Does it Matter?

Inspired by the Holocaust conference at Pacific Lutheran, I began to write small essays to convey my thoughts on that experience.  The blog that I created to understand my heritage had remained idol for years.  Even if the audience had been only me, I would have found it to be good therapy.   I began writing; chronicling thoughts on what I experienced.  However, the endeavor was derailed temporarily, shelved for a short time after a visit to my sister.

I shelved my essays, decided that it didn’t matter.  I wasn’t sent out in to the world with a toolbox that had any useable tools.  The tools I have; I created and collected myself.  They are the essays I write to sort out the past and plan the future.  Responding to negativity by ignoring and hiding from it doesn’t serve my purpose.

Pacific Lutheran University has a Holocaust Center.  Yearly, they offer the Powell-Heller Conference on the Holocaust, now in its ninth year.  This year’s subject interested it me, Women and the Holocaust.  I attended the conference for the first time.  My daughter Kerrie and her two daughters attended programs with me.  However, we haven’t gathered to share what we learned from those programs.  Sharing experiences is not a trait that I possess.  Sharing is not a trait my Opa and Oma possessed.  I wonder how the unspoken words in their house tainted me.

My sister is a very negative person.  She is sixteen months younger than I am.  She also witnessed underlying tensions during our formative years in our grandparent’s house that had no explanation.  The same as I had.  My sister knew as little about the maternal family history that fueled those negative currents in that home as I did.  We grew up with German Lutheran immigrants who came to the U.S. because of the political climate.  Not Holocaust survivors. We witnessed and overheard snippets, but when things escalated, they reverted to speaking in German.  She now knows her Mother’s family is Jewish.  She now has some knowledge of the family history, preferring to stay in her own imaginative world instead.  She studied fairy and folk tales in school and is more at ease with the Norwegian trolls of her father’s heritage.  However, my sister’s bitterness over Opa and Oma’s presence in her life is still the fuel that starts her day.  She asked what I had been doing at Pacific Lutheran University for three days.

I shared a great session featuring Olga KaczmarekI, the director for the Polish Forum for Dialogue.  Poland is 95% Roman Catholic today and there is little knowledge among the youth to explain why their country has such a single, ethnic make-up.   There is a project in Poland to educate the young people in Poland about the Holocaust.  Many of the villages had a 20% to 85% Jewish population prior to the Holocaust.  The last exodus of Jews from Poland happened in 1968, according to the speaker.  After the war, Poland was under Communist rule.  The Polish Universities had a large Jewish population of educators who left in 1968 because of the political climate.  The Jewish people value education and knowledge. The hole has never been filled.  

I shared the Polish session with my sister. She informed me that she read all of the Holocaust stories.   She talked about Jewish people trying to locate prized family heirlooms that were trusted to those they thought of as friends, to be kicked out of their former homes as they recognized their parent’s prayer shawls used as table cloths. She talked with clench fists about stories she had no context for. 

I retreated to my fertile mind and found myself imaging my sister standing in a bread line with an oversized basket, watching a woman in front of her with a much smaller basket receive two loaves of bread.  I imagined her staring at the woman’s basket, then looking at the two loaves of bread in her oversized basket.  My sister would,  and I have no doubt,  be screaming and yelling that they filled the other person’s basket more than half full and that her basket was more than half empty. 
During the conference, I heard a story about Nazis removing Jewish farmers from their farms and moving in non-Jewish people.  These orchestrated relocations were done in a day long blitz.  After the war, a Jewish farmer visited his former farm.  Trying to assure the occupants that he wasn’t there to reclaim it, just to see it; he showed the current tenants his name carved in a tree.  The people asked where the gold was.  The Jewish farmer told them there was no gold. He was just a farmer. They wouldn't believe it, couldn’t believe it.  Shortly afterward, the whole farm was bulldozed in an effort to find the gold.

History is replete with stories of the conflicts between the Jewish people and their neighbors.  Is it a half full, half empty conundrum?  

Survivor’s Guilt

Pacific Lutheran University hosts a yearly a Holocaust Conference which I attended this year.  Learning about the role women played in the Holocaust intrigued me.  It began with a musical tribute.  Poems and stories set to music.  I was enchanted by the violinist.  He played his instrument with joy and enthusiasm.  It was infectious. 

Set to music, there was a story of an abandoned suitcase lamenting over the whereabouts of its old and blind master.  I was reminded of the death certificate that I had located for my great grandfather, an elderly gentleman executed shortly after his arrival at a camp;  an elderly gentlemen who was a community rabbi, a neighborhood organizer.

There was a story of a young Jewish lawyer who hid behind a new identity to avoid the gas chambers.  It was powerful.  The gifted singer drew you in to the story.  With stage props, you could feel the young woman sitting at her desk, a non-Jewish political prisoner, in a coveted desk job, inventorying the meager possessions of the women lined up on the other side of her wall.  The noise, the smell invading her space as the women walked the path to their certain death.  Returning to Auschwitz long after the war, much older, she imagines the camp as it was, although the reality was that the camp was no longer the camp of her nightmares.  It was now presentable.  It was for tourists.  Survivor’s guilt haunts her.  And the violinist played on with a passion for the music that told the story.

The violin; I approached the violinist during the reception after the performance and thanked him.  I shared with him that my great grandfather died at a camp.  I explained that my grandfather, Opa, had a violin in the closet of his den.  I never knew the story of his violin, never knew if it was his or if he had ever played it.  Like the suitcase, did the violin lose its master?  Perhaps it was survivor’s guilt? 

