Our visit to New Orleans in December 2002 was the culmination of an exciting adventure in family history. Just a few months earlier, who would have thought that my mother, brother, and I would travel from Vancouver, Canada, to attend a cousin’s wedding in the state of Louisiana? Not only does this story prove the practical value of genealogical research, but also credits the Internet—especially Google—as a powerful tool that helped make this discovery possible.
When I was a teenager, I found some old photographs, and I asked my mother, Elizabeth, who was in them. She said that they were her relatives with whom she had lost contact decades earlier. After further questions, she told me that her beloved grandmother, Anna Mund (née Kaufer), had two younger brothers. One, Henry Kaufer, had emigrated from Europe to Brooklyn in 1938 before the outbreak of World War II, and the other was Siegfried Kaufer, murdered together with his wife during the Holocaust. These family photographs were of Henry, his wife, Amalia, and their children—Helen (Kaufer) Steiner, Gisela (Kaufer) Davidson, and Enoch Kaufer. My mother remembered them from their visits to Cracow when she was a child. Although born in Cracow, Henry and his family had resided in Vienna after the end of World War I.
By the end of the fighting, World War II had taken its toll on the members of my mother’s family who had remained in Europe. Most relatives had perished. My mother survived thanks to the decisiveness of her father, Leon Waldman, whose sister, Rozalia Alster, told him to flee without delay. Rozalia had been evicted from Germany together with her husband in 1938 shortly after Kristallnacht. They returned to their native Cracow from Cologne with first-hand knowledge of the Nazi threat. Hence, in the first days of September 1939, when Hitler unleashed his Blitzkrieg on Poland, Leon packed my mother, my grandmother, Sala, and my great-grandmother, Anna, into his car, fleeing eastward towards the Soviet Union.
They drove at night, taking refuge in ditches to avoid bombs dropped on the roads during the day. Having reached Soviet-ruled Lvov, they stayed there for several months, allowing my mother the chance to continue her education and her father the opportunity to work in his profession as a dental surgeon. However, as Polish refugees in Soviet territory, they were deported in the early summer of 1940 to a forced labor camp in central Russia near Siberia. One night without warning, my grandfather was taken away by the guards, given a closed-door trial, and imprisoned in a Soviet gulag. This was a calculated move to intimidate the rest of the captives to work harder. He was re-
| Elizabeth, Anna, and Sala in Russia during World War II. |
leased six months later in very ill health.
Elizabeth, wearing gloves her grandmother pieced together from scraps of clothing to protect her hands, was assigned to work as a tree cutter for road construction. The Waldman family remained Stalin’s political prisoners until the USSR switched sides, joining the Allied war effort to help defeat Hitler. Within a few months of this momentous political decision, my mother’s family was resettled in Yoshkar-Ola (red city) in the Mari language—capital of the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. They remained there until 1946, a year after the war’s end, when my mother, her parents, and her grandmother were finally permitted to make the month-long journey by cattle train back to Poland, without knowing what awaited them. After arriving in Cracow, my mother received the shocking news that just one first cousin, Maria—daughter of Anna’s son, Ferdynand Mund—had survived, and that her paternal grandparents, Nachum and Amalia Waldman, her uncles, aunts, and the rest of her first cousins on both sides of her family had all perished in the Holocaust.
A few years after the war, Maria, married to Janusz Tarasiewicz, relocated to Warsaw where Janusz rose through Poland’s administrative ranks to become, in the 1970s, Secretary General of the Polish Red Cross. In Warsaw, they raised three children: Joanna, Jacek, and Janusz. My mother and her family remained in Cracow with a new surname, Wiśniowski, a change initiated by my grandfather, Leon, in 1946 in response to the prevailing anti-Semitism in Poland.
As Elżbieta (Elizabeth) Wiśniowska, a talented graduate of both the Jagiellonian University and Cracow Academy of Music—a member of postwar Poland’s first graduating class of professional music instructors and conductors—my mother had become well known in Poland’s artistic community. Throughout the 1950s, she was the associate conductor of Poland’s much acclaimed Cracow Philharmonic Boys Choir. However, after her grandmother, Anna, died in 1952 followed by her beloved father, Leon, in 1953, my mother and grandmother, Sala (or Łucja as she was known after the war), decided to immigrate to Australia in 1960.
