Puerto Rican connection to my great-aunt Greta Brauer’s family and frustrated I had been unable to learn what happened to her after 1933, I recently did an Internet query on the member of her family I knew had lived there, namely, “Till Brauer.” However, given the cataclysmic events associated with Hurricane Maria in September 2017, I had scant expectations I would be able to locate much less connect with any member of the Brauer family; on the contrary, I expected anyone from the family who’d survived the Hurricane to have decamped for an unknown destination on the U.S. Mainland, as many Puerto Ricans did. So, it came as an enormous surprise when I quickly discovered a “Till Brauer Mongil” (Figure 1), operating a charter fishing business out of Carolina, Puerto Rico, which lies immediately east of the capital San Juan. His website stated he was no longer in business, but because it had once been an active operation, an email address was provided. I immediately sent a message with tempered expectations, but within less than an hour, surprisingly, I received a response from Till Brauer asking me to call him. I immediately did.
Till Carl Brauer Mongil, born in 1959 in Puerto Rico, it turns out, is the great-grandson of Greta Brauer, and my third cousin once-removed. As we speak, Till has contracts to conduct inspections related to cleanup and reconstruction of Puerto Rico’s infrastructure resulting from Hurricane Maria, and is extremely busy. Understandably, we’ve had only one opportunity to communicate, so all I’ve learned is from a brief phone conversation. Still, I was able to pick up enough information to correct and supplement what I discussed in Post 34.
In my original post I included a picture of three generations of Brauer taken in 1933 in Neubabelsberg, near Spandau, outside Berlin. The photo, reprinted here, shows my great-aunt Greta, her daughter-in-law, Herta Brauer, and her grandson Till as a baby. (Figures 2a-b) I also showed an image taken in Calvia, Mallorca in 1966, similarly reprinted here, showing a son Oliver holding a young daughter named Margarita. (Figure 3) I mistakenly concluded that Till Brauer and Oliver were one person, but, in fact, Ernst and Herta Brauer had these two sons. This was my first error, but not my only one. Till Carl Brauer Mongil, I learned, is the son of the Till Brauer shown in the 1933 photograph. To remind readers, in Spanish-speaking countries, newborns are given two surnames, that of their father and mother, thus the “Brauer Mongil” attached to Till’s name.
Briefly, let me discuss some of the documents and Passenger Manifests I found for Ernst and Herta Brauer’s family on ancestry.com and connect these to some of what Till Brauer told me.
The names of Ernst, Herta, and Till Brauer, along with that of a Yutta Maria Muenchow clearly traveling with them, are listed on a “Manifest of Alien Passengers” bound for New York City aboard the Spanish liner SS Marques de Comillas that departed Lisbon, Portugal on February 22, 1941; this document showed their last permanent residence prior to leaving Europe had been Rome. (Figure 4) A “Record of Aliens Held for Special Inquiry,” shows the arrival of these four people in New York on March 12, 1941. (Figure 5) The title of this manifest suggests the Brauer family was separated from passengers disembarking in New York; a notation in the upper right-hand corner of this document confirms the family’s stay in New York was brief as they were “transshipped to Santo Domingo [Dominican Republic] on the SS Coamo (Figure 6) on March 20, 1941.” And, this comports with a third Passenger Manifest showing the entire family leaving New York City on March 20, 1941 aboard this passenger ship. (Figure 7) An Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) file, dated May 2, 1941, lists the entire family having traveled aboard the SS Marques de Comillas. (Figure 8) Finally, another Passenger Manifest shows Ernst Brauer traveling alone to San Juan, Puerto Rico from Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic on October 7, 1947 aboard a Pan Am flight. (Figure 9)
The four Passenger Manifests and the INS file generally confirm what Till Carl Brauer (to distinguish him from his father Till Brauer) related. Till Brauer was married to a Puerto Rican woman, a circumstance that eventually allowed the Brauers to settle in Puerto Rico, although not before first living in the Dominican Republic for several years by choice or necessity; Ernst and Herta’s son, Oliver, was born there, and judging from the various Passenger Manifests I found, it appears the Brauers lived in the Dominican Republic no longer than seven years, though Till Carl claims it was about four years.
Till Carl Brauer explained that Herta Brauer’s maiden name was “Stadach,” and that she had previously been married to a Karl Ferdinand Hermann Münchow (Figure 10), by whom she had had a daughter, Yutta Maria Münchow. (Figure 11) Thus, the “mysterious” Yutta Maria who traveled with the Brauers was Herta’s daughter by her first marriage.
As explained in Post 34, in ancestry.com I located a document titled “Report of the Death of An American Citizen,” for Ernst Hanns Brauer showing he passed away in Calvia, Mallorca on May 19, 1971. (Figure 12) I found no corresponding form for Herta Brauer, and, in fact, the Social Security Death Index recorded her address at the time of death in August 1983 as San Juan, Puerto Rico (Figure 13); I assumed she had died there. Till Carl told me that in truth both Ernst and Herta died in Mallorca. The circumstances that lead the Brauers to relocate there are connected to historical events in the United States during the late 1960’s. Readers will recall that at the time America was ramping up its presence in Vietnam. The compulsory draft would have made both Till and Oliver eligible to be called up since Puerto Ricans are citizens of the unincorporated territory of the U.S. Opposed to the war, and not wanting their sons to be drafted, the Brauers left the country. It’s clear that neither parent ever relinquished their American nationality, and, both sons, had dual American-German nationality; Oliver ultimately died in Germany, place unknown. Till Carl was unable to tell me anything about the daughter Oliver is shown holding in a 1966 picture of the two of them.
The thing I had most wanted to find out from Till Carl was when and where Greta Brauer, his great-grandmother, died, but he didn’t know. I began to despair finding out. On this note, Till Carl and I ended our conversation with a promise on my part to send him all the documents I’d uncovered related to his family.
In compiling all this evidence, but convinced I’d already examined the various Holocaust victims’ databases, I decided to double check for Grete Brauer before sending all the family documents to Till Carl Brauer. For reasons that are unclear, I had never found or simply overlooked my great-aunt’s name in these databases but this time I found her and confirmed she died in the Theresienstadt Ghetto on November 24, 1942 (Figure 14), an all too familiar ending with Jewish relatives whose deaths remain unsolved during the Nazi era.
Following my brief conversation with Till Carl, I exchanged an email with Larry Leyser, my third cousin once-removed whom I’ve alluded to in other posts. I told him in passing I’d spoken to one of our relatives in Puerto Rico, and, a short time, later he sent me a picture and a clipping from a Puerto Rican newspaper asking whether it had anything to do with the people shown or mentioned. Incredibly, it did. The photo and newspaper article were scanned from a horde of items Larry had borrowed from one of his cousins, curiously included in this stash, and set aside as people to be identified later. Simply because I mentioned Puerto Rico, Larry sent these documents to me on the off-chance they might be connected to what I was working on. The picture shows Herta and Ernst Brauer book-ended by their two sons, Oliver on the left, Till on the right along with a family friend, on the day of Till’s wedding. (Figure 15a-b) Herta and Ernst Brauer are rightmost in the newspaper picture, involved, as they were most of their lives, in dance and theater. (Figure 16)
One final thing. My still-living 89-year old mother, who knew my grandmother, Greta Brauer’s sister, says my grandmother never mentioned having an older sister. What, if anything, to make of this omission is unclear.