My grandparents; my Opa and Oma, their son and my mother had fled from Eger (Cheb) and sought refuge in Prague.  They left Prague through the efforts of the underground.  They made a perilous journey to Holland.  My mother, a little girl at the time, recalled one soldier checking their travel papers and dropping them on the floor.  As he was clumsily picking them up he pointed them to the door at the train station and whispered, “GO!”  They traveled to the United States on one of the last refugee boats allowed to dock in New York. 

Do Americans realize that like the Syrian refugees now, many Jewish refugees could not find sanctuary in the United States?

It was only toward the end of my grandparent’s lives that I realized that they were not German Lutheran immigrants that came here because of the political climate.  Opa began to drop meager breadcrumbs about the “old country.”  I overheard that my great grandfather didn’t want to immigrate.  I cannot remember if the story I overheard came from Opa or if my mother told the story.  I hear Opa's voice in my head when I think of it.   When they fled Prague, Opa’s father had said that he was an old man and he couldn’t imagine being thought of as a threat. My great grandfather remained in Prague with a friend of his.  "What threat could two old Jewish men be?" he said as he sent them away. 

Opa's brother was a talented lawyer.  However, his heart lie in art history and puppets.  He had an adult puppet theater that was well known.  There was an exhibition of his puppets recently.  Spielberg has a collection of movies.  On youtube, if you search for Spielberg Out of Evil, the movie features his puppets.  Half-way, around 46, 52:35 is a glimpse of Paul Lowy, my great uncle.  He looks a lot like my Opa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klzypSRGwf8 

 

Powell-Heller Conference

I attended the ninth annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education at Pacific Lutheran University this year, for the first time.  Information on the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program at the university can be found at www.plu.edu/hgst .

November 1 - 3, 2017 is the tenth annual conference.  The theme will be an exploration of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Nazi Germany and in the Holocaust.

Mother

She is sitting in an urn on my bookcase in a black vase I know she would appreciate.  I am still thinking about what to do with her ashes.  It is complicated.  I do talk to her on occasion.
When she was close to passing, and even before, she said she wanted to be cremated (I have it in writing).  My uncle in England was not happy with the choice, he contacted me.  I ruminated over it.  …looked at her note.  I did take his concerns to heart.  Anyone else but my mother and I probably would have capitulated.
The way Mother wore her Star of David and the way she told people she escaped the Holocaust always felt to me like she was looking to shock them.  She said she was Jewish. This was something that was never talked about or mentioned until the last few years of her life.  Trauma to children brings unreal baggage to adulthood.  

Experiences were shelved away in my mother’s memory.  Her life before the family’s arrival in the United States was stored in the basement.  In her old age, she would bring them out, not to reminisce, but, it seemed, only to get reactions from people.  Recovery from her childhood experiences for my mother would have been further complicated by the very complex relationship with her own mother.  It would have been virtually impossible. My mother belittled her mother.  She mocked her.  My mother told me often that she hated her mother.  There was no relenting, even in her old age.

Pacific Lutheran University’s Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education in 2016 included a session on Anne Frank.  Not the retelling of a naïve, sanitized middle school literature and civic class version, but one of exploring the real diary, circumstances, and emotions that shaped Anne’s experience. If I was a student, I would be standing in line for Professor Kirsten Christensen’s classes. 
Both she and Professor Clementi of the University of South Carolina lectured on Anne Frank, suggesting new ideas in teaching her experience.  I was intrigued.  I saw Anne Frank as a girl, evolving into a woman during her days in hiding.  The conflicts with her mother seemed typical of a young girl going from childhood to adulthood.  The angst of adolescence. The days of captivity just magnified them.
My mother’s timeline is a work in progress, but I think she was eight when her family left their home in Eger (Cheb).  They almost did not make it to the United States.  They may have been in Prague for two years before they were smuggled to Holland.  In one story my mother recounted (in her later years), the man who was to house them overnight on one leg of their journey to Holland wouldn’t open his door.  Her father, my Opa, kept throwing rocks at his window.  The man relented and opened the door, embarrassed that it was his charges trying to gain entry.  He thought the SS was trying to trick him. Fleeing for a young child must have been terrifying.  However, I never saw that in my own mother’s retellings. I do not know if it was the trauma or if it was the spoiled, privileged little girl ripped away from a Nanny she adored and forced to interact with a woman she begrudgingly called mother. 
The family relocated to West Los Angeles.  Immigrants tend to congregate together.  The Nanny, a Roman Catholic, had also migrated to the strong German community in Los Angeles.  She and my mother met in Los Angeles once.  My impression was that it happened when my mother was a young adult. The Nanny offered to be a part of her new life, but my mother (or her family?) said, "No." 
I had thought of my Grandparents (Opa and Oma) and Mother as German Lutherans.  It is interesting that I knew the Nanny was Catholic, but I did not know that my mother’s family was Jewish.
Throughout my childhood, my mother would mention that meeting.  I saw little maternal instincts in my own mother as I grew up.  As an adult, I could see my mother as that angry eight-year-old girl.  Listening to the Anne Frank lecture made me wonder if my own mother had missed that entire adolescent period because she refused to let go (or couldn't) of that eight-year-old girl.
In discussing the Holocaust and the lecture “Reconsidering Anne Frank” with a work colleague, she told me of a lecture that she attended several years ago.  Seven Generations.  The Native American woman lecturing said that it takes seven generations to heal.