Having left Poland’s repressive Communist regime behind, Elizabeth began in Australia a long association with Jewish choral music, becoming founding choral conductor of Sydney’s North Shore Temple Emanuel. In Sydney, my mother married my father, Edward Wolak, a physician and Holocaust survivor. They moved to Canada in 1963, where my brother Richard and I were later born and raised. In Vancouver, she founded and directed several award-winning, record-producing Jewish choral groups, including the Jewish Community Choir of Vancouver and the Shiron Singers. In 2009, for her four decades of work in Canada as a Jewish choral music specialist, Elizabeth was recognized by the Canadian government with the British Columbia Community Achievement Award, reserved for those rare individuals who have made important contributions to Canadian culture.
| Henry and Amalia Kaufer in Marienbad, 1937 |
While she was free in Australia and Canada to pursue the Jewish music she loved—as opposed to her culturally confined existence behind the Iron Curtain—our family in Canada remained very small. The loss of family during the war and the dispersion of surviving members before and after meant we lacked the large circle of family that many others enjoyed. Although we were able to renew contact with our Polish cousins in the waning days of Communism, visiting them in Warsaw on several occasions before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain, we knew that a branch had survived Hitler’s wrath through emigration. This was the family in our photographs.
In the late 1940s, after returning to Cracow from Russia, my mother and her family had renewed contact with Henry and Amalia Kaufer. In the initial years following the war, these Brooklyn relatives had sent the occasional parcel of food and clothing, along with some photographs that I would later find. Before the age of the Internet, continual migration severed family contact. This unintended estrangement lasted more than 40 years, ending in 2002 thanks to Google.
How I Discovered the Missing Branch
This is how I discovered the missing branch of our family. During the 1990s, I had searched for family names in phone books and, when online tools became available, on the Internet. While in Europe, I visited archives in both Cracow and Vienna and photocopied old telephone books from the 1930s showing where my mother’s great-uncles had resided after they left Cracow. Contemporary telephone books were not useful since I never knew where our long-lost relatives had ended up. Brooklyn proved to be a dead end, as Henry’s and Amalia’s children had spread throughout the world.
| Henry, Gisa, Helen, Enoch, and Amalia Kaufer, 1919 |
In March 2002, I had a thought: Why not put some of our unique family names onto Google and see what might turn up? The very first name I checked was my mother’s great-aunt, Amalia Kaufer. Sure enough, a page popped up. I was amazed at the quickness of this preliminary discovery. It turned out to be an essay by George Alexander of New York on his family’s origins in Cracow. I read the article and paid particular attention to the first lines of his third paragraph in which the author states that he had obtained much of his knowledge about his family though his great-aunt Amalia:
Before he died in 1968, my father sat down with me and we made copious notes of family history. Also, he and I took notes of our conversations with an older relative, my father’s aunt, Amalia Kaufer, who emigrated to America from Vienna in 1938. <www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Krakow/ kra_essay_3.htm>.
While I instantly knew that this Amalia must be my mother’s great-aunt, I also realized that George and my mother were not related to each other since this was my mother’s great-aunt—by marriage—to Henry Kaufer. However, that meant that George and my mother must have mutual cousins. This hunch proved correct.
I wrote to George (who, fortunately, had included his e- mail address in the article) outlining my case that he and my mother shared common relatives. I mentioned some facts
| Family reunion in New Orleans in 2002 |
about the family that few would know. He instantly replied and sent me the address of Charles Steiner, my mother’s and George’s common second cousin. I recognized this name—Charles was scribbled on the back of an old photograph taken in New Zealand with Amalia Kaufer, formerly of Brooklyn, that was among our collection of random family photographs. The address George sent, however, was in New Orleans. Who would have guessed that a cousin of my mother had made his way to the American South?
I composed a letter and mailed it off. After many weeks, an e-mail arrived. As it turns out, Charles had been in New Zealand where he resides part of the year and found my letter waiting in his mailbox when he returned to Louisiana. Interested in his family’s genealogy, he was astonished to discover that his grandfather was not an only child, as he had thought, but that he had siblings, including my great-grandmother, Anna. I explained that his grandfather, Henry, was one of three children, that his brother, Siegfried, had perished during the Holocaust, and that Henry’s elder sister was my great-grandmother, who had survived World War II in Russia. Charles, a retired cardiologist in New Orleans, who had graduated from medical school in New Zealand and completed his cardiology training in New York in the 1960s, had not known these facts, as he had never had the opportunity to meet his grandfather. (About his grandmother, Amalia, I would later learn that she was the younger sister of renowned European cantor and musicologist, Eduard Birnbaum, whose vast collection of Jewish liturgical music was acquired and preserved by Hebrew Union College’s Library in Cincinnati.)
