Amalya Malka Meisses Ashkenazy, 1849-1935. Part 2: Natan and Amalya; their children, grandchildren and on….

Amalya and Natan had five children: Nachim Alois,  Szymon, Paula, Joszef and Roszalia.

 

Alois Nachim became a lawyer and married Therese Blum, from a prominent family from Stanislau, Poland, who had a leather goods factory in Vienna. They had one son, Otto.

Alois and Therese were hidden in Belgium by a priest, Dom Bruno, and survived the war. Their son Otto was hiding out in Marseilles, while waiting for a boat to flee; he was caught in 1942 and sent via Drancy to Auschwitz, where he perished. He was 26 years old.

After Alois’s death in 1948, Therese moved to New York, changing her surname to Ashe, and lived there until her death in 1961.

Szymon excelled at Sanok school and with scholarships, finished highschool in Lviv, then going on to study Mechanical Engineering in Vienna. He married Anna Mahler in 1918 and they had two daughters, Elisabeth and Leonore, my mother.

Simon and family had a summer house and property in Austria and did not return to Sanok. Lisl and Lore apparently knew their cousins Mausy and Litsa and visited in Vienna. My Aunt Lisl reportedly preferred her Aunt Roszalia and cousins to the Mahler uncles on her mother’s side. And Anna reflects in her memoir that Lisl was a Mayss.

“Once Wolf’s mother was visiting us in Vienna, and when she saw Lori, she cried out: “What a good child!” But when her family saw Lisl, they all cried out: “She is a true Mayss!” Wolf’s mum’s maiden name was Mayss, and Lisl took after that side of the family.”

Simon was caught by the Gestapo while in the family apartment on March 15th, 1938. His wife, Anna and daughters Lisl and Lore had fled by train to Switzerland on March 13th, the morning after the Nazis marched into Vienna. Simon was imprisoned in the Gestapo Headquarters ( former Hotel Metropole). After a failed attempt at extortion, he was tortured and murdered. He is buried in ZentralFriedhof cemetery in Vienna.

Paula married Elias Beer and they had one son , Milos ( Milek) and also lived in Vienna. Paula died of tuberculosis in 1927. Her husband and son were caught in Vienna and died in Sobibor extermination camp.

Joszef had a hearing problem, apparently from a fall as a young child. He married (there is no record of children), and stayed in Sanok and ran the Hotel Warszawski. In 1940, he was apparently either beaten to death by Ukranians or killed by Nazis.

Roszalia married Max Zuckerberg, a banker, and they had two daughters, Martha and Elizza and also lived in Vienna.

(Left to right) Back row: two un- named cousins, Max Zuckerberg ( in suit), Roszalia

Middle row: Amalia, Joszef, his wife.  Front row: Elizza ( Litsa) and Martha ( Mausy)

Roszalia and the grand- daughters often returned to Sanok for summer holidays.

The story of Roszalia, Max and their daughters’ escape, I will recount in another installment, along with some further details of my own mother’s flight with her sister Lisl and my grandmother Anna. Stories of strong young women.

Natan Aszkanaszy died in 1929, and Amalya lived to be 86 years of age, dying in the year 1935.

Thankfully we have photos of their tombstones in the Jewish cemetery, taken before it was destroyed (1940-45) and the stones used to pave the roads of Sanok.

 

That graveyard today; photo taken by my cousin on a visit to Sanok. All photos of the Sanok family and of Otto, courtesy of my cousin.

Two years ago, I knew nothing about these family members! I still picture vividly the table napkin with a family tree being penned in by my genealogist niece, the small black x’s beside the names of those who perished, and the numb shock of it all.

Amalya Malka Meisses Ashkenazy, 1849-1935. Part 1: My Polish Honeymoon and chocolate.

Today, for International Women’s Day ( March 8, 2020), I must bite the bullet and, at least, begin to write about my Polish family.  This past week, I began the process and went to see the excellent movie, My Polish Honeymoon, at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8682932/

I had ordered a ticket on line. I prepared a travel mug of mint tea with a thick slice of lemon and packed an apple to eat on the way. I already had rainboots and coat on, keys in hand, when I suddenly remembered: “Chocolate!” There was a partial bar of Lindt – dark chocolate with orange and almond – tucked away on the bookshelf by my bedside. Grabbing it, I stuffed it in my purse as I ran down our condo stairs.