 

Hanna

Hanna Löwry  

known as

Joan Caroline Lee, Legreid, Snow (Brandt)

April 21, 1930- May 31, 2015

The family wishes to thank the staff of the Dialysis Unit at Saint Joseph’s Hospital, Tacoma for many years of excellent, dedicated care. 

Hanna was born in Eger (Cheb) Czechoslovakia, a German border town.  The family fled to Prague in October, 1938.  When they were no longer safe in Prague, the underground smuggled them to Holland.  Her beloved grandfather, the community leader for the Jewish families of Eger, chose to stay.  He was executed at the Theresienstadt Camp in 1942.  The family entered the United States in 1940, settling in the Los Angeles area.   Hanna Löwry became Joan Lee; a German Lutheran immigrant.   

Joan had a long career in assembly work.  She began in the 1960’s soldering the first generation of circuit boards for leaders in Southern California's growing electronics industry.  Her career took her to the Boeing Everett plant.  When she retired, she moved to Spanaway.  She was known for collecting Teddy Bears and knickknacks, especially Scandinavian folk art. 

Joan had five children; Amanda, John Mark, Patricia, and Kathleen; her son Christopher predeceased her.  Her youngest daughter, Amanda Snow, was her devoted caregiver for many years. She has two grandchildren, Kerrie (John) and Korinne (James).  Her six great grandchildren are Ariana, Sierrarose, Zachary, Alicia, Emily, and Jacob.   

Her wish, shortly before her passing, was to be known as Hanna.

No service is planned per her request. We thank the Tacoma Mausoleum for their arrangements.

KPMS students tell Holocaust stories; enter state contest ^Featured

Written by  Scott Turner 

KPMS Students Tell Holocaust Stories

Holocaust Essay "In a Survivor's Shoes" by SierraRose Nason (Submission to Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center essay contest.)

In a Survivor’s Shoes

By SierraRose Nason, great granddaughter of Hana Lowy, Joan Caroline Lee

 

Place yourself in a survivor’s shoes. Your heart is twisting in your chest and you are holding your mother’s hand. The Nazis stare down at you with hatred in their eyes. You feel disowned from your own country and even your own life. You start to question yourself, your family, and even your heritage, wondering; “Why was I born a Jew?"

I sit in the living room of my Great Grandmother’s home. My eyes constantly fall on her modestly clothed body, now worn with age. I could not believe that exactly 72 years ago today she had come to America. I settle my notebook in my lap, spilling over a pile of family portraits she had given me to ponder. My pencil is ready to write as I ask, “What is your Holocaust story, Grandma Joan?”

She looks at me with her aged eyes and asked me, “What do you want to know?”

I feel a smile tug on my lips at this moment. I wait a bit, pretending to think it over before I blurt out, “Everything!” She laughs softly, a smile now on her lips too. Once she begins to speak my pencil flies across the paper as her story becomes alive.

☩ ☩ ☩

I never really wanted to leave Eger when my parents told me we would be leaving for Amsterdam, Holland. I knew it would ruin my life. I would have to be stuck with my mother, my brother, and my father. I wouldn’t have my Governess, who I adore and love.

“Why do I have to go?” I cried out, my bottom lip trembling with despair. My Governess, not mother, got to her knees and took my hand.

“My dear, Hana,” She started out as she spoke to me, I could hear the pain in her voice. “It is not safe here anymore for Jews such as you. I am sorry my little Hana... But you must go.” I hated those words that left my German Governess’ mouth. My small arms wounded around her neck.

---

“Goodbye,” I whispered.

I saw tears in her eyes as she left with her paycheck and her last glance toward me. That was the last time I saw her for years.

Hurry seemed to be the word that day as we got packed to leave. I was told by my mother that the only toy I was allowed to take was my teddy bear. I cried that night, knowing I was to leave everything behind, but I didn’t know they were for other children to have. I did not know we would never come back to retrieve our items, I thought I would be back someday.

That next morning my mother woke me early and I knew I had to leave for Holland. I eyed her and rose slowly from bed, donning my pretty plaid dress and shiny black shoes. I was one of the few Jews who left fast enough to not have to wear the Jewish star.

“Metza... Let us go, we have to.”

I heard my father call to my mother as she sobbed about leaving her good china behind. I hated her for it, her acting as a child, when I had to leave my own cherished toys. I never forgave her for making me leave; I never got to forgive her-- or would have. She took everything away from me. My country, my identity; and my beloved Governess, Julie Grashold. I hated them all and I felt the hate steam in me as we left our beautiful green home, just a few yards from a large fountain that had a man on top with a baton in his hand. I still feel upset for having to leave this beautiful place- Eger, Czechoslovakia. I waved goodbye to our home, the fountain, everything I knew as I was pulled to a cab. I sat in the cushioned seat with tears in my pale blue eyes, my arms crossed over my chest. I wanted to voice my pain as we rode to “Holland.”

Hours later we stopped at a train station and didn’t know which train to board to Holland. We saw a man on a bike and asked him which train was going to there. He looked nervous, as if he knew we were Jews. The man plastered a fake smile onto his lips despite being nervous.

“Oh just go straight, Mister. The train will be that way.”

