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.