{"id":1587,"date":"2018-09-20T07:07:15","date_gmt":"2018-09-20T14:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=1587"},"modified":"2018-09-20T07:07:15","modified_gmt":"2018-09-20T14:07:15","slug":"martyrology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=1587","title":{"rendered":"Martyrology"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As the family genealogist, I spend more time than most thinking about my ancestors and relatives, but it wasn\u2019t until 1999 that I submitted 41 Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem for the ones I then knew had perished.\u00a0 I\u2019ve discovered many more since them. In my family, the Holocaust was never a story of survival.\u00a0 Sure, we learned of the escape of my grandparents \u2013 the Schoenbergs fleeing suddenly in the middle of the night from Berlin in 1933; the Zeisl narrowly escaping from Vienna on November 10, 1938, the day after Kristallnacht.\u00a0 But when I thought of the Holocaust, it was not about them, the survivors, it was about all the ones who didn\u2019t make it out alive.<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s parents made it to New York and in 1940 my mother was born there \u2013 an anchor baby.\u00a0 Her father\u2019s parents Siegmund<\/a> and Kamilla<\/a> Zeisl had remained in Vienna, perhaps because Kamilla was not well.\u00a0 She died of cancer a month before my mother was born.\u00a0 Kamilla\u2019s sister Malvine<\/a>, a widow, took care of my great-grandfather Siegmund, a retired coffeehouse owner whose caf\u00e9 was taken away by the Nazis, and the two eventually married so that they could try to emigrate together.\u00a0 I\u2019ve read the letters they sent from Vienna during that time and they are full of love and encouragement for their children who had managed to escape, and hope that they would soon be able to join them.\u00a0 Innumerable obstacles were put in their way, both by the Nazis and by the American immigration authorities.\u00a0 In the final letter, Siegmund says he could get a ticket to sail from Lisbon on December 5, 1941, but that Malvine could not leave until January.\u00a0 He was hoping to sort it out.\u00a0 He must have delayed his escape to remain with Malvine.\u00a0 The December 5 boat from Lisbon turned out to be the very last before war broke out on December 7.\u00a0 The two of them were deported to Theresienstadt on July 14, 1942, survived two terrible months there, and were then put on a train on September 21, 1942 to Treblinka, where they were murdered on arrival.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>We in America like to hear stories of survival and escape, and we lionize resistance fighters, but for me, those stories don\u2019t represent the Holocaust.\u00a0 My great-grandfather Siegmund didn\u2019t have a daring escape, he didn\u2019t survive the camps, he stayed behind to take care of his loved ones, and he was murdered.\u00a0 For that, I remember him today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the family genealogist, I spend more time than most thinking about my ancestors and relatives, but it wasn\u2019t until 1999 that I submitted 41 Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem for the ones I then knew had perished.\u00a0 I\u2019ve … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1587"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1589,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions\/1589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}