My father thanked him and we were on our way to that train. I looked back, and saw him turn his head briskly as he carried on with his bike ride. So many obstacles were in the way at this time, so many Jews were leaving. So many cries of children and wives; men, too.

As we were standing in the long line to have our pass checked I turned my head to see an old white haired Jewish woman being kicked and tumbling down the stairs. I was already scared, knowing this, too, could happen to me, a Jew. I swallowed as I stepped forth with my family. We set our papers on the table when we nervously noticed we didn’t have the latest pass; a pink one, not blue. I thought deeply now as my heart rapped against my chest,

...We are going to die. We are going to die...They will see we do not have our pass ...and we will surely die.

A sob caught in my throat as the German soldier reached for our papers. Suddenly, shiny black boots were before me, tightly laced, ankle high. I looked up to see the Gestapo walking toward the steel table, monstrous gun slung over his burly arm. I wanted to scream, I wanted to pray to G-d. I was surprised at this moment as the Officer "tripped,” and our papers flew about.

“They are fine, these Jews. They can board the train. Let them go.” His deep voice cut the cold air like his bright blue eyes, meeting my own as if saying, "You're welcome." I wanted to smile but had no time, as my parents carted me off to my uncertain future.

---

Finally boarding the train, supposedly on our way to Holland, we soon discovered we were really traveling to Prague. I watched out the window as we rolled away from the home I had lived in for eight years, ever since I was born. We sat on that train for over three hours; scared, hungry and bored.

Finally, we arrived in Prague, Czechoslovakia. We soon learned we weren’t safe here, either. Thankfully, we found the "Underground" ready to help Jews, and obtained train tickets to Münster, Germany.

A few weeks later, we had train tickets in hand to travel out of Prague. Sent to Münster, Germany, Rabbi Florsheim would protect us until the train to Amsterdam arrived. We had missed the first train, making us two hours late.

I shivered in the cold as my Father knocked on the door. For some while, we were alone, out in the cold, waiting. Time was running out and panic was consuming my father since our papers were gone and Gestapo was everywhere. In a panic, he grabbed up some pebbles and hurled them at the Rabbi’s window. Finally, a head poked out of the door.

"Oh, it is you, Fritz Löwy! Louise, and your two children. I thought you were the Gestapo." He chuckled nervously and let us in.

A few days later we left the Rabbi’s home to go to the train station to depart Münster, Germany heading to Amsterdam. Before we left his home, he stopped my parents and spoke to them in whispered tones.

"I have a sister in America named Alice. She has a daughter named Judy. She was married to a German doctor, but he died in a ski accident. So I told her to go to America because she hates snow. I want you to meet her. She will help you when you arrive in America.” My father nodded.

“Good-bye Rabbi Florsheim. May G-d be with you!" my mother called out as we left the home of the Rabbi. Sadly, that was our last time we saw him.

We traveled across all of Europe by train, making our way to Holland. I sat on the train seat and played with my teddy bear alone, not having anyone to talk to, not allowed to. I was scared of what was going on, being as young I was, now ten. We had been on the run for almost two years now, scared and in panic. I was taken away from what I had known and was being tossed into the unknown. I was tumbling down a rabbit's hole, being chased.

The train stopped hours later in Holland and it was time to go. We got off the train, hand in hand and started walking down the crowded streets of Amsterdam. We finally came to the home we were given directions to; a woman named Antonia was supposed to take us in for three weeks before we got on our ship to America.

Those three weeks for me were boring, sitting in an attic where we could not move around much or speak above a whisper, where we could not laugh and were brought food. My mother complained about the soup we were given, the pork. She said we were vegetarians although we were not. At our beautiful green home we had had two cooks, no meat could touch vegetables. We were a strictly kosher family and despised the pork that now floated in our food.

After our three weeks in Amsterdam it was our time to sail to America. I felt a smile stretching onto my lips when I heard we were leaving to America. In later years I had found out we were the very last ship out of Germany, Holland, and anywhere destined to America that was not in danger of being sent back.

One day I decided I would leave the bottom port, where it swayed and was filled with refugees. I wanted to see what it was like outside. I held onto the metal railing as I stumbled up each step, one at a time. The light that hit my face was bright, yellow and warm. I walked across the wooden deck, staring down at my worn black shoes before I looked up and there I saw it; Lady Liberty. My eyes widened with amazement at this beautiful green woman, and her torch of flames. I couldn’t stand seeing it by myself, seeing New York by myself, I just had to share.

---

We had to change our names; my parents demanded it, my brother also. I didn’t want to but my mother said we had to, we couldn’t let the Gestapo find us. “But why must I change my name, have a middle name?” I cried out with tears in my eyes.

My mother gave me a stern look, her eyes narrowed. “Because you need to. Pick a name and a middle name. Americans have middle names, we are now American.”

I knew there was no argument; no way I could get out of it. Finally I decided on the name Joan Caroline Lee. I was no longer Hana Löwy.

In person I never forgave my mother all these years after she stole away my home. I was meaning to one day but I just never could, I hated her too much. Now I need to, now I will. I will thank her for what she did, thank her for saving me. She threw all she knew away too. She did this for us, for me. She got us to America, to safety.

☩ ☩ ☩

Place yourself in a survivor’s shoes. Life is better now and you are alive. Everyone you hated is gone. You never got to forgive them. Will you forgive them now?

______________________________________________________________________________

Why did you choose this story, event, or person?

