Uncle Sam

My Uncle Sam (Andrea, Charles and Jeff's father) was the youngest of the Hochbaum siblings.  Born January 19, 1917, he was known in the family as Schulem (sp?) and that name appears on the ship manifest when he and my father came to the US in 1938.  He stayed with my father on Ellis Island for almost two weeks when my father was detained at Ellis Island because of an eye infection.



Sam's parents both died in 1928 [though there is some question about this, see the notes at the end of this link], and I assume he and Regina went to live full-time in Beuthen after that.  He would have been 11 years old, Regina, 13, Henry, 15.  The older children, Marte, 23, Daddy, 20, and Erna (aka Esther), 19,  would have been responsible for them, and also for running the family business.  It must have been an interesting time.

We know from Andrea (and the pictures) that Sam played soccer and was a champion ping pong player.  He also rode a bicycle:

And he played chess:

I don't know who he's playing with, but my guess is that that's Charlie, hiding behind the chair....

Both Sam and Regina have lots of pictures of friends from Beuthen in their photo albums, though interestingly there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap.  I thought I'd include some of Sam's pictures, starting with the young women, just because I think it gives us a sense of what life in Beuthen was like.  This clearly wasn't an Orthodox religious community, and life seems to be notably middle class. As Alice said to me, "They went to the opera!"

 (Check out the silk stockings!)

And here are some of the guys:

 There are several more mysterious pictures, too, that I'll talk about in a subsequent post.

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My Uncle Sam died young, of a sudden heart attack, in 1962.  He was 45 and left his wife, Selma Goldberg Hochbaum  -- the niece of Chrzanower Young Men's Association President David Wishner -- with three children:  Andrea, 16, Charles (known to us as Charlesie, to distinguish him from Charlie), who was 10, and Jeffrey, just 5.  Uncle Henry, Sam's partner in Center Novelty, took over the business, and Aunt Selma went to work as a saleswoman in Mays, a local department store, to support the family.  

I was just 18 when Uncle Sam died, and so didn't know him very well.  I always thought of him as easy-going and quiet, and possibly the nicest of the Hochbaum sibs (who were, all in all, a pretty nice group).  I'm not sure that goes along with excelling in soccer and ping pong, and whether Andrea and Charles and Jeff share that view.

So I asked Andrea...Here are her comments:

My father was very progressive and liked to try new things. He was quiet at home, leaving the child-rearing mainly to my mother. I suspect my brothers barely remember him. He was funny around his friends "on the block" and social at work, especially when visiting his clients. He seemed very well-liked by the store owners from what I could tell on the special days he took me to the city. Everybody at work and in the stores gushed over me and seemed so nice because I was Sam's daughter.

I so admire how the Hocbaum siblings started their new lives in America. I can't even imagine how hard that was but that's the whole point of this blog, isn't it? I admire that my father could speak so many different languages and was an astute bussinessman. Our fathers brought with them some 'European' rules that didn't always jive with our culture but our dads made us feel very safe and secure.

Some great pictures from Andrea

You may have been wondering what is going on, and why there have been no new blog posts for so long.  Yes, I have been distracted by other things (as is my wont), but I have also been trying to fill some gaps in my own knowledge of history, to provide some background on the labor camps and the displaced persons camps and what went on in Chrzanow during the war. 

This is taking more time than I expected, but it's interesting history that isn't written about much, and some day I hope to be able to do a decent job of sharing some of it.

This week, however, the postman brought a wonderful collection of photos from Andrea Hochbaum Friedland (my Uncle Sam's daughter, for those of you who haven't memorized the family tree yet).  So I took a break from reading history to scan some of my favorites.  There'll be a lot more coming!

Here, for starters, is my grandfather, the original (for our purposes) Chaim Hirsch Hochbaum:

That's a fur collar around his neck.  He is clearly a Hochbaum, with what a nurse in Florida once called the Hochbaum "bedroom eyes"  (I had never thought of them that way).  Do we know anyone in the family who has a forehead like that?  He was born in 1876 in Chrzanow, and died around 1928.

I had asked Andrea for pictures she had from Europe.  Here are two wonderful pictures, from the family business:

That's Uncle Sam in front of the sign.  The white lettering is my translation, thanks to Google translate.  I've written about the business a couple of times, most completely in The Pearl Corp, but this is the first time we can see what it might have looked like.

And here is another picture of the business:

That's Sam waving, and his older sister Erna in the apron. This looks to me like a delivery of some local produce, but that is a guess. 