Chocolate helps me deal with pain….that self- medication started when I cracked my hip in Malaysia thirteen years ago….I recall how, even as I thought about hobbling towards the fridge, where we one has to keep chocolate in the tropics, the pain would lessen as endorphins started to flow!

More recently I have discovered that chocolate also helps me with Holocaust pain; I’m presently nibbling on a second row of thick Lindt hazelnut.

At the bus stop, a woman approached me asking for: “One bob”, a British expression for a shilling. I offered her my apple, but she said she wanted to buy a Coca Cola and only liked apples if they were baked! I checked my wallet, but had no change. I offered her the chocolate: “Thank you, I do like chocolate!”

I wondered briefly how I would fare on my possibly traumatic armchair journey to Poland without chocolate….but I also understood that this woman had her own degree of trauma.

As I walked across Burrard Street at Fifth Avenue and saw the the queue just inside the cinema door, I spotted the familiar jacket and shape of a dancing friend at the end of lineup. I joined the queue and tapped her on the shoulder. Big smiles all around, and not only did we sit together, she treated me to a popcorn! ( just as good as chocolate, when sitting with a friend accompanies it!) “Thanks Mom!”, i said, adding, to her approval: “You’re my young Mom!” Very true, too, as my own dear Mum, if still alive, would have been turning 99 years old this May.

My own Mum was definitely on my mind, though, as I came to this movie about Poland, where her father, Szymon Aszkanaszy was born;  in Sanok, in 1882. While growing up, my Viennese born, Czech roots maternal Granny and her family stories dominated our life, and I had heard so little about my grandfather’s Polish family. My mother never volunteered anything, apart from the story of her father’s decision at the train station itself, to stay in Vienna, when her mother, sister and she herself all fled that morning after the Anschluss, in March 1938.  Then she would pass on again, the life lesson she had learned at age 16, ( because Simon was caught only days later, and after an unsuccessful extortion attempt, murdered), that one’s possessions do not matter.

I do not recall any other stories except a mention that she thought her father’s family had been somewhat religious….I think this may have emerged when my brothers and I all embraced the Christian faith in our teens at various independent stages.

I have realized, with deep pangs of remorse, that I never asked her anything either…but although I had not asked for any more details about the family, I did tell her when we did Expo 86 together, when I was 28, with no prospective husband in sight, that if I had a son one day, I would name him Simon, after her father. This visibly pleased her. Neither of us knew she would die only two years later.

Three years later, Gary and I named our firstborn son G. Simon! Interestingly, he is the one who generously keeps our cupboard stocked with Lindt Hazelnut chocolate bars! ( He’s a smart shopper and frequents the sales at London Drugs!)

Perhaps a message of comfort spanning four generations, from that so-close, yet so-far “other side” of life.

Here is my great – grandmother, Amalya Malka Meisses Ashkenazi ( daughter of Haim Meisses and Mrs. Pessel- Meisses).

On the viewer’s far right in the photo below, Amalya is about age seventeen.

Amalya was born in the year 1849 and married Natan Ashkenazy, who apparently was a rabbi ( his daughter Roszalia’s grave has “daughter of rabbi” in Hebrew on it). His family had likely come from ByeloRussia ( Belarus) several generations previously. Amalya apparently had very long hair, almost to her feet, before they married! It was then cut, and she wore a sheitel ( wig), a Jewish Orthodox tradition.

Together they ran the Hotel Warszawski in Sanok, Galicia, now southeast Poland.

In the hotel entrance (from the viewer’s left to right), stand Joszef, the tall third son, who ran the hotel, tiny Amalya with Elizza (Litsa) and Martha (Mausy), grand- daughters visiting from Vienna. ( ca. early 1930’s)

The Hotel Warszawski was built in the 1850’s by Amalia’s family, and they ran it until 1940, when Joszef, her third son, who was the hotel- keeper, was either beaten to death by Ukrainians or killed by Nazis.

The hotel is still running today. My cousin, son of Litsa, says it’s a long inconvenient trip there from Vienna, and there is no Jewish presence left in the town of Sanok.

Natan and Amalia’s gravestones were taken to pave roads after 1940, and the site of that Jewish graveyard, where their bones still rest, is filled with a few stones from another destroyed graveyard….see Part 2.

My Polish Honeymoon is an excellent movie, and, along with some comedy, poignantly shows the erasure of Jewish life there and helped me understand my own mother’s silence.