I wrote this story about my Great Grandmother Joan because a story such as hers has not been heard. You hear stories of escapees late in the war and people say those are survivors, so why can’t my Great Grandmother be one too? I wanted my Great Grandmother Joan’s story to be heard but not just by me and my family, but by a whole nation of people. I was really connected with her as she told her story; I was her for a moment of time.

What did you learn from this story, event, or person?

I learned from my Great Grandmother that when a war is going on, killing off your people like flies getting hit by a swatter; you need to hold something close, your family. She didn’t love her family and hated her mother for taking her away from what she knew and loved. She never had the chance to apologize for being difficult for her own mother has long passed, she now knows she has to forgive. One way was to tell me her story, so I can understand family.

Family is important, I learned. Even if you hate them you need to hold them close. Because of my Great Grandmother’s story I hold my family closer. If a war went on now, I know I would be reluctant about leaving, but in the end I would. I learned of forgiveness. Her mother did something dangerous, something she didn’t have to but did, in order to save her daughter’s life. I understand now why my mother is so harsh about things; like being late, not asking before doing things, like not saying where I was or where I am going, is because she loves me. She wants to keep me safe, like Hana’s mother did.

I learned numerous things from my Great Grandmother’s story. Hold yourself close, don’t cry and kick, but hold your family even closer.

Anat

Anat Hoffner-Raccah discovered my blog and wrote to me on March 23, 2012.  Located in Israel, where my grandfather’s brother Paul fled to, she introduced herself, “I am the grandaughter of Paul Löwy, the brother of your grandfather Fritz (Fred).”  Anat is preparing an exhibition of Paul Löwy’s work.“  My great-uncle was a renowned puppeteer.

She shared memories of a trip she and her mother took to Czechoslovakia a few years before her mother, Eva, passed away in 1994.  In Eger, they visited the family house, Carlsbad, where her mother was born and grew up.  They saw “beautiful Prague” and she met Lili Pavlova, daughter of the sister of our grandfathers.  Anat says, “Lili was one of the most wonderful people I have ever met, and we were in close contact until she died.”  Anat and Eva also went to Theresienstadt and saw the documents regarding Eduard Löwy.  There is a stone in his memory funded by George Weiss, husband of Trudi Löwy.

Update from Anat:Paul Löwy (Loewy)'s Israel exhibition will be open on the 23rd of July.

The result of the exhibition in Cheb was a biography of Paul Löwy  on the Museum of Cheb website:

 http://www.muzeumcheb.cz/base/osob.html

Paul's Biography http://www.muzeumcheb.cz/odbor/osob/lowy/lowy.html

Paul Löwy 7th October 1891 (Eger/Cheb) - 9 June 1970 (Tel Aviv), 

puppeteer, teacher, founder of Puppet Theater

Paul and Sister

Jitka Mlsova Chmelikova

I had stopped posting on the blog because I felt that revisiting the past was not important and of little value.  However, who I have become, my quirks, my lack of self-confidence, and all of my life experiences made me who I am and they are all related to the past.  I was raised by a mother that never reconciled with the 8 year old girl, raised by a loving nanny, who had to leave behind everything she knew, everything she was, to become someone else.  She left behind a grandfather she adored, a lifestyle, a language, and even an identity. 

Secrets shaped my existence.  I couldn’t explain to people who would see on my mother’s papers that she was born in CZ why she spoke only German as a second language. She would not translate for others, saying that she knew little German, yet when she visited her parents, she spoke German to them.  (Especially when they were talking about Christmas presents to buy for the grandchildren. Maddening to know people are talking about you, plotting and planning, and you don’t have a clue what  your Christmas surprise is.)

My mother was a German Lutheran immigrant.  She attended the Lutheran church.  Married in the Lutheran church, raised her children in the Lutheran church. Sometimes Oma would be there, never Opa.

Jitka Chmelikova's book on the Jews of Eger/Cheb helped me understand some of the dynamics of my family life.  She contacted me on  February 14, 2011 because an Internet search led her to my blog. I had tried to translate her book using Google translator.  I am rereading her e-mails and am correcting some of my assumptions and expanding my knowledge.

Ms. Chmelikova's e-mails:

“You know, your family was very special in Cheb. Eduard Löwy was not a rabbi. He was head of the Jewish community. I met his granddaughter Lilly Pavlova. She was daughter of Hildegard Löwy sister of Fritz, Paul and Trude.

Lilly wrote wonderful memoirs about her life and also a lot about her grandfather Eduard. We met 1998, but she died one year later. She emigrated with her brother Heinrich and aunt Trude to England. Lilly was the only one who came back to Czechoslovakia after the war, because she maried Czech soldier Josef Pavel.

Her daughter in law lives still in Prague. I have Lillys memoirs in Czech, but I am sure, she wrote them also in English for her relatives in England. Let me check this.”

Paul

”

“There is a project in Cheb right now. There are 950 years since the town was first time mentioned in a written document and they are preparing an exhibition 950 years - 950 fates. I am working on some biographies - there will be for sure Eduard Löwy, Paul Löwy and hopefuly also Lilly. I was always very interested what happend with Fritz. I knew just from Lilly he emigrated to the USA, but it was all I knew.”

The Jews of the Sudetenland

"Despite the extortionist tax and loss of property some 26,629 Jews managed to emigrate, legally or not, before emigration was completely banned in October 1941."

