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.