Charles’ parents—Helen, who held a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna, and Jirka Steiner, a Czechoslovakian law school graduate—had emigrated from their home in Prague to Wellington, New Zealand, in 1940. They returned to Europe in the 1960s, retiring in London. His aunt and uncle, Gisela and David Davidson, both pulmonary physicians trained in Vienna, had come to the United States in 1938, settling in Portland, Maine. Having immigrated to the United States in 1939, his uncle, Enoch, a Viennese law school graduate and Massachusetts-trained accountant, became one of the first radar instructors in the U.S. Navy, serving at Virginia Beach, and then in the Atlantic Fleet, ending his naval career in San Diego, in 1945, at the Point Loma C.I.C. Team Training Center. Enoch and his American-born wife, Evelyn, remained on the West Coast.
Charles was just as fascinated as I was to learn that branches of our Kaufer family resided all over the world. We continued to exchange e-mails with more facts and photographs. Charles even shared a photograph of Chaya Kaufer, the mother of Anna, Henry, and Siegfried, who was our entire clan’s common progenitor. Each reply had a growing list of family members with more e-mail addresses added to the expanding “cc” list. We certainly had a much larger family than I had ever expected.
Charles had adult children residing in Florida, New York, and Louisiana. His elder brother, John Steiner, had also graduated from medical school in New Zealand, only to immigrate in the 1960s to England, where he became a noted Cambridge-educated psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in London. He and his wife, Deborah, also had adult children in London and Nottingham.
Gilda Wheeler (née Kaufer), a resident of Seattle with her husband and daughter, was another of my mother’s growing number of second cousins. Seattle is just a short drive from Vancouver. I never expected that a cousin resided so close. We soon were in contact with Gilda’s brothers, Lanny and Michael Kaufer, both involved in the music business in Ojai, California, Lanny’s son in Berkeley, and daughter in Santa Monica. Family communications quickly broadened to include Minna Noone (née Davidson), my mother’s second cousin in Connecticut. The web of relations was rising steadily, spanning the periphery of the United States and England. We were the sole representatives from Canada. Having lost so many family members during the war, my mother was astounded that she had so many new found relatives.
I finally had a fuller picture of our missing family branch. While the New Zealand relatives later immigrated to England and America, and descendants of the cousins in Maine settled in Connecticut and Massachusetts, the California contingent had moved to Los Angeles, where Enoch became a professor of business law at Burbank’s Woodbury College. While running as the Democratic candidate in the 28th Congressional District in the election that made John F. Kennedy the 35th President of the United States, Enoch tragically died during the campaign, leaving behind his wife and their four children—Lanny, Michael, John, and Gilda. But social activism remained in their genes. In the mid-1960s, Lanny volunteered to help Martin Luther King, Jr. as a civil rights worker in the segregated South.
Until being reunited with our long-lost cousins, we never knew my mother’s numerous second cousins’ first names, which made a name search in the large state of California—and anywhere else—a daunting task.
The e-mailing between our newly discovered relations turned into phone calls, and before we knew it, we were invited to Cousin Charles’ December 2002 wedding in New Orleans. This proved to be an ideal opportunity for a unique family gathering that I never could have anticipated when I first began my search. We were very happy to attend. In the summer, we had already driven to Seattle to meet our cousins in the Pacific Northwest, but now we had the opportunity to meet representatives of all branches who would descend on New Orleans for Charles’ and Gina’s wedding. Cousins from England, New York, Florida, Connecticut, California, Washington, and my mother, brother, and I from Canada met in New Orleans for an unforgettable family reunion.
After Louisiana, we attended family weddings in California and Washington and even a birthday party in New York. None of this would have happened without those photos, those unanswered questions, and Google. The Internet was an indispensible tool that helped reunite our family. No one is happier and more surprised than my mother, who never thought her family could have grown so large after the devastation of the Holocaust.