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/sudetenland.html

   Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/cam37/3426060355/

It is just conjecture on my part, however, I believe that the hope for a Sudetenland homeland was what kept my grandparents in Eger (Cheb) until the late 1930's.  Leaving their home this late in the developing conflict led them on a perilous journey across Europe.  Many wealthy relatives and friends had already immigrated to other countries.

It was late in the 1930's, Opa and Oma (my grandparents) and their two children fled Eger (Cheb) and went to Prague.  After a short stay, they left for Holland. My mother remembers the journey.

They left Prague on a train for Minster, Germany to see a Rabbi Florsheim.  She remembers showing their papers at various check points and a German soldier losing their papers to a windy breeze and letting them through. They arrived two hours late.  Her father knocked on the rabbi's door, but no one came.  In a panic, he started throwing pebbles at the windows. Finally a head appeared, "Oh, it is you, Fritz Löwy, Louise, and your two children. I thought you were the Gestapo. I have American flyers out."


A few days later, they left for the train station to take another train. The rabbi told them that he has a sister.  She was married to a German doctor, but the doctor had an accident, hit a tree and died. They had a baby, Judy.  The rabbi insisted that his sister Alice go to America.  She said she hated snow. 


The Löwy family crossed Europe to go to Holland where they met Antonia.  At her house the went up three stairways to the attic.  My mother remembers stones and rope lines for drying clothes outside the window. Delicious soup was brought up for them to eat.  They liked it except that it had bacon in it and they were vegetarians.


(My note:  My grandparents ate meat, my Oma made pork roast for her grandchildren when they visited.   I don't think it was because they were vegetarians that the bacon was a problem.  I believe that it was because they were Jewish and bacon is pork.  My mother recalls that they employed two cooks and maintained two separate kitchens in the house they lived in in Eger (Cheb). When they arrived in the United States,  Fritz (Friedrich) Löwy became Fred (Frederick) Lee, my grandmother Louise kept her first name, their son Alfred Löwy became Fred Lee, and my mother Hanna Löwy became Joan Caroline Lee.  And they were Lutheran immigrants from Germany.  I did not know they were Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia until I was in my twenties.)


For three weeks the Löwy family stayed in the attic.  They had booked passage on the ship the Rotterdam, but it had hit a mine and would not be sailing.  The Amsterdam was taken out of retirement to replace it. They were headed to America on what I think was one of the last ships to sail out of Holland that was not in danger of being sent back to Europe by the United States. My mother remembers life jacket drills and the feeling that they were always lost.  They set out across the Atlantic in the storm season.  


From what I can piece together, more conjecture, I think the original plan was to go to England and then return home.  In Prague, where Fritz and his brother fled to from Eger (Cheb), his brother's diaries indicate that they were experimenting with making cloth waterproof. Fritz worked alongside his father in a well-known tailor shop that was also associated with a textile factory.  A factory they owned. One of their relatives was in England making fabric, it makes sense to me that better raincoats may have been a goal.


Aboard the Amsterdam, crossing the Atlantic in storm season, everyone aboard was seasick.  My mother remembers a Fred Weiss on the passage. More than half of the journey was spent being soaking wet. There was water all over the ship. Temporary beds aboard were not nailed down. 


Arrival in New York and the Furth family, then a train trip across the United States to Los Angeles.  


The Whitneys met the Lees in L.A. Sylvia and Earl Whitney took them to an apartment in Oakhurst that was set up for them. Earl Whitney was, once, Otto Wittenberg, my grandmother Louise's brother. One of their immediate concerns was that they wouldn't find Alice and keep a promise to a rabbi that helped them. 


(I did say was, once. Growing up, I knew that Earl was somehow related. The Whitneys and the Lees visited on a regular basis.  When I visited Oma and Opa during summer breaks, Oma would drive me to the Beverly Hills Hotel's gift and toy shop to visit with Aunt Sylvia, owner of the shop.  I never put it together that Earl and Oma were brother and sister.)   


Five weeks after arriving, Oma started cleaning houses with a Ms. Tan. My grandmother went with her to a yarn shop that immigrants went to.  The lady sitting there in the yarn shop was a Ms. Florsheim, Alice! Ms.Tan introduced Alice to a jeweler named Fred Weiss (he limped because of polio). They married, my mother helped out in the jewelry shop when she was older. Judy became a school teacher in Livermore, CA.


The Rabbi and his entire family in Germany were killed because of American flyers. 


From Oakhurst, to Studio City, to Hollywood; my grandparents rebuilt their lives. I knew my grandfather, Opa, as a gardener for estates in BelAir, CA and my grandmother, Oma, as a seamstress who worked in smaller shops.  One story is that she worked in the shop that made the octopus dress for Morticia in the Addams family television show. 




More and more information is posted on the internet that fills in my family's story.

The Jews of the Sudetenland
Bohemia & Moravia

Holocaust Education & Archive Research Teamwww.HolocaustResearchProject.org

"The Sudetenland is the German name used in the first half of the 20th century for the western portions of Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. Located on the border with Germany and Austria it encompasses the areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and those parts of Silesia associated with Bohemia.

When Czechoslovakia was forced to accept the terms of the Munich Agreement on Sept 29th 1938, the region was relegated to German control between October 1 and October 10, 1938. The remaining parts of Czechoslovakia were subsequently invaded by Germany in March 1939, with a portion being annexed and the remainder turned into a satellite state, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Administration of the Protectorate was placed under the supervision of the Reichsprotektor, Konstantin von Neurath and shortly there after Hitler summoned Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha to Berlin and intimidated him into accepting the German occupation of the Czech rump state."

