We Thought They Died in the Holocaust: How Genealogy Research Found What My Grandmother Never Knew

My grandmother's mother came from a very large Hungarian family. Her grandfather Samuel Hirschmann was born in Csóngrad in 1855 and married Netti Steiner of Abony in 1880 in the town of Tiszaföldvár. Between 1880 and 1907, Samuel and Netti lived in three different towns and had 12 children. My grandmother's mother Anna was the youngest, born in Kiskunfélegyháza in 1907. In 1909, the Hirschmann family left Hungary and relocated to Vienna, where my great-grandmother Anna grew up. In 1925, Anna met a strapping young Galician Jew from Lemberg named Lonek. They married within a few months of his arrival in Vienna, and one week after their marriage, they left Vienna for Mandate Palestine. Lonek was 20, Anna was 17. My grandmother was born the next year in Haifa.

The rest of the Hirschmanns took different paths. Some came to Mandate Palestine like Anna, some remained in Vienna, another went to Budapest and yet another went to Prague. In 1943, when my grandmother was 16, her mother died, after which she lost touch with most of her mother's side of the family. When I later asked my grandmother what happened to all of her mother's siblings and families, she knew of two siblings that also came to Israel and one that remained in Vienna. As to the others, her common refrain was that they died in the Holocaust. 

After my grandmother died, I was able to find through genealogical research what she never knew: she had two first cousins who, completely unbeknownst to her, survived the war and lived out their lives in Europe. 

Pauli and Karli

Before my grandmother passed, I interviewed her about her life and experiences. One of the unique things she described was that around 1930, when she was four years old, she and her mother left Haifa and went back to Vienna for about six months. While describing what she remembered, she discussed a memory of sledding in Vienna with two cousins named Pauli and Karli. I had never heard or come across those names in my research. I asked her who their parents were and she could not remember. When I asked her what happened to them, she said she never heard about them again, so she concluded they had died in the Holocaust.

For years after I interviewed my grandmother, I had no idea who Pauli and Karli were. Indeed, because my grandmother did not know all the names of her mother's siblings (given her mother's young death and the fact that many had not left Europe), I didn't even know how to necessarily locate these individuals. The first mission, as a result, was to find all the siblings of my great-grandmother Anna.

I was able to find the names of all of Anna's siblings from a source that many might overlook: a probate filing. Anna's father died in Vienna in 1926. I contacted the very helpful Vienna Municipal and Provincial Archives (Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv) about what information they might have on Anna's father Samuel. They responded that they were able to locate a probate record, and thrillingly, this listed the names, ages and locations of all of his children!

Excerpt of probate filing for Samuel Hirschmann, Vienna, 1926

This document was a blessing. Most importantly, it gave me the names of all of Anna's sisters, and their married surnames, which I had not previously known. One name was completely new, number 4: Bora Hirschmann, whose married surname was Teichner, age 35, living in Vienna at Hannovergasse 33. After learning from other Vienna records where the Hirschmann family had come from, I then reviewed the FamilySearch microfilm for Csongrád, Hungary and found Bora's birth entry, under the name Borcsa.

Excerpt of birth entry of Bora Teichner née Hirschmann, Csongrád, 1891

I now set out to find what happened to Bora Teichner and to determine whether she had any children (I still did not know the name of her husband; there was no Viennese marriage record for her). The ultimate breakthrough came by searching the Yad Vashem archives' Shoah Names Database. There, I found the following entry, written in Hebrew:

Yad Vashem entry for the Teichner family

This entry records the memory of a Ladislav Teichner from Hungary who had been living in Vienna and had been married to a woman named Boriska. The entry identifies that they both were killed in Budapest in 1944. This seemed to generally fit the information I had gathered about Bora. But then, below was what I had been searching for all along -- the entry lists the names of two children: Paul and Karl. I had finally found Pauli and Karli! They were Paul and Karl Teichner.

