PRAGUE — A newspaper article has led to an emotional reunion of Holocaust survivors at a Prague Jewish community center earlier this month.
Nearly two years ago, Czech-born Israeli resident Hana Greenfield wrote an article about a late cousin for the London-based Jewish Chronicle. In the essay, “Another Victim,” Greenfield shared her fond personal memories of cousin Richard Goldschmid, one of the heroes of the 1943 Treblinka uprising.
Soon after it was published, an English man named Felix Morel contacted her and said Goldschmid was also his relative. To her astonishment, she learned that she had another relative in Prague named Karel Zimmerman.
As it turned out, Greenfield, Morel and Zimmerman were related through three grandmothers who were sisters.
On Sept. 8, they met as a group for the first time to share their childhood memories and learn how each had fared during the war.
It was a double family celebration because the occasion also marked Morel’s 70th birthday.
“I cannot describe my feelings,” Morel said. “Most of my family went into the gas chambers, so to find some people who I did not realize existed had a very emotional effect on me.
Greenfield also found it difficult to express her feelings about the reunion party.
“It was very emotional,” she said. “Suddenly you are not alone in the world. We passed around family photographs and got to know about the history of the family.”
Each had very different war experiences.
Morel was sent to Britain in 1939 when he was 8 years old. His mother returned to Czechoslovakia just before Hitler invaded the country and ended up in the Lodz Ghetto for the rest of the war.
She miraculously survived, but Morel spent the entire war not knowing whether his mother was alive or dead. He later settled in England.
Greenfield, whose family lived in the Czech town of Kolin, about 30 miles east of Prague, was 12 at the start of the war.
She was forced to work in a soap powder factory before being sent to Terezin, also known by its German name of Theresienstadt, in 1942. Greenfield spent two years there before she was transported to Auschwitz.
After six weeks, she was moved to Hamburg, Germany, to work as a slave laborer. She was later to spend the last days of the war at Bergen Belsen.
The final and youngest member of the reunion party was Zimmerman, now a renowned mathematics professor based in Prague.
As a baby, he was removed from the clutches of the Nazis by being sent to live with his paternal grandmother, who was not Jewish.
Greenfield, who has sold 50,000 copies of her Holocaust memoir “Fragments of Memory,” summed up why the reunion was so important to her.
“For me, the Holocaust isn’t just about the 6 million who died. It is about the havoc caused in so many lives.”