For more information: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/sudetenland.html

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
STEVEN SPIELBERG FILM AND VIDEO ARCHIVE

March of Time -- outtakes -- Sudeten-Deutsche Party; customs

Story RG-60.2150, Tape 2245
Title: Czechoslovakia-Prelude to Conquest
Event Date: March 27, 1938 & April 2, 1938
Place: Bozi Dar, Czechoslovakia
Eger, Czechoslovakia
Most, Czechoslovakia 

http://resources.ushmm.org/film/display/detail.php?file_num=2105

I can imagine my grandfather in the crowd. The familiar streets that they walked would soon be a distant memory.

Kathleen Ann LeGreid

Comment from J. Mark (brother): nice read-do not see opa in panic mode-odd,for me-knew very young,they had left a war-

Thursday at 8:23am

My response:  

Well, maybe panic was too strong a word. Mother was about nine or ten and this was her account. However, they were on the run, literally. They had check points to get through, papers that needed to be in correct order. At one check point the German soldier (according to mother) deliberately let the wind blow the papers off the table and when he was picking them up, he told them to go. The safe house they needed to be at wasn't answering the knock on the door.

Thursday at 1:57pm 

Death at Theresienstadt

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: The Theresienstadt "camp-ghetto" existed between November 24, 1941 and May 9, 1945. Theresienstadt served three purposes:1) a transit camp for Czech Jews whom the Germans deported to killing centers, concentration camps, and forced-labor camps2) a ghetto-labor camp 3) a holding pen for Jews in the above-mentioned groupsIt was expected that that poor conditions there would hasten the deaths of many deportees..http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005424

It is strange looking at what is probably my Great-grandfather's death certificate and seeing hand written notations in pencil.  I imagine a clerk or a doctor holding this record in their hand and wonder what they were thinking.  It is disturbing to think that holocausts are still happening all around the world, the death toll from tribal feuds in Africa is staggering. Would things be better if women were in charge?

The National Archives in Prague> Jewish registers> examiner leaves - Ghetto Theresienstadt> Band 1910
Victims of the Holocaust, which the document relates
Eduard Löwy
Born January 2, 1856
Died 1942 Theresienstadt.

For publication will need to contact the National Archives in Prague, where the original document is stored. The document was digitized Terezín Initiative Institute with the support of the Endowment Fund for Holocaust Victims.

The Dawn; Eighty Years On The Planet

   
Eighty years ago, April 21, 1930, my mother was born in Eger.  You will not find Eger on the map.  It is still there, but the current name on the map is Cheb.  Eger is a Bohemian border town that has been claimed by either Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Austria, and Czechoslovakia all though out its history and now it is on the Czech side of the border. Cheb is the Czech name.  Eger is the German name.

     Although my mother's birth records record her as a Czech, she grew up speaking a dialect of German. Not the dialect spoken in Germany,  but Sudeten. There was a dream held by Germans living in that region of a independent homeland, Sudeten land, and this I believe was a dream that my grandfather, Opa, held on to.  It was a dream that both Jews and non-Jews had for the region.  He must have forgotten that there was a difference between Sudeten Germans and Sudeten Jewish Germans.  I am only guessing, but this may have been the dream that kept Opa stubbornly in Eger when many Jewish friends and relatives sold out and left for England and America with their finances in order and the chance for a new start.  I have been confused about this for most of my life, but I think I may now understand that piece of the puzzle.  On the dawn of her eightieth year on this planet, my mother may have finally understood it too.

     When family history is not shared, when it is hidden, so much is lost. For all of my life, my mother and my grandmother, Oma, were mortal enemies.  At least in the version of the story that my mother recited over and over again.  And, yes, my Oma was a difficult person, demanding, cold, and aloof.  I know why Oma was the person that she became.  Or at least I think I know, because I am only guessing what the puzzle looked like before all of the pieces were scattered.
 
     Secrets cripple, knowledge is power.  My grandmother, Oma, hid the whole time she lived in this country.  She hid from who she was.  Every knock on the door could have been the Gestapo.  That is what my mother now says in her eightieth year.  Of course, we didn’t know that growing up.  We just knew that she was strange, bitter, controlling woman who still wore her hair in a 1930 hairstyle until just before she passed away in the 1970’s.

     I regret not knowing the stories of my Bohemian, Jewish culture. My ancestors may have settled in that area hundreds of years before the middle ages.  I have read stories about Native American children being torn away from their homes, their culture, their language, and raised in boarding schools so that they can blend into the European culture that dominated this country.  We know what that toll had taken on them.  In Europe, the same genocide of culture has taken place throughout history, I am thinking of the gypsies as one example.  We are better people when we know the stories, by knowing the stories we can avoid making the same mistakes in the future. By knowing the stories and embracing our culture, we can create a better future.

