CzechRoots.net:

Maybe it's just another Holocaust memorial-slash-genealogy site, maybe not. I can only assume there are other folks out there who were surprised to find out about their Jewish roots, and even more surprised to find that practically all of their relatives & ancestors who were real people and had real lives before the war were exterminated by the Nazis.

Some people take this information in stride - it happened, it's true, it's fact - without lessening the gravity of the realization; some people have a much more difficult time with it, as I've come to find in my own family, and they simply cannot process or accept that their recent ancestors were totally wiped out, just because they were Jews. My family is generally defective across the board, but it's been especially fascinating to see how some people balk at indisputable facts and assassinate the character of the messenger, and others accept - but not necessarily embrace - the same facts. This is how it happened with my siblings.

My father has maintained for my entire life that we've been Catholic for centuries, and that he lost his family in the war, that "there's nobody left." He "didn't know" his father, he said. My dad and grandmother were "in England during the war." Those were about as many words as we ever got on the subject, and there weren't really any suspicions about whether or not we are Jewish. Sure, there were other questions, but my dad would never entertain them. If any tantalizing tidbit comes out about our exotic and exciting Czech background, it is at his whim. But don't dare ask any questions, and don't expect any conversation or details. I learned my lesson the hard way very early on. So we never got too far with asking about what happened and how he got to the United States to start his uniquely great story as an American.

As a naturally (and sometimes terminally) curious individual I've always wondered about all of that. Nobody left? Didn't know his father? How did he get to America? What was my grandmother's part in all of this? Tell me about my grandfather! I want to learn Czech! My father used to keep a little, round, clear plastic container with some straw in it on a small picture stand on his bedroom dresser. I always wondered what the story was behind that. He also has a small plaster tile that was given to my grandmother by Jan Masarýk. How did that come about? I mean, Jan Masarýk?

One time I was visiting my dad for dinner, and it was only he and his wife and me at the table. If memory serves she excused herself to answer the phone and while I was putting away a beer my dad starts coming out with, "When I was a little boy I was told to go to the corner pub to get a bucketful of beer - because we didn't have bottled beer - to bring back for my mother. She would keep it on hand for entertaining her guests. Our apartment was pretty lavish, and all of the furniture and facilities were built-in. That was considered very high class in those days. We had a wine cellar adjacent to the building and I can still smell the wood and the grapes. It's a very powerful memory."

Another time he came out with, "We had a dishwasher named Filipa at my grandfather's farm. I had my own cow." This is terrific stuff. Later I would learn that my father, in his typically modest and humble way, grossly understated certain things. His grandfather Rudolf was a livestock trader and businessman. That farm was actually an enormous livestock facility in Malešice in what is now Prague 10. There were five hundred-odd head of cattle at that place at any given moment, and that was only one of his facilities. Filipa wasn't just a dishwasher, but one of several full-time servants and stewards in the employ of the high-society, politically influential Klinger family. So that's where the little container of straw came from.

I'd seen a few pictures here and there. My grandmother used to keep tons of pictures in a guest room in her home in Florida, but I was too young then to think anything of them. I'd seen photographs of a Czech villa with a diminutive but portly man smoking a very unusual pipe on the veranda. I saw a photograph of a bunch of men standing outside on what vaguely resembled a commercial farm. I saw a tiny photograph of two gravestones, but the picture was so small that I couldn't make out the engravings. Since my grandmother passed away in 1994, those pictures have disappeared. Fortunately I have an original photo-portrait of my father as a 4-year old in silk trousers, sitting next to and dwarfed by his boxer, Toby. Silk trousers.

Things are different now. I'm an adult and I'm in charge of my own life. I make my own choices, and I choose to find out about my family. When I came to that decision in February of 2008, the meaning of my life and existence changed drastically. That's how I've come to publishing at CzechRoots.net.

Initially, I was lucky enough to come across answers to a few of my thousands of questions. Eventually I started making some connections between information from different sources and I started asking, "Hey, could we be Jewish?" It took me at least a couple of months of dealing with disparate and circumstantial information to get to a point where there was enough evidence to answer that question - Yes, we are Jewish! I was relieved and thrilled that I had come up with a conclusive answer to one big question. I was wide open to the experience, and I'm extraordinarily proud of my "new" heritage. This awareness, and the forthcoming knowledge of what happened to my family has also cemented my pride in being an American.

That bombshell also opened up many, many avenues of research, and it also prompted me to start planning a trip to Czech Republic. One of my first reactions was pure compulsion to go; it wasn't a choice, I absolutely had to go, and soon. I continued doing research through April, and when I felt I had enough to go on I got a plane ticket for a July departure.

In the intervening time I learned so much more about my family. I came across a document at the Yad Vashem site - a Page of Testimony - which had the name and address of someone who had visisted the museum and who had filed this document on behalf of one of my family members. Someone who for sure was a relative. I immediately posted a letter to Prague using the address on the Page of Testimony. Within a month I got a huge packet of information and pictures in return. It was a watershed moment in the reconstruction of my family, and the foundation of my family tree studies. I had actually connected with a living family member in Czech Republic, entirely by chance and good fortune. That packet came from Karel and Klara Fous, relatives by marriage and professional genealogists. Obviously they were great resources, especially Karel, but more important was the profound treat of getting in touch with actual relatives. So much for "there's nobody left." Since then I've connected with living, blood relatives in Canada, England, Chile, Israel, and Australia.

I flew over there and spent 10 days between Czech Republic and Poland. Besides the many sites in Prague, I visited Josefov and other places of interest for Jews, as well as Šeberov, Chodov, and Kunratice (where my grandmother's family originated), the Terezín concentration camp, and Warsaw, Lublin, and Krakow in Poland, including the Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps where most of my family perished. I also met Klara's great-auntie Eva who knew my blood relatives and remembered a lot about them. The trip was thoroughly illuminating. Now I see myself and the world - and my place in it - through different eyes. I can't wait to go back.

And so the journey continues.

The long and short of this story is that there's a lot out there. Don't get discouraged by gaps in time during which you don't come up with anything new in your research. The internet isn't going to shrink, and that means new on-line archives will appear and old ones will grow. Keep at it.

It's up to people like us to make sure that the people who died in one of the grossest, greatest tragedies of all time are not forgotten. That's the mission.

If you have a question or you need some insight, drop me a line. You can reach me by email, Skype, or sometimes by Yahoo! or AOL IM.

-Jason

Skype Status:  

Yahoo! IM: ntbrltd
AOL IM: DoubleFantasy66
email: jb@czechroots.net