The entrant originally wrote the names Paul and Karl, but then she crossed them out. I searched for their names in the Yad Vashem database and found nothing. No ages were listed for them either. So now all I knew was that I had the right family, but I had to determine when Paul and Karl were born and what happened to them.

(Note: the Yad Vashem entry was filled out by Malka Gantz, the mother of Israel's current "Alternate Prime Minister" and former IDF chief Benny Gantz; her mother was the sister-in-law of Bora Teichner, making her first cousins with Paul and Karl as well, although unrelated to my grandmother.)

How Old Were Paul and Karl Teichner?

Finding the birth records for Paul and Karl would be crucial for determining what happened to them because I needed their birth dates to accurately identify if other people with those names (yes there are several!) were indeed them. The first place to look was a website called GenTeam, which has indexed a significant amount of records from Vienna, including its Jewish records (now you can search on JewishGen as well). In this collection, I found one match, for a Karl Teichner, born in Vienna on November 18, 1919, son of Ludwig Teichner (not Ladislav, as shown on the Yad Vashem record) and Borcza Hirschmann.

Indexed birth entry for Karl Teichner on the GenTeam website

With that information, I was able to locate the original image of Karl's birth record within FamilySearch's collections (all available Vienna Jewish records are located here; searchable vital records pre-dating 1911 are available here). I still had no idea what happened to Karl, but at least I knew the right date of birth. One down, one to go.

The breakthrough for Paul Teichner was in the Vienna Meldezettel collection for 1930-1940, family registers that are available on FamilySearch. This collection generally requires manual review, as most is not indexed. And it's quite tedious because the records were organized in an overly complicated way that could only be dreamed of in a country such as Austria (or Germany). Eventually, though, I found an entry for a Paul Teichner, single, born in "Prag Smichov" on July 28, 1917. The signatory on the record was a Ludwig Teichner. It appeared to fit (I had previously learned from the Vienna Archives that the Teichner couple had relocated to Vienna from Prague in 1919), but I needed to be sure. 

Vienna Meldezettel entry for Paul Teichner, 1937

Next step: Czech records. I turned to the Badatelna site, which includes scans of Jewish vital records from the Czech Republic, and I looked for birth records from the Smichov district of Prague. Therein I found the birth entry for Paul Gabriel Teichner, born in the Dejvice district of Prague, son of Ludwig and Bora Teichner. Success!

Birth entry for Paul Gabriel Teichner (line 2), Prague, 1917

Uncle Benno

So what happened to these two brothers? I still had no idea. And I had no idea for a very long time. I searched over and over again in all assorted databases, but for years, I had no luck. Eventually, the next big breakthrough came from a very useful but underutilized source that I've already discussed: probate records.

As I mentioned above, my grandmother had some family that remained in Vienna after the war. This included her uncle Benno Hirschmann. During the war, Benno had fled Europe to Shanghai. He married a non-Jewish woman from Prague who converted to Judaism, they apparently "tried out" Israel, did not like it, and returned to Vienna. Benno died there in 1967. As far as I knew, he did not have children. I was not sure, though, so I tried out what I had done for Samuel Hirschmann -- request information from his probate records in Vienna. 

The Viennese archives got back to me with the greatest news of all: heirs are listed, including two nephews, Paul and Karl Teichner. Even better, it included addresses: Paul Teichner was living in Prague and Karl Teichner was living in Paris as of 1967. So they survived, and continued to live in Europe! My grandmother had never known...

Excerpt of the email from the Viennese archives with information on Benno Hirschmann's heirs

So What Happened to Paul and Karl Teichner?

The remainder of the fascinating story of discovering Paul and Karl Teichner will be told in the next installation, as my research trail did not simply end with finally locating their continued life in Europe. I wanted to know what happened to them, how they survived the war, whether they were still living, and if not, where they died. Finding the remainder of Paul and Karl's unique stories required several more years (indeed, until 2020) exploring several additional sources in new countries, including English vital records and naturalization papers, Czech post-war archives, and French military and vital records. Stay tuned to learn about the remainder of their interesting lives!

Check out part 2 of this story here!

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