     My mother’s future changed when she was a little girl.  Only eight years old, I think she may have been at home, in the house overlooking the town square in Eger, when Kristallnacht, "the Night of Broken Glass" happened. In Germany, on November 9 and 10 of 1938, gangs of Nazi youth roamed through Jewish neighborhoods breaking windows of Jewish businesses and homes, burning synagogues and looting.  I am sure, even though she has no memories of it, that her life as a German speaking Jew living in a border town, on that night, changed forever.  From the few pieces of the puzzle that I can find, it was during this time that the family left their business and home and fled deeper into Czechoslovakia to Prague.  The majority of the Czech people had little sympathy for Jews; Czech or German.  But especially for those from Sudeten.  A life of privilege ended for my mother, but she only remembers that her parents took her away from her home and a nanny who she thought of as more of a mother than my grandmother, Oma.  For the rest of her eighty years my mother’s anger, the anger of an eight year old girl, was directed at her mother, and indirectly to her father.

     So, on her eightieth birthday, she tells me that she had been thinking about her mother.  My mother says that Oma only interacted with her on weekends when the staff was off.  My own mother's nanny, on her own, made it to the United States.  Mother used to tell me that she met her in California when I was little.  In my mother's story, the one she told us over and over again, the nanny was willing to move in help to raise us correctly and she adamantly refused, the anger of an eight year old girl that was deserted by the one person she adored and spent more time with than her own mother. 

     Mother says she now realizes how hard it must have been for Oma to leave behind a life of directing the household staff, to being the household staff.  A whole way of life buried in name changes and hiding ones identity.  Kosher meals are not part of the life of a Lutheran family.   "Why choose to call us Lutheran and have me be part of that community?" she asks.  Martin Luther, the founder, was a German, and maybe he was familiar to even a German Jew?  My mother's memories of 1938 are still buried, but she does know that there were two kitchens in their home and two cooks,  because of kosher meals. Even though mother says that Oma was a cold person with no personality, mother now thinks that it must have been hard and confusing for her parents to leave it all behind; the culture, the language, the friends, and the relatives.  In this country, in the hot dry climate of California, Oma had taken jobs cleaning houses and working in sewing sweatshops.  Opa was the gardener for people that were once his peers in Europe.  Mother is hinting that maybe she had been too bitter and too angry with her parents.  Eighty years is marking a time for reflection.  Perhaps her children, me included, would have had it easier if we had understood why she was the mother to us that she was.  We were raised by an angry eight year old girl.  From a life of privilege to a life of secrets, a new name, a new religion, and a little bungalow in West Los Angeles. 
 
     An interesting story in Google books:
Hanna's Diary, 1938-1941: Czechoslovakia to Canada  By Hanna Spencer
http://books.google.com/books?id=wK-6fqZoPYwC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=czechoslovakia+breaking+of+glass+1938&source=bl&ots=QVESlnJzAz&sig=DsWbKF1aXEBM-5Be-5PZjuQcvdQ&hl=en&ei=UwjRS-CwAoG6tQOqhLDvDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CCQQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false
My mother’s REAL NAME was also Hanna.

Book overview from Google books:
Hanna Fischl, a Czech of Jewish descent, was a twenty-four-year-old teacher in a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia when Hitler's shadow loomed over Europe in 1938. No longer able to associate openly with her lover, Hans Feiertag, the talented, Christian composer whom she had loved since her teens, she began writing a diary at his request so that, once they were reunited, he could learn about her life while they had been apart. Written in a touching and candid style, Hanna's Diary, 1938-1941 is the result of that request. Hanna's Diary, 1938-1941 offers an intimate view of sweeping historical events that engulfed Europe and the world, evoking the creeping fear, desperate hopes, desertion of friends, and sense of isolation that Hanna Spencer felt as Nazism spread. The diary follows Spencer to England - where she faced misery of a different kind - and then to Canada, where, as a young immigrant with a PhD, she worked in her uncle's glove-making factory before finally landing a teaching job in Ottawa. Spencer describes her experiences lecturing on Czechoslovaki's history and its takeover by the Nazis, and her resulting celebrity on the Ontario lecture circuit. Written with clear wit and a sharp eye for detail, Hanna's Diary, 1938-1941 is a must-read for anyone interested in the human side of the Second World War.



     ACPR POLICY PAPER
NO. 106
CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1938 –
ISRAEL TODAY
Arieh Stav
    
The first Czechoslovak Republic was established in 1918 after hundreds of years of Austrian (i.e., German) domination over the Czechs and Slovaks. The new state arose on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in a certain sense was a miniature heir to the Empire. As its name indicates, Czechoslovakia was made up of two Slavic nationalities, the Czechs and Slovaks, who together constituted 9.5 million out of a total population of 14.5 million people in the Republic. The largest minority, more than three million, were Germans, the 1.7 million remaining were Hungarians, Ruthenian Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. The large German minority made up 23% of the whole population. They were a classic example of an irredentist ethnic group, a fifth column that rose up against their country and undermined it from within until it was totally destroyed. Nevertheless, the Germans and the other minorities enjoyed a generous system of national cultural rights and political equality.

     The Czech leaders, Masaryk and Benes, were alert to the danger from the German minority concentrated in the mountainous Sudetenland fringe of the country. They could not do much about this dangerous situation since the principles of the democratic system required them to bring the Sudeten Germans into the workings of government. As early as 1925, there were two Sudeten Germans in the cabinet and the strength of the German minority rose in direct relationship to the consolidation of Nazism in Germany. Autonomy under the guise of self determination became one of Hitler’s demands, and in 1938, the Sudeten German minority became Berlin’s agents in all respects.

     http://www.acpr.org.il/pp/pp106-astav-czech-E.pdf