And here is a picture, also probably taken in Beuthen, of Charlie and his parents.  We don't have a lot of these, so this is special, too.

And, last, but not least, here's a picture of Uncle Henry and Uncle Sam (on the left, standing next to each other) and what we assume is their soccer team.

Andrea wrote: 

     My father was on a soccer team but he excelled at PING PONG. 

Gina told me a story about how my father was supposed to get a medal but Hitler was giving them out. The family wouldn't let him go to the ceremony and were very afraid for his life!

Sam was the youngest of the Hochbaum siblings, born in 1917.  This picture is undated, but he was probably 20 or 21 when it was taken. 

There will be more coming.

In the meantime, some belated Happy Birthday wishes to Andrea and her brother Charles.  I'm usually not good with birthdays, but I was deeply impressed at an early age that Andrea and Charles shared the same birthday -- September 14th.  How's that for family planning?  And, just to answer your next question, their younger brother Jeff's birthday is October 16th.

An Old Address Book

I discovered an old address book of my father’s after Mom died, so never had a chance to ask her if she knew how to interpret some of the entries.  On the other hand, it is SO rich in mysteries and information that I thought I needed to include it, and see what we can learn from it.

I’ve provided a scan of the address book as PDF in the new “Documents” section on the right hand side of this page, so I think you should be able to blow up the pages, if you would like to.  This post is an annotated version, with the individual scanned pages, and some comments/interpretations by me as to what they might contain….

I will warn you all in advance that this post is going to be long, and likely confusing.  This address book appears to be my father’s address book shortly after he came to the US (August, 1938).  It includes US addresses and some European addresses.  The European addresses seem to be war-time or just post-war.  My guess is that Daddy had a separate address book that contained the addresses of friends and relatives when he left Germany, but unfortunately we don’t seem to have that one.

Just as background, Moshe Lieb Hochbaum, my father’s grandfather, had two wives and 8 children. This same Moshe Lieb Hochbaum was also my mother’s great-grandfather, so for you Brauners, this is also part of your history. My count is that these 8 children had 41 children between them, so Daddy had a total of 40 siblings and first cousins. That’s a lot of mishpokhe.  Of those, the eight cousins who were Mom’s aunts and uncles were all in America by 1922, Daddy and Henry and Sam came over in 1938, and Rose Schaufeld and her family came over in 1939.  Some of the others (like Regina and her cousin Golda) went to Palestine and other places, but the vast majority of the cousins were in still in Europe when the war broke out, and most of them died in the camps.

The Yad Vashem memorial site in Israel has an online database of “pages of testimony,” where people can put the information they know about people who perished in the camps, and I have been (slowly) going through that to add that information to my family tree.  Of the eight children of Moshe Lieb, the five or six  who were still alive at the start of the war all died in the camps.  (Daddy’s father and Mom’s grandmother had both died earlier, which may have been a factor in the two families being willing to emigrate.)  Many of the next generation also were killed in the camps.  Some miraculously survived.  These include “the two Reginas” (Regina Rappaport and Regina Singer), Duftsha Schoenberg, Lena Mandelbaum and Morris Barber, and perhaps others.  Of the next generation, the only survivors I know of are Charlie and Tamar Landau (Bertl Hochbaum), a lovely lady who lives in Israel.  I may be missing others.

With that introduction, here we go:

“Dago” (pronounced  DAH-go) was Daddy’s nickname in Europe and to a lesser extent here also.  My mother never called him Dago, but many of the relatives and his two business partners (also named David) did.  The address listed here is in Washington Heights, and may be the first address he had in the US.

This is page 2.  There's a column labeled “Geburstag,”  which means  “Birthday,” and in fact, this little book has some information about birth dates and occasionally about birth places.

The first entry, Rosi Brauner, is our grandmother, Rose, along with her address on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.   Note the second entry, which is for Mom, with her name misspelled.  26/11 1912 is her birthday in European format (November 26, 1912 in ours), and the penciled in address of 971 Madison Avenue is the address of the Carlyle Hotel, where Mom had her store.

There are entries for Fred Bihari (probably both home and work), who was Aunt Minnie’s husband. (Aunt Minnie was my mother’s aunt, and one of the Schorr sisters.) And there’s an entry for Uncle Sol.  I don’t know who Edna Bochner is.

And, of course, all the telephone numbers are in the old, pre-area code format, with two letters for the location and the other five for the number.  (Our Bayside phone number was BA 9-7363, for example.)

One of the fascinating things about this little book is the combination of European and American entries.  The first entry on this page, I think is for Lily (Leonie) Grun, who was living in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, and was instrumental in getting Charlie to the States, as we have discussed in previous posts.

Next is Henry Goldberg, who along with his wife Anjou, was instrumental in helping Daddy and his brothers come to the States.  I don’t know what their relationship was, but note that Henry is also living in Washington Heights. 

Julius Goldberg is Aunt Selma’s father (Aunt Selma was my Uncle Sam’s wife).  I think Aunt Selma’s uncle was from Chrzanow. 

Tina Green was a cousin of Charlie’s on his father’s side.  I vaguely remember her from Charlie and Alice’s wedding when she was sitting at the same table with me and Regina and Esme.  Regina was plying Esme with champagne.

I have no idea who Elias Grubner was, but there are Grubners on our family tree.  One was my mother’s paternal great-grandmother (according to Debbie Weston’s family tree). 

Sam Goldblatt was my mother’s Aunt Esther Schorr’s huband.  He was a butcher, and I think the second address says “Paramount Meat.” 

There are a couple more addresses and phone numbers for Tina Green, including one at the Hotel Plaza (on 161 St?).  I’m not sure what that’s about.  Alice may be able to help.

The next three lines are information about David Grun (Charlie’s father), Marta (his mother) and Charlie (Chaim Hirsch).  David seems to have been born on the 27^th of October, 1900, and (I’m guessing) his full name was David Samuel Grun.  I thought he was born in Tescen, Czechoslovakia, but this seems to say he was born in Biala.  I think the second column was their address in Prague, probably after they moved from Beuthen.  I have no idea why the 1904 date for Marta’s birth was changed to 1905.  The last column seems to say, Marta geb. (born) Shoenberg.  There is also a “Registernnummer”  (registration number seems to be the translation).  I don’t know what that is about or who it was for. It may have been a registration number in Germany.  More questions than answers…….

Lazar (Eliezer) Hochbaum was a half-uncle of my father’s, and the grandfather of Tamar Landau in Israel.  He died in Auschwitz.

This page also has the birthdays of Daddy’s sister Erna (Ester), her husband Henry, and son, Chaim Hirsch, all of whom died in the Holocaust. [Chet, note the spelling of Hirsch.  I’m not sure which I should be using!]

My guess is that the address on the bottom is a forwarding address, but I don’t know where that is.  Notice that it is also X’ed out. 

And on this page, also is Regina’s address in Israel, which I can’t read, and her birth date.  I think the address may be Kibbutz Shamir (see my last post).

On this page we have Uncle Henry’s address in the army, in Mom’s handwriting, and then an address in Brooklyn, Sam’s address in the Bronx, and two Bergen-Belsen addresses, which is enough to make you stop breathing if you haven’t already. 

Berta Hochbaum (Tamar Landau) was Daddy’s first-cousin once removed and was indeed in Bergen-Belsen.  She survived the war as a teenager and moved to Palestine, where she and her husband (also a survivor) were active in the resistance to the British.  He, I believe, became an economic minister in the Israeli government.  They live in Jerusalem.  Her parents both died in concentration camps.

Sigfried Hochbaum was also a first-cousin once removed, and also seems to have survived the war and moved to Israel, but I don’t know anything about him.  His parents perished in Auschwitz.

The David Hochbaum here is Duftsha Schoenberg, and Regina Hochbaum is his sister, Regina Rappaport.

According to my family tree, Berek Hochbaum was a half-cousin of Daddy’s, Gusta his wife, and Monek their son.  I don’t know anything else about them, except that seems to be a USSR address (?) 

And, I assume that the phone numbers on the bottom are NYC numbers for Gina and Sam.

Binem Sonnenshein was the husband of an aunt of Daddy’s, and I think was Regina Singer’s father.  He and his wife and Regina Singer’s husband all died in the camps. Regina survived and lived with Regina and Lutsi Rappaport (both also survivors) for many years.

I don’t know anything about the next two entries, but notice that one of them is for Santiago, Chile.  Refugees were going wherever they could get in, and it was very tough to get in anywhere.  Daddy and his brothers wound up here, but if that hadn’t worked they were looking at Argentina and Australia.  Some of Charlie’s father’s family wound up in Australia; others in Shanghai.

Leonie Schwartz and Isidor Schwarz are Charlie’s aunt Lily Green and her husband.

I don’t know anything about Josef Gruen, who I assume was somehow related to Charlie’s father.

Totally overwhelmed? I’ll try something a little simpler next time………

Regina in Palestine

When we last left Regina, she was on her way from Beuthen, Germany, via Trieste, to Palestine.  It was January 1, 1938.  She was 22 years old. The rest of her family is still in Beuthen, Germany.  Her photo album is full of pictures of her friends from Beuthen, the way a college yearbook might be, saying things like "remember me." 
This is my first pass at trying to fill in Gina's years in Palestine, from 1938 until 1945. Gina used to tell lots of stories about her years in Palestine, but even back then they all got garbled in my head, so this may be a little incoherent (to say nothing of inaccurate).  

To start this chapter, and help you get oriented, here's a geography lesson on our Israeli connections.  The map and notes are from Aliza Link, a second cousin.  Aliza is my age, and lives with her husband Dan in a suburb of Jerusalem.

[To fill in some names that might not be familiar to you:  Golda Hochbaum Mendel, Aliza's mother,  was a cousin of Daddy's.  Tamar Landau (aka Berta Hochbaum) I hope to write about again soon.  She is a first cousin once-removed of Daddy's, and was a young camp survivor, as was her husband Simcha. Shlomo Hochbaum you have already heard about.  He was our war hero cousin who singlehandedly stopped the Syrian tanks in 1948.]



In any case, Regina was in an agricultural school in Nahalal, a moshav, or agricultural community that was one of the earliest in Palestine.  Moshe Dayan's family lived there and he had gone to the same school (before Regina got there).  Regina's background was not exactly agricultural, however, and the story she always told was that they told her to milk a cow and she fainted dead away.

So they seem to have put her to work peeling and slicing vegetables and cleaning pots (Gina was a superb dishwasher later in her life....this may be where it comes from.)  She said, "I cried bitterly from the onions."

Golda Meir visited the school once.  She left a lasting impression on Regina, because she was a chain smoker.  (Gina was, too.)

In the beginning, money was not an issue.  Gina's schooling was paid for, and her clothes were paid for.  Her cousin Golda, however, "was in the worst kibbutz I had ever seen.  Torn shoes, and Arabs shooting from all sides.  So whatever I had I gave her."  My notes say that Golda was living in a tent.  We'll have to see what Aliza says about this.

We have lots of pictures of Gina with friends in Palestine. Here are a couple of them. Perhaps one day I'll scan them and add them, just to give you all a sense of her very social nature, but they are mostly people we don't know (or at least I don't), so I'll leave that for another day. 

Pretty soon the war was on, and Gina decided she was too old to stay in school.  And she had no interest in agriculture - "I couldn't kill a worm.  Couldn't stand the blood."  Marta sent her 10 Marks every month, and so did Dave and Erna.  She used to travel a lot among her German friends and spend the money...."I was a welcome guest."

She seems to have moved from Nahalal to a kibbutz, where she spent nine months.  I think this may be Kibbutz Shamir, in its early days, near Haifa.  (It has since moved close to the Golan Heights and become very prosperous.)  There is an address in my father's old address book which I THINK says Kibbutz Shamir, with a Haifa PO Box address. 

They opened up a brick factory, and Gina worked there cutting bricks. She was the only woman in the factory and very proud of that. "I was tops in every field.  Wasn't afraid of anything."  We have a great picture:

I'm not sure how long that lasted.  Gina said, "I wanted to be a nurse in the worst way.  I went to Jerusalem, but they chose someone else."

I'm not sure what the year is, but Regina is now in Jerusalem with no money.  Getting work is very difficult, because of the influx of refugees. "Hundreds and hundreds of refugees, and absolutely no way to get work."

She stayed with her friend Leah, seen later in the picture below in the flower shop she and her husband later owned (in Jerusalem?).



But Leah had lost her job and they only had two pounds saved.  Gina borrowed clothes from her and went to work for six weeks for a farmer whose wife was sick.  She took care of his kid and cooked and picked strawberries until the wife got better.  Gina says she sent Golda a half a pound, and gave Leah back her clothes.

When that job ended, Gina wound up working two jobs.  She cleaned at Pension Ascher, run by someone she knew (Esther Borgia (sp?)), for four hours a day and worked for a Dr. Auerbach who was a professor somewhere for four hours a day.

I'm not sure how long that lasted either, but Gina's connections seemed to have helped her, and she wound up living in the apartment of a doctor who had gone into the army, taking care of his furniture and his books.  That seems to have lasted two years, until the Arab who owned the house was released from jail and took back his house, and Gina had to leave.  

I think the rest of Gina's years in Palestine were more of the same.  Scrounging out a living, but being generous (possibly over-generous) to her friends. My mother used to complain that while Regina was in Palestine and my parents had very little money, Regina used to beg my father to send money, and then, when he did, she bought umbrellas to give to her friends.

Regina was always very social.  Here's a quote for you:  "Boys were afraid to bring me home.  I said, if you are afraid to bring me home, how are you going to marry me?" 

She never did get married.  My father said she was too fussy.  (This was said as a lesson to me.)  She always did have a warm spot for Israel and her friends.  Leah and her husband used to come visit her for weeks in NY, sleeping in her bed while Gina slept on the sofa, and Gina took frequent trips back to Israel to visit. 

Regina emigrated to the US in 1945.  The war was over, and what remained of her immediate family was here.  She got typhoid fever on the ship over, and was taken off the ship to recover in a hospital in Spain.  She always complained that she had thick, wavy hair until she got sick.  She sailed from Bilbao in September 1945, arriving in Philadelphia on October 6th.

Here's the ship manifest:

And here is a picture taken upon her arrival:

L to R:  Daddy, Aunt Hilda, Regina, Uncle Sam and Aunt Selma

Charlie - Coming to America

Richie raised the following questions about how Charlie came to America in his comment on the post "Charlie and his Aunt Lily:

"This is interesting and raises some questions. We didn't really know the details of what happened to Charlie after the war. I had imagined that he was in a displaced persons camp until he came to the US.

Esme thinks he came to live with you after she was born in 1947. So the questions are:

What were the circumstances of his being freed from the Nazi's?

How did he spend those two years?

How did Lilli Green and her husband survive the war?

How did she find Charlie?

Since he had family in Europe, why did he decide to come to the US instead of staying in Czechoslovakia?"

We know the answers to some of these questions, because Charlie told us in a talk he gave about his experiences at his synagogue.  The whole talk is included as an attachment to Charlie - Part II in the right column of this blog, but here's a snip that addresses some of the questions Richie asked:

Charlie came to the US in September, 1946.  Here is a picture of him arriving, and the two page ship manifest.  (You'll have to blow up your browser window to read it.  One of these days I'll put all the ship manifests we've got in a pdf as background info, which will make them easier to read.)  That's Aunt Hilda and Uncle Henry with him.  The ship manifest says they arrived in New York, but the story I always heard was that there was a longshoremen's strike in NY, and so the ship came in in Philadelphia.  Charlie's luggage had been lost in Paris, as I think I've already reported, so he arrived on a very hot day, wearing woolen knickers, which were the only clothes he had.

Lily and her husband eventually came to the US also, and settled in Seattle.  I'm not sure when or what the circumstances were....I'll call Alice and see whether I can get more info.



Charlie at the Roth's Creamery

Another find from Alice's treasure trove are these pictures of Charlie working at the Roth's Creamery in Jeffersonville, in the Catskills.

My mother's aunt Ida (one of the Schorr sisters) and her husband Norman Roth ran a Creamery in the Catskills during the summer.  They provided the local hotels with eggs and milks and butter.  It looks like Charlie had an ideal (perhaps) job one summer. 

I don't know if this was an actual dairy farm or whether they acquired the milk and eggs from local farmers, which seems more likely.  Does anyone else have more information?

This was a morning job, says my cousin Sally Crown, and Norman and Ida found a place nearby that they could turn into a rooming house and they ran that also.  Sally called it a kuchelein  - "cook alone."

My grandmother Rose Brauner also ran a kuchelein, in South Beach, Staten Island, in Belmar, NJ, and at least once in the Catskills, near Ida and Norman.

Sally describes a kuchelein this way:

"It was a rooming house that rented rooms to families - usually parents and two kids to a room - for a week.  The house had 5-6 rooms with a big shared kitchen with six burners lined up, labeled with the room numbers.  Each family brought their own pillows and linens (Bed gevant) and their own pots.  Everybody made their dishes and then shared with other families….an American kibbutz."

Nobody had cars then, so you hired a truck to drive you to the Catskills or wherever.  "Two or three families in a car, loaded with all this stuff. 

In the days before air-conditioning, vacation spots like the Catskills were a draw.  They weren't THAT far from the city, and they were a lot cooler.  Sometimes families would spend a month in the country, with the husbands (who were the only ones to work, of course, if there were young children) staying in the city during the week and commuting to the country on weekends.

We have some postcards dating back to 1907 that I'll include in the next post.

More from Alice -- Charlie and his Aunt Lily

I've written elsewhere about how Charlie's Aunt Lily found him after the war and arranged for him to come to America.  He lived with her and she took care of him until the arrangements were made.  Here are two pictures from that time period:

This is Charlie, Lily and her husband Isidor Schwarz in Bratislava (now the Czech Republic) in 1946. 

During this time, Lily took Charlie to ski in the Tatra mountains (according to Wikipedia, these form the border between Poland and today's Slovakia).  Here is the picture:

What to me is truly amazing, and very moving, is that all the youngsters in this photo are survivors of the camps.

Charlie's father's side of the family had a lot of different experiences during the war years.  One sister traveled through Russia and wound up in Shanghai.  Other family members wound up in Siberia, fighting with the Czech army in exile, ultimately landing in Australia and Israel.  I'm hoping that Alice will capture these someday and we'll add them to the blog.  They aren't directly Hochbaum-related, but they are close enough.

Lily Green and Regina seem to have been close friends. The following photographs are from Regina's album:

On the back, it says "Dem Bilde ein freundlicher Blick, dem Original ein stets gedenken."  And it is signed Leonie Grun (with the umlaut), Beuthen 10/VII - 36 (July 10, 1936).

My (very) rough translation -- courtesy of Google translate -- is "View this picture in a friendly way.  Always remember the original."

Here's a picture from Lily in 1942, and her wedding picture below, labeled May 23, 1943.



A treasure trove from Alice - Pictures from Beuthen

Alice and I spent several hours at the snack bar in Bloomingdale's a couple of weeks ago, going through some old photos that Alice had from Regina and Charlie.  We only left when the fire alarm went off and they threw us out. (We, of course, had long since finished our frozen yogurts.)  I wound up in temporary custody of a treasure trove of pictures and stories to go with them.

Here is the first batch -- these are of Charlie in Beuthen and some of other members of the family.

Charlie and a friendly bear

We don't think he was doted on, do we?   When he was older, Alice said, his father traveled to Berlin and brought back toys for Charlie, who played with them for a half an hour and then took them apart to see how they worked.  An early indication of his engineering aptitude!

Notice the sign behind Charlie.  This is probably a sign advertising the Ch. H. Hochbaum wholesale fruit and vegetable business.

Here are other pictures of a young Charlie:

Charlie and Gina

This picture is small and very dirty which accounts for what might look like bruises on Charlie's face.  (I did some cleanup but decided not to push my Photoshop skills.)

That's an unhappy looking Charlie with his Aunt Regina.  This picture is dated September 18, 1934.

And a somewhat older Charlie with most of the  Hochbaum family.

From the left (standing): Henry and Erna Hochbaum, David and Marta Green, Lily Green
Front row:  Sam and David (Dago) Hochbaum, Charlie, Henry Hochbaum

The Hochbaum siblings in the picture are Daddy, Sam and Henry, Marta and Erna.  Only Gina is missing.   The standing Henry Hochbaum is Erna's husband (and a cousin).  Lily Green is David Green's sister (and, of course, Charlie's aunt).

Notice the picture on the wall in the background.  It's actually a needlepoint, and today it hangs in Alice's house in Matawan.  I think it was made by Marta, but Alice couldn't confirm that.  The amazing thing is that it is here.  How did it get here?  I asked Alice. 

After the war, she said, Charlie went back to the apartment in Prague where he and his parents had lived before the war.  They had gone to Prague after the family was forced to sell the business in Germany for almost nothing.  Whereas they had lived well in Beuthen ("they went to the Opera"), in Prague they didn't have a lot of money.  They made a living folding boxes in their apartment.  When the Germans rounded up the Jews in Prague they left their valuables with someone in the apartment building.  When Charlie returned, the people said they had nothing left -- they had been forced to sell everything. Which certainly may have been true. In any case, we are surmising that the needlepoint may have survived that process.  There's a second needlepoint that also made it to Matawan.

Here's a picture of Erna, looking very much like a Hochbaum, and her baby, Chaim Hirsh Hochbaum.

And here's an undated picture of Erna and her husband and their son, David and Marta, and